The Overland Mail

In Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Overland Mail", the vast jungle becomes an everyday obstacle for some as job to get mail across to the overland. The significance of the landscape is crucial to understanding the poem. The poem starts as dark is beginning to take over the night. The runner starts his journey off in the dark of the night starting at the railway. McLeod states "In the first stanza there is created the sense that the landscape which lies ahead is not going to be hospitable. It is referred to bluntly as a 'jungle', and the poet warns of 'robbers' and 'tigers' that must 'make way' for the mail to be delivered in the 'Name of the Empress of India', Britain's Queen Victoria"(71). India is portrayed as this land that contains many obstacles that must be crossed just to deliver mail from the homeland to the hills. These messages cross obstacles of safety. The landscape threatens the runner with water problems which could destroy roads. The landscape of the nature is represented as danger. The Empress of India symbolizes the dangers like the 'tiger'. The vast, and empty landscape leaves only the runner and the robber."This is a depopulated landscape. The only figures who feature are those significant to the British in the Indian hills and who either maintain or threaten the smooth running of their postal service. In presenting this part of India as a wilderness of obstacles, an ominous, anonymous jungle, Kipling virtually empties it of indigenous Indians. This depiction of the landscape is clearly mediated by the limited perception of the British and shapes a particular and selective envisioning of space"(72). Next it talks about how India is out of control until the reach of the calm of the British . This all symbolized the colonization of India during colonialism. McCleod also talks about the landscape of the poem moving higher and higher  which he wants to argue as a metaphor for the conquest of India by the British. This metaphor of the landscape just shapes India into a fight between the hills of homeland and the settled British. The landscape may be an obstacle, but this is nothing the people of India have not before come to face.

"Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab" as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--perhaps most importantly--prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. These notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates."-http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Orientalism.html



There is so much discussion of the sexuality of women in orientalism. They are sexualized by men and men are also somewhat feminine.

In this picture this woman is being sexualized along with the women next to her. The men behind and beside them are enjoying the show and as well seem to be dressed a little bit feminine.