"The Sabbath of the Heart": Transgressive Love in Lady Morgan's India
Abstract
This article discusses the book "The Missionary: An Indian Tale" by Sidney Owenson. The book presents a tragic love story between a Western cleric and an Indian princess, fraught with all the tensions and pressures that contraries of culture bring to bear on forbidden love. Such transgressive love is a powerful metaphor for cultural conflict, which Owenson uses to represent the crisis faced by a non-European woman in love with a celibate Christian and Western missionary. Much of it is set in the valley of Kashmir, India, during a time of political conflict and religious tempest when idealism, nationalism, patriotism, and radicalism collided with an oppressive European hegemony over ancient people from a civilization alien to Western understanding.
