Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"The Sabbath Of The Heart": Transgressive Love In Lady Morgan's India, Laura Dabundo

Faculty and Research Publications

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, …