E.M. Forster once said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and his friends, he hoped he'd have the courage to betray the former. This preference for personal loyalty over patriotism reveals the core of Forster's values, the...
[more]E.M. Forster once said that if he had to choose between betraying his country and his friends, he hoped he'd have the courage to betray the former. This preference for personal loyalty over patriotism reveals the core of Forster's values, the liberalism that he brought to his fictional explorations of British culture. While Forster loved England for its individuals, he exposed the weaknesses, contradictions, and pretensions of its prevailing manners and mores.
Like James and Conrad, Forster is a threshold writer: the Victorian era stood behind him while modernity loomed ahead. Concerns about the effects of urbanization and industrialization mark his work; he spoke of London as a place that "throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever born before." In his novel "Howards End" (1910), he shows how city living undermines human values. Here we watch the Schlegel sisters, a pair of unmarried sentimental idealists, fight the Wilcoxes, upwardly mobile mercantilists, for ownership of an idyllic country home. Forster juxtaposes the artistic heart, with its capacity for spontaneous emotion, against the cold, insensitive heart of the businessman. The house at the center of the conflict turns into a greater metaphor for England -- Forster asks, which of these will inherit the country?
In "A Passage to India" (1924) the clash of cultures is more disturbing and more destructive. When narrow-minded colonizers come into contact with the, for them, incomprehensible world of the colonized, the dissonance and miscommunication is palpable: an English woman believes herself to have been raped by her Indian host during a trip to the mysterious Marabar Caves. What "really" happened is left for us to guess, but Forster leaves no doubt that truth will never emerge from a conflict between rulers and their subjects.
Forster repeatedly pinpointed the contradictions in British politics at home and abroad; he was a gadfly on the nation's side, yet he simultaneously epitomized the liberal ideals of British democracy. D.H. Lawrence called him "the last Englishman," and Forster took this role seriously, propounding his political views in the treatise "What I Believe, or, Two Cheers for Democracy" (1938) and twice serving as president of the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Although he ceased publishing novels after 1924, Forster kept writing. Biographies, short stories, reviews, and lectures occupied his time. Some of his fiction remained unpublished by his own choice, most notably "Maurice" (written in 1914). "Maurice" is the most intimate of Forster's novels; in it, he turns away from his usual treatment of love between men and women and towards an open account of love between two men. Forster himself was a homosexual -- he was firmly entrenched in the Bloomsbury group, where sexuality was as open as the ocean -- but he felt that his reputation as a social critic would be damaged by the novel's release. "Maurice" was finally issued posthumously; it further secured Forster's reputation as one of the premiere, and one of the last, Condition of England novelists.
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