Mrs. Moore loses her religion

      Mrs. Moore appears to embody all the characteristics of the modern woman, portrayed as both jaded and disillusioned in A Passage to India. What I find most interesting about her is her ambivalent relationship with Christianity and God which transforms from a tentative ambivalence to a complete disenchantment. Earlier in the novel, Forster writes that “Mrs. Moore felt that she had made a mistake in mentioning God [to Ronny], but she found him increasingly difficult to avoid as she grew older, and he had been constantly in her thoughts since she entered India, though oddly enough he satisfied her less.” It is almost as if being in India had compelled her to re-examine her relationship with the Divine, whatever or whoever that may be. Mrs. Moore’s first adventure alone was going inside a mosque, which, I feel, is no mere coincidence. However, later on, after the incident of the rape, Mrs. Moore is very frustrated at the idea of religion as a means of salvation: “Her Christian tenderness had gone, or had developed into a hardness, a just irritation against the human race”. It is as if Forster is insisting on the question of “[w]hat are the roots that clutch?” (T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’), or whether or not the falcon can still hear the falconer? (W.B Yeats 'The Second Coming').

      In the case of Mrs. Moore, the journey from a semi composedness to utter chaos can be easily traced. From someone who insists on the marriage between Ronny and Adela, she suddenly renounces the very institution in one hysterical outburst “Why all this marriage, marriage?. . . And all this rubbish about love, love in a church, love in a cave, as if there is the least difference!” In this particular line, Mrs. Moore equates ‘love in a cave’ i.e. the supposed rape, to ‘love in a church’, as if both were different versions of the same (horrifying) experience. She seems to suggest that a wedding in a Church under the auspices of a religious figure is as meaningless (or terrible) as a rape inside an obscure cave. Neither matter. The disillusionment from God is clear in this exchange. Despite being in the ‘spiritual orient’, Forster does not allow Mrs. Moore the possibility of redemption.