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God has put us on earth to love our neighbors and to show it, and he is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.
Annoyed with her son’s insulting opinion of India and Indians, Mrs. Moore attempts to defend India by claiming it is England’s prerogative to love India, because humans are called upon by God to love one another. Mrs. Moore is the only English character – including Fielding – to achieve a loving friendship with an Indian that is not tainted by race or politics. Of course, Mrs. Moore is not the image of perfection, and she has her faults and negative perspectives, but her friendship is so deeply felt and appreciated by Aziz that she even becomes a spiritual symbol of love to the Indians of Chandrapore after her death.
She was past marrying herself, even unhappily; her function was to help others, her reward to be informed that she was sympathetic. Elderly ladies must not expect more than this.
Mrs. Moore is restrained by a somewhat boring and limited existence. An older woman, much of her life would have been dictated by England’s strict patriarchal norms. Although the country has progressed in its view of women since Mrs. Moore’s youth, as evidenced by Adela’s generally liberated and intellectual lifestyle, Mrs. Moore is too old to get much benefit from the change. She is still shackled to her duties of getting her children married off. In this passage, Forster subtly comments on the unfairness of Mrs. Moore’s situation – there is clearly something in her that wants to question and learn more about the world beyond what she has believed her entire life, but she cannot escape her “function,” and dies before she can work through her existential questions.
But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from “Let there be Light” to “It is finished” only amounted to “boum.”
Mrs. Moore has generally relied on Christianity and English domestic traditions to give her purpose, but her existential experience in the Marabar caves gives her a crisis of faith that sends her into a depressive spiral. She realizes that Christianity explains nothing, that it is all just a part of the meaningless noise that is humanity and our fruitless attempts to make sense of existence. This realization is difficult for Mrs. Moore to grapple with. Her newfound nihilism doesn’t free her from her trivial domestic duties, allowing her to chart a new direction in her life, but rather causes her to become apathetic about humans and their insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe.
