Howard's End

Howard’s End appealed to me greatly – far more than I initially expected it would. I had seen the Merchant/Ivory film adaptation years before, but the memory had faded into bare mist. Initially, I thought that Forster was going to turn put the entire novel into epistolary form – an idea that appealed to me due to my studies of the American Novel during the previous semester. (Professor Ashton discussed at length how the epistolary form never truly caught on in American literature as it had in Britain, and I was curious to see how this might have been borne out in a turn-of-the-century “Gateway to Modernism” novel.) While I noted many of the standard “literary” aspects of the novel such as the symbolism of the tree and its folk tradition and how the levels of class interaction played out, I was struck by the voice and tone of the work.

Howard’s End has one of the most thoughtful, even, considered tones of any novel I have ever read. It is a voice of understanding and communication – true communication, not commutual shouting (though plenty of that figuratively occurs between the characters themselves – indeed, the entire conflict between Margaret and Henry could be viewed as one long non-communicative feud). Rather, the narrator seems to truly understand both sides and works to mediate between them in the reader’s mind. I did not quite realize the core of this until I had read Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination and Howard’s End.” In reading how Forster found common cause with liberalism but did not agree 100 percent with the ideology, (much to his friend’s Lawrence’s lament of his favorable portrayal of businessmen) I could see how the evenness of the narrative came about. Forster, while expressing ideology and idealism, refuses to give in to demagoguery. Likewise, as Stone notes, Forster demonstrated his resistance to settling into easy self/other separations later in his life, even to the extent of writing propaganda – and labeling it as such.

Such bespeaks a deep understanding and honesty with regard to the dualistic forces in one’s nature. Perhaps his pacifism was derived from the fact that he sought to mediate the oppositions within himself – and had no desire to add to the conflict outside of himself.

Other reactions:

I found the scene wherein Margaret notes how much power she had by merely whispering in her husband’s ear (and how she could see how women might not value their suffrage) to be quite… disappointing in the personal/emotional sense. Indeed, both the narrative arcs of Margaret’s suffocation under Henry’s rule as well as the Basts’ trials to be emblematic of how working with a monolithic hegemony tends to support it – a suppressive structure by its nature suppresses anything that wishes to interact with it on ITS own terms. One must note that the excesses of the Wilcoxes (and their gentrified social order) did not cease until after this order was openly challenged.

I did appreciate how each of the three primary social groups, the Wilcoxes, the Schlegels, and the Basts were intertwined in their responsibilities. Forster shows each with virtues, but he never lets any of them off the hook. A lesser writer would have made the erudite Schlegels the unvarnished heroes of the piece and the Basts the unquestioned martyrs, but he shows that simple erudition is insufficient to solve the world’s problems – nor is goodness and need. While he champions art, art is not the panacea.

I enjoyed the tension between the city and the pastoral, and I could see how that highlights one aspect of the Bloomsbury existence. They, by their nature, were products of education and culture – indeed, Woolf as an educated woman was certainly not part of the then-contemporary societal motif. Thus, a group of cosmopolitan city dwellers who appreciate the urban but bemoan its dehumanizing aspects would yearn for the rural. As such, one can draw some very close parallels between the Schlegel family and the Bloomsbury group.

Final note: I found it very interesting that Forster’s first sexual relationship was with a foreigner while abroad. This resonates with my studies of Genet – another writer with deeply ambivalent (though vastly more militant) feelings toward his colonial society. I may have to explore this more deeply.

Reactions to the Previous Class

I am breaking my blog post into two sections. I feel that my reactions to the previous class merit their own discreet posting, as much for length as for theme.

In reflecting on the concepts of the previous class, I was (and continue to be) struck most by the notion of gender roles as constraints – or, in a harsher sense, traps. The notion of role, especially with regards to gender, seems a most intensely oppressive concept, for it deals solely with perception, and only “masters” of perception are able to alter this aspect of their reality.

Consider the idea of Gender Studies. Consider the implications thereof. If Gender Studies, as evolved from Women’s Studies and/or Queer Studies, then that begs the question of what “Masculine Studies” would entail. Now, one may respond that the contemporary focus of Gender and/or Queer studies are a reaction to the previous monolith dominance of the Male Hierarchy which has suppressed the previous two. I am uncomfortable with that for two reasons. First, a suppression or nullification of the masculine in favor of the other two smacks of the same oppression redirected. Second, once again, it traps the male within this monolith of culture.

The idea of gender role entraps everyone. Yea though it is an natural function of humanity – humans being natural selectors and categorizers – it also demonstrates the fundamental weakness of that nature. Human beings are predators, and the chief function of the predator is to identify prey and commit acts of predation. Social orders allow neat demarcations of “self” and “other” and, by their structure, produce norms. Thus, the roles created by perception, while a natural outcropping of human intelligence, function as little more than mob rule by an essentially headless beast.

What use is society to an individual if one must gauge one’s gender role not only by the norms of one gender but also the reactions of the opposite gender to the first, and the reactions of the first to the second?

This does not seem like a triumph of the individual, as one might hope for in an enlightened society. Instead, it seems like societal mutually-assured-destruction.

Post-script: I’m unwilling to leave this meditation on such a defeatist note. Thus, I inject some humor. One, a clip from the Coen Bros’ film The Big Lebowski, and the other, the trailer for the film adaptation of Hedwig and the Angry Inch – perhaps the best film about gender freedom I’ve ever seen.

Warning: Offensive Language Abounds