SOURCE: Langland, Elizabeth. “Gesturing Towards an Open Space: Gender, Form, and Language in Howards End.” In E. M. Forster, edited by Jeremy Tambling, pp. 81-99. London: Macmillan, 1995.

[In the following essay, Langland explores sexual politics in Howards End, focusing on Forster's own homosexuality and admitted misogyny.]

E. M. Forster is a difficult writer to approach because he appears simple. His work presents none of the stylistic resistance and technical virtuosity characteristic of his notable contemporaries like Joyce and Woolf. Further, he seems to have recourse to a nineteenth-century liberal humanism in resolving his novels, an emphasis that sets at naught the complexities of literary modernism.¹ So, at best, Forster claims a precarious stake in the twentieth-century canon. But Forster accomplished something difficult and important in his novel Howards End that a gendered politics of reading can uncover. In his personal embattlement with gender and his embattlement with patriarchal culture, Forster exposes the constructed nature of gender and his own ambivalent relationship to traits coded ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in his culture.

This gendered politics of reading begins with an acknowledgment of Forster's homosexuality and outspoken misogyny, a textual politics that is tied to a sexual politics. There is substantial evidence that Forster was deeply troubled and preoccupied by his own gender identity during this period. He had spent his own childhood largely in the female company and sheltering presence of his mother and aunt, who no doubt gave him his ‘knowledge’ of women and female friendship. At the same time, he was uncertain of his own sexual orientation and uncertain of even the basic facts of male-female reproduction, which Forster claimed he never fully grasped until his thirties. The conviction of his homosexuality came shortly after publication of Howards End when George Merrill, the working-class homosexual lover of Forster's friend Edward Carpenter, ‘touched Forster's backside “gently and just above the buttocks”’. Forster continued: ‘The sensation was unusual and I still remember it. … It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts.’² That touch conceived Maurice, Forster's novel about homosexual love published only posthumously.

It wasn't until 1916 that Forster found ‘total sexual fulfilment—or, as he put it, “parted with respectability”’³—and not until 1917 that he finally fell in love: with an Egyptian tram conductor, Mohammed-el-Adl. After that fulfilment, Forster wrote to Florence Barger: ‘It isn't happiness … it's rather—offensive phrase—that I first feel a grown up man.’⁴ The offensiveness lies in the implication that a man becomes grown up through sexual mastery.

Thus, in 1910, while composing Howards End, Forster was in a great deal of confusion, which we can understand more fully if we consider the Victorian notion of homosexuality: anima mulieris in corpore virile inclusa or ‘a woman's soul trapped in a man's body’.⁵ Ironically, that confusion and dissatisfaction precipitated a misogynistic homosexuality, which I suggest we see in light of Forster's fear of the feminine in himself.⁶ This understanding also gives us some insight into the process by which the confusions that produced this misogyny in Forster also fuelled a desire for something other than the classical opposition between male and female, masculine and feminine, and so initiated his embattled relationship with patriarchy. In Howards End we see this relationship played out through the narrator, the leading female characters, certain thematic oppositions, and the connections between all of these and the dramatic structure of the novel.

At a first glance, Forster appears to offer neither a radical literary practice nor a liberal sexual practice in this story of a younger woman's conventional marriage to an older and successful businessman, who looks upon women as ‘recreation’. But textual evidence suggests that this conventional image is an anamorphosis reflecting Forster's attempt to manage a site of conflict in himself. A close analysis of the textual manoeuvres in Howards End discloses a radical sexual politics that has been obscured by psychobiographical approaches and by assumptions about Forster's literary allegiance to the nineteenth century. We may begin to excavate the layers of the text through its narrative stance, which is ambiguous, uneasy, and defensive. The following passage from the middle of the novel first brought me to examine Howards End because of the ways it makes problematic the omniscient narrator's voice:

Pity was at the bottom of her [Margaret's] actions all through this crisis. Pity, if one may generalise, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities and however tender their liking, we dare not be unworthy of it, or they will quietly let us go. But unworthiness stimulates woman. It brings out her deeper nature, for good or for evil.⁷

The problem emerges from the ‘us’, which initially appears to refer back to ‘woman’, used to essentialise all women, with whom the narrator seems to identify.⁸ A closer reading suggests that ‘us’ simply refers to all people, that is, ‘when men like people. …’ The temporary confusion arises here because, previously, the events have been focalised through the female protagonist, Margaret Schlegel, and ‘us’, the first-person-plural pronoun, invokes the feminine perspective.⁹

The ‘us’ feels problematic, too, because the narrator's previous narrative intrusions have been characterised by an uneasy authority that hovers between irony and sympathy, creating an overall impression of indefiniteness.¹⁰ The narrator opens deferentially: ‘One may as well begin with Helen's letter to her sister’ (p. 3). Shortly thereafter we are told: ‘To Margaret—I hope that it will not set the reader against her—the station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity’ (p. 12). The special pleading is intrusive here and later: ‘That was “how it happened”, or, rather, how Helen described it to her sister, using words even more unsympathetic than my own’ (p. 25). Comments on the underprivileged seem to attempt sarcasm but end up sounding defensive: ‘We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable’ (p. 45); or, ‘take my word for it, that [poor woman's] smile was simply stunning, and it is only you and I who will be fastidious and complain that true joy begins in the eyes’ (p. 48). Later addresses to the reader fail to achieve either authority on the one hand or familiarity on the other: ‘It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes have offered their home to Margaret? I think not’ (p. 98); and, ‘Margaret had expected the disturbance. … Good-humour was the dominant note of her relations with Mr Wilcox, or, as I must now call him, Henry’ (p. 177).

Forster is more assured when he avoids omniscient comment and focuses on Margaret Schlegel, from whose perspective we see the events of the novel. It is not merely that we share the point of view of a woman here (although that is important to Forster's ends) but also that we tend to take her perspective as representative of the female point of view in general. As the novel develops, Forster complicates this identification of Margaret with the ‘female’ or the ‘feminine’, but initially it undergirds the binary oppositions informing the novel. The novel is built upon a dialectical opposition between male and female, under which several others are subsumed.¹¹ The most significant oppositions for this analysis are those of class—rich and poor; those of philosophy—logic and vision; and those of language—word and intuition. Under the male side of the equation fall wealth, logic, and the word; under the female, poverty, vision and intuition. These oppositions are worked out on the level of theme and plot.

On the level of theme, that resolution is fairly straightforward, although we should note that those terms subsumed under the aspect of male and female perpetuate a hierarchical tradition that relegates women to an inferior status. We may want to applaud Forster for attempting to redress the balance by privileging the feminine, but we are still caught in a net of stereotypes that perpetuate hierarchy and binary opposition, ideas that inscribe male perspectives in the world, as we shall see in a moment.

Although I have relegated wealth to the male side of the equation and poverty to the female, in fact, the female protagonists of the novel, Margaret and Helen Schlegel, are well-to-do women. Their sympathy with the poor, however, initiates Forster's interrogation of class distinctions. The Schlegels are distinguished from the Wilcoxes, the masculine protagonists, by their recognition of the privilege that money confers. Margaret asserts that the rich ‘stand upon money as upon islands’ in the sea of life (p. 61). As a result of this perception, she and Helen are able to look beneath the social surface of a poor individual like Leonard Bast to the ‘real man, who cared for adventure and beauty’ (p. 316).

Yet, even as the novel attempts to redress the imbalance between rich and poor, it cannot transcend certain class attitudes which are implicit in Forster's uneven characterisation of the workingman and explicit in Margaret's discovery that Jackie Bast has formerly been Henry Wilcox's mistress. She writes to Helen that ‘The Basts are not at all the type we should trouble about’ (p. 241), and Helen, ‘who is ready enough to sympathise with Leonard Bast, condemns Jackie as ‘ready enough to meet’ Henry Wilcox and laments that such women ‘end in two ways: either they sink till the lunatic asylums and the workhouses are full of them … or else they entrap a boy into marriage before it is too late’ (p. 253). That Jackie is a victim of patriarchy is understood imperfectly, although Margaret strenuously criticises Henry's double standard. Helen's disclaimer, ‘I can't blame her’, sounds unconvincing as the novel seeks to deconstruct sexist and class values on the level of theme, which it then reconstructs on the level of plot when Helen has a sexual relationship with Leonard—a woman's classic offering of her body in sympathy—and then arrogantly seeks to compensate him with cash, admitting that ‘I want never to see him again, though it sounds appalling. I wanted to give him money and feel finished’ (p. 313). Both of these episodes play out basic patriarchal expectations about relationships between men and women, between the rich and the poor. The pattern we see here, where plot reconstructs what the theme interrogates to deconstruct, will be replicated in working out Forster's other binary oppositions.

Thematically, vision is privileged over logic, intuition over word. Of course, logic and the word are related: They are in this novel the logos, the word of the fathers. Forster is committed to an ideology that seeks to defy the phallic mode and, from the novel's opening, logic and the word are made to appear irrational. Charles Wilcox's blustering question to his brother, Paul, about his engagement to Helen Schlegel—‘Yes or no, man; plain question, plain answer. Did or didn't Miss Schlegel’—is corrected by his mother's response: ‘Charles, dear Charles, one doesn't ask plain questions. There aren't such things’ (p. 22). When Henry Wilcox confronts Margaret over Helen's seemingly irrational behaviour at the end of the novel, he echoes his son: ‘Answer my question. Plain question, plain answer’ (p. 284). Henry's plan to trap Helen like some hunted animal and Margaret's resistance provoke her recognition that the plan ‘is impossible, because—… it's not the particular language that Helen and I talk’ and his counterclaim that ‘No education can teach a woman logic’ (p. 284). Margaret's later rejoinder—‘leave it that you don't see. … Call it fancy. But realise that fancy is a scientific fact’—refuses Henry's reductive dichotomies. Margaret is given the final word in the novel as she reflects that, ‘Logically, they had no right to be there. One's hope was in the weakness of logic’ (p. 339), and she is vindicated in the conclusion as the Wilcox clan gather to hear the word of the father—‘And again and again fell the word, like the ebb of a dying sea’—which belatedly, yet inevitably, affirms the intuitive vision of the mother in seeing that Margaret is the ‘spiritual heir’ she seeks for Howards End.

And yet Margaret's ‘final word’ is problematic because definitive answers belong to the male-inscribed discourse the novel seeks to deconstruct. We might want to argue that the apparent difficulty is only a matter of semantics. But, in fact, my introduction of a teleology of final word here anticipates the deeper problems we discover on the level of plot.

Forster's central opposition between man and woman would seem, initially, to be played out between Henry Wilcox and Margaret Schlegel. It begins on the level of houses. Margaret recognises that ‘ours is a female house. … It must be feminine and all we can do is to see that it isn't effeminate. Just as another house that I can mention, but I won't, sounded irrevocably masculine, and all its inmates can do is to see that it isn't brutal’ (p. 44). This summary prepares us for the dialectic to follow, but Forster's feminist vision removes Margaret as a single term within the traditional dialectic, replaces her with Helen, and reinterprets Margaret as the principle that will complicate the hierarchical oppositions and provide a new kind of connection. That new connection is not the old androgyny, a merging or blurring of terms and traits;¹² it is a condition that preserves difference.

Whereas Henry Wilcox remains inscribed in a male mode of discourse, set within masculine imagery of dominance and conquest, Forster's descriptions of Margaret transcend the traditionally feminine and reinscribe her within a rhetoric of reconciliation and connection. Through Margaret Schlegel, the traditional terms of masculinity and femininity are scrutinised and subjected to the demands of higher integration. Margaret's point of view, then, is ultimately not representative of a view we might code as essentially female or feminine. Forster is sensitive both to essentialist conceptions of the female and to the social coding of the feminine. He subverts both in his characterisation of Margaret Schlegel, who can calmly state, for example, ‘I do not love children. I am thankful to have none’ (pp. 337-8), thus debunking ideas of a natural, maternal female.

And Margaret remains constantly alert to social expectations of feminine behaviour, decoding those expectations. She turns the notion of ‘reading the feminine’ into a lever against the men who are dependent on and limited by its convenient categories. When Henry proposes, Margaret has anticipated his action, but ‘she made herself give a little start. She must show surprise if he expected it’ (p. 164). Later, when a man hits a cat with his automobile and Margaret jumps out of the car, we learn that ‘Charles was absolutely honest. He described what he believed to have happened. … Miss Schlegel had lost her nerve, as any woman might.’ But the narrator reveals that ‘His father accepted this explanation, and neither knew that Margaret had artfully prepared the way for it. It fitted in too well with their view of feminine nature’ (p. 215). Later, in response to a question, Margaret ‘knew … but said that she did not know’ (p. 221) because ‘comment is unfeminine’ (p. 240).

Throughout the novel, Margaret resists being controlled by this dichotomous thinking and instead manipulates the terms with the goal of dismantling and transcending them. From the beginning, she is suspicious of hierarchies, as we discover in her mediation of the English and German claims to superiority. She announces, ‘To me one of two things is very clear; either God does not know his own mind about England and Germany, or else these do not know the mind of God’ (p. 30). The narrator pronounces her, ironically, ‘a hateful girl’, acknowledging that ‘at thirteen she had grasped a dilemma that most people travel through life without perceiving’ (p. 30). That dilemma focuses on the logic of binary thinking. Margaret resists such dichotomous thought and chastises Helen's binary oppositions as ‘medieval’, telling her ‘our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them’ (p. 104). Not surprisingly, it is Margaret who is capable of concluding that ‘people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop’ (p. 339).

In his reconceptualisation of Margaret, Forster generates a new integrative principle that is associated with a woman but not ideologically coded as feminine.¹³ Part of his success here depends, as I have suggested, on using Helen to re-evaluate the traditionally feminine by associating her with emotion and the inner life.

Helen Schlegel, in contrast to Margaret, is emotional, impulsive, impatient of logic, impatient of all restraint on her generous impulses. She scoffs at moderation and is incapable of balance; she is first seduced by the Wilcox men and then violently rejects them. She extols the ‘inner life’ and, unlike Margaret, refuses to acknowledge the value of Wilcox energy, which has created a civilised world in which her sensibilities and the inner life can have free play. When Margaret must protect a pregnant and unmarried Helen from the interference of Wilcox men, Margaret herself codes the struggle as a sexual one: ‘A new feeling came over her; she was fighting for women against men. She did not care about rights, but if men came into Howards End, it should be over her body’ (p. 290). Although Margaret prefers not to be locked into a struggle between opposed faces, under duress she will privilege what Helen represents. Forster has anticipated this moment earlier in the novel when Margaret and Helen disagree over the older sister's impending marriage to Henry Wilcox. Their ‘inner life was so safe’, we are told, ‘that they could bargain over externals. … There are moments when the inner life actually “pays”, when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use’ (p. 195). The narrator adds that ‘Such moments are still rare in the West; that they can come at all promises a fairer future’. Forster codes the inner life within another set of oppositions—Eastern mysticism versus Western pragmatism—but he reverses the usual hierarchy to privilege the East and the inner life.

In contrast to Helen, Henry is associated with an imagery of war, battle, and self-defence. When Margaret discovers that Jackie Bast was Henry's mistress, the narrator claims that, ‘Expelled from his old fortress, Mr Wilcox was building a new one’ (p. 244). Margaret is forced to play ‘the girl, until he could rebuild his fortress and hide his soul from the world’ (p. 246). Henry believes that ‘Man is for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior, but he does not dislike it if she makes a show of fight. She cannot win in a real battle, having no muscles, only nerves’ (p. 259). At the end of the novel, in the crisis over Helen, Henry speaks ‘straight from his fortress’, and Margaret at first fails to recognise that ‘to break him was her only hope’. It is only when ‘Henry's fortress [gives] way’ that Margaret can initiate the process that leads to the integration, the connection, she enacts in the novel's conclusion by bringing Henry and Helen together at Howards End.

It is significant in Howards End that the most moving scene occurs between two women, Helen and Margaret.¹⁴ When the sisters meet at Howards End and Margaret discovers Helen is pregnant, she asserts, ‘It all turns on affection now’ (p. 291). Although at first they feel themselves in antagonism, unconsciously they move toward communion:

The triviality faded from the faces, though it left something behind—the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things. Explanations and appeals had failed; they had tried for a common meeting-ground, and had only made each other unhappy. And all the time their salvation was lying round them—the past sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future, with laughter and the voices of children. Helen, still smiling, came up to her sister. She said: ‘It is always Meg’. They looked into each other's eyes. The inner life had paid.

(p. 299)

In stark contrast stands Charles Wilcox's relationship with his father:

The Wilcoxes were not lacking in affection; they had it royally, but they did not know how to use it. It was the talent in the napkin, and, for a warm-hearted man, Charles had conveyed very little joy. As he watched his father shuffling up the road, he had a vague regret—a wish that something had been different somewhere—a wish (though he did not express it thus) that he had been taught to say ‘I’ in his youth. He meant to make up for Margaret's defection, but knew that his father had been very happy with her until yesterday. How had she done it? By some dishonest trick, no doubt—but how?

(p. 329)

The traditionally feminine mode is clearly affirmed in these final contrasting scenes that sanction the inner life and ‘voiceless sympathy’.

In privileging the inner life, as we have seen, Forster reverses the usual hierarchy in the oppositions of inner/outer, female/male, East/West, intuition/logic. This affirmation is a part of Forster's achievement. More significant, he takes a further step and sets up through Margaret a double reading in which the poles indecidably include each other and the différance of this irreducible difference. It is a process made familiar to us by Derrida.¹⁵ We are forced to think or imagine the ‘inconceivable’, what we have seen as mutually exclusive; we are forced to form conceptions of that for which we have no concepts. The novel's epigraph—‘Only connect’—stands at the heart of this difficult process through which Margaret hopes to enable Henry's salvation: ‘Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer’ (pp. 186-7). At Howards End, Margaret senses this connection of comrades between the house and the wych elm tree: ‘It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness. … It was a comrade. House and tree transcended any similes of sex’ (p. 206). Significantly, Forster has chosen representative terms—a house and a tree—that resist hierarchical placement and the classical oppositional structure of patriarchal thinking. Margaret reflects that, ‘to compare either to man, to woman, always dwarfed the vision. Yet they kept within limits of the human. … As she stood in the one, gazing at the other, truer relationship had gleamed’ (p. 206). Margaret also argues for connection—this discovery of mutual inclusivity—in her conception of proportion: ‘truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything. It was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility’ (p. 195). Finally, in the novel's conclusion, Margaret looks toward an ‘ultimate harmony’ (p. 330).

To summarise, the connection that Margaret seeks is obviously not born out of an attempt to merge or to blur or reverse oppositions. She fights the ‘daily grey’ of life, the blending of black and white. Rather, she seeks to dismantle the hierarchical privileging of one term over another. She expresses it as a celebration of ‘Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey’ (p. 338).

Ironically, however, although the resolution thematically insists on connections and although the patriarch Wilcox is unmanned, the plot appears to encode the patriarchal structures that the novel seeks to escape. I began this essay with the narrator's ambiguous sexual identification. I then quoted a paragraph which is followed by one that reads,

Here was the core of the question. Henry must be forgiven, and made better by love; nothing else mattered. … To her everything was in proportion now. … Margaret fell asleep, tethered by affection, and lulled by the murmurs of the river that descended all the night from Wales. She felt herself at one with her future home, colouring it and coloured by it, and awoke to see, for the second time, Oniton Castle conquering the morning mists.

(p. 243)

We notice the imagery of proportion, of connection, of mutuality monopolising the paragraph which, nonetheless, concludes with an image of domination, ‘Oniton Castle conquering the morning mists’. It is possible Forster is being ironic because Oniton is not to be Margaret's home and she is, perhaps, mistaken in so valuing it. Yet, if this is irony, it is irony of a very subtle sort.

I suggest instead that the pattern is not ironic; rather, it anticipates the resolution of the novel where the value of connection, represented by the presence of Henry and Helen at Howards End, is enacted in the plot by Margaret's conquest of Henry. Henry, in masculine style, has earlier told Margaret, ‘fix your price, and then don't budge’, and she has responded, ‘But I do budge’ (p. 155). Nonetheless, on the issue of connection, she, like her masculine counterparts, won't budge: ‘He had refused to connect, on the clearest issue that can be laid before a man, and their love must take the consequences’ (p. 331). And in the novel's closing paragraphs, Margaret reflects, ‘There was something uncanny in her triumph. She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives’ (p. 341). Margaret has triumphed, conquered, and broken up their lives. This conclusion to a novel about connection is ironic although not, I would suggest, deliberately so.

The irony arises because Forster inscribes the value of connection within the patriarchal dialectic of conquest and defeat, domination and submission, and within a narrative form that demands a resolution instead of ‘continuous excursions into either realm’ (p. 195). Although the themes of the novel indicate a desire to deconstruct the patriarchal ideology, ultimately, it seems, Forster is forced to reconstruct that ideology in the structure of the novel, in Margaret's ‘victory’ over Henry. Plot has demanded a hierarchical ordering of terms for a resolution to conflict even though the novel's themes have argued for replacement of conquest with connection. Forster's often trenchant interrogation of patriarchal language and perspectives appears to give way before the resistless temptation to expropriate the authority available to him in patriarchy. What he wants to assert, of course, is the value of the feminine perspective as a first step to dismantling hierarchy, but in the act of assertion, he affirms the value of the masculine mode, remaining dependent on patriarchy's hierarchical structures for authority, resolution, and conclusion. Ultimately, Forster recuperates an authority that would thematically seem to be repudiated.

Reaching this point in my argument—where the need to conclude a paper definitively is as imperative as the requirement to resolve a novel—I nonetheless stepped back from my own recuperation of authority, stepped from form to language. Perhaps Forster's critique of patriarchal modes and binary thinking was more trenchant and thoroughgoing than I first perceived. Forster had certainly appropriated the language of conquest, but he had also recontextualised it and, in the process, forestalled expropriation by that masculine terminology. A deep suspicion of conquest in its most notable manifestations—imperialism and war—lies at the very heart of Howards End. The narrator simply asserts, contrasting the yeoman who is ‘England's hope’ to the Imperialist who ‘hopes to inherit the earth’, that ‘the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth that he inherits will be grey’ (p. 323). Strong biblical cadences underline this apocalyptic vision of a world shaped in a masculine mode.

Perhaps, then, Forster is having his joke when Margaret characterises her success as a conquest. ‘She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives’ (p. 341). In fact, she has not ‘charged through’; she has simply done what ‘seemed easiest’ (p. 334). ‘No better plan had occurred to her’ (p. 335). She confesses, ‘I did the obvious things’ (p. 339). ‘Conquer’, in this context, is not an act of self-assertion and dominance but is redefined as non-assertion, an opening up of space, a refusal to accept the exclusivity of opposition, between Henry and Helen. ‘Everyone said [living together at Howards End] was impossible’ (p. 338), but Margaret defies this patriarchal logic.

The futility of binary thinking appears in the lives of both Henry and Helen, both of whom declare they are ‘ended’. Henry confesses, ‘I don't know what to do—what to do. I'm broken—I'm ended’ (p. 334).¹⁶ As if in echo, Helen rejoins, ‘I'm ended. I used to be so dreamy about a man's love as a girl, and think that, for good or evil, love must be the great thing. But it hasn't been’ (p. 337). The man of action and the woman of emotion reach the bankruptcy implicit in their exclusive positions. Margaret's conquest or victory, then, is not the patriarchal one demanding suppression of an other but one that emerges as the traditional oppositions destroy themselves and clear a space for difference.

Forster has anticipated this conclusion, as we have seen earlier, in identifying a warfare mentality with Henry Wilcox. But we may now discover a further step Forster has taken. While Henry Wilcox persistently refers to casualties such as Leonard Bast as ‘part of the battle of life’ (p. 191) as if such casualties were in the ‘nature’ of things, Margaret decodes his metaphor: ‘We upper classes have ruined him, and I suppose you'll tell me it's part of the battle of life’ (p. 224). Margaret herself is a master of words, as we see in her first encounter with Leonard Bast when her speeches ‘flutter away from him like birds’ (p. 40). But Margaret's strength lies in recognising the way ideologies are encoded in language and in acknowledging the social privilege behind her ‘speech’. She early argues ‘all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches’ (p. 61), underlining both the intensity and the futility of Leonard Bast's desire ‘to form his style on Ruskin’ (p. 49). Ruskin's style cannot ‘speak’ Leonard Bast's life.

When Margaret rejects Henry's language and metaphor of life as a battle, she rejects his patriarchal ideology and introduces new terms into the novel. She reflects that ‘Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty’ (p. 107). This passage informs the entire novel and encourages us to reread the metaphors of conquest concluding the novel within a romance topos put into play by the figure of Ruth Wilcox, Henry's first wife.

Margaret's own sense of victory is severely qualified when she learns that Ruth Wilcox had ‘willed’ Howards End to her, had designated her as its ‘spiritual heir’, many years earlier: ‘Something shook [Margaret's] life in its inmost recesses, and she shivered’ (p. 342). Ruth Wilcox is introduced into the novel as one who always ‘knew’, although no one ‘told her a word’ (p. 27). Ruth Wilcox is represented as beyond language deployed as power, beyond the words that cripple communication among the other characters, implicated as they are in ideology. Margaret ultimately asserts to Helen: ‘I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman's mind. She knows everything. She is everything. She is the house, and the tree that leans over it’ (p. 313).

Miss Avery, who after Mrs Wilcox's death becomes her representative, prophesies to Margaret: ‘You think you won't come back to live here [at Howards End], but you will’ (p. 272), and Margaret, who has discounted her words, is disturbed to find them fulfilled when she and Helen sleep in the house: ‘It is disquieting to fulfil a prophecy, however superficially’ (p. 302). She will, of course, fulfil it much more deeply, making Howards End her permanent home, as, increasingly, Margaret herself recognises the ‘power of the house. It kills what is dreadful and makes what is beautiful live’ (p. 300).

As Margaret moves toward insight and vision, she, too, moves away from language. The narrator comments, for example, that Margaret's ‘mind trembled toward a conclusion which only the unwise will put into words’ (p. 205). And later we learn that Margaret ‘had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things’, an inevitable process ‘if the mind itself is to become a creative power’ (p. 262). Finally, Margaret admits to Helen, who calls her life ‘heroic’, ‘No doubt I have done a little towards straightening the tangle, but things that I can't phrase have helped me’ (p. 339).

At best, because of its ideological character, language can take characters to the brink of understanding as it does when Margaret exposes Henry's hypocrisy in committing adultery himself and refusing to forgive it in Helen. Margaret confronts Henry: ‘I think you yourself recommended plain speaking’. And the narrator reveals that ‘they looked at each other in amazement. The precipice was at their feet now’ (p. 307). Language takes them to the abyss, but it cannot reconstruct their lives on a new basis because they cannot form conceptions of that for which there is no concept. Margaret simply relies on ‘the power of the house’.

As we reconsider Forster's resolution in light of Mrs Wilcox and the spiritual heir she seeks for Howards End, we notice that the novel moves toward resolution, but it is a resolution that existed from the beginning as a ‘part of Mrs Wilcox's mind’ (p. 315). In that respect, the plot subverts its own commitment to hierarchy and sequence, to prior and subsequent events. In addition, the power that has ‘defeated’ Henry Wilcox, the patriarch, is diffused over the universe. At the end of the novel, Henry Wilcox lies suffering with hay fever, confined to the house, recalling Miss Avery's words with their echoes of battle imagery: ‘There's not one Wilcox that can stand up against a field in June’ (p. 273). The patriarch is ‘shut up in the house’, and his wife pronounces, ‘It has to be. … The hay-fever is his chief objection to living here, but he thinks it worth while’ (p. 336).

As previously noted, the novel's last words belong to Helen, who rushes into the house with her child and the neighbour boy accompanied by ‘shouts of infectious joy’: ‘We've seen to the very end’, she cries, ‘and it'll be such a crop of hay as never’ (p. 343). To see ‘to the very end’, in this scene and in the novel as a whole, is to discover the beginning of possibility: ‘such a crop of hay as never’. The last phrase is appropriate, too, concluding with a ‘never’ that has already been subverted. In its closure, the novel gestures toward an open space, like a field in June, that ‘not one Wilcox … can stand up against’. It is a ‘closure’ that echoes Hélène Cixous on écriture féminine. Though Cixous is speaking of women writers, she describes what I am arguing that Forster has achieved:

[Writers] must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence’, the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘the end’.¹⁷

This reading seems more true to the narrative and linguistic procedures of Forster's Howards End. But it raises further questions. Can Forster thus evade the connection between discourse and power by postulating an unspoken knowledge? Indeed, the pressure of resolution may seem inevitably to produce an evasion as Forster gestures toward an alternative to binary thinking, a ‘conclusion that only the unwise will put into words’. It is, at best, an uneasy truce. And this final inaccessible metaphysics may leave us frustrated by our own discontinuing embattlement with language, power, and patriarchy.

Notes

1. After the early, enthusiastic appreciation of Forster's work set in motion by Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster (New York, 1943), and Trilling's identification of Howards End as ‘undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece’, because it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of the early books and connects them ‘with a more mature sense of responsibility’ (pp. 114-15), other critics have not been content to rest with the thematic coherence of his work and have disagreed with Trilling's assessment. They have located Forster's reliance on nineteenth-century modes as a source of the novel's weakness. See, for example, Frederick Crews, who feels that Margaret's ‘“connection” with the Wilcoxes is merely diagrammatic’ and that Forster's ‘plot must finally retreat to an un-convincingly “moral” ending’ (E. M. Forster: The Perils of Humanism [Princeton, NJ, 1962], p. 122). See also Wilfred Stone, who claims that ‘The forces of value do not “connect”, but pursue each other in a lonely and circular futility. And the circle is especially vicious because Forster seems to see only its “proportion” and not its “emptiness”’ (The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster [Stanford, Cal., 1966], p. 266).

   I hope my own analysis identifies a new way to see the narrative strengths and challenges of Forster's novel, to perceive those techniques and questions that align him with other literary modernists. At the same time, my goal in this essay is to give another perspective from which to assess the novel's difficulties, which have been too readily grouped under the rubric of Forster's return to a nineteenth-century liberal humanism.

2. Francis King, E. M. Forster and His World (New York, 1978), p. 57.

3. Ibid., p. 64

4. P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 2 vols (New York and London, 1977, 1978), II, 40.

5. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 154-5.

6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), p. 20, has made an important connection here between misogyny and fear of the feminine. She argues that ‘homophobia directed by men against men is misogynistic, and perhaps transhistorically so. (By “misogynistic” I mean not only that it is oppressive of the so-called feminine in men, but that it is oppressive of women).’ Sedgwick also notes that, although antihomophobia and feminism are not the same forces, the bonds between them are ‘profound and intuitable’.

7. E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York, 1921), p. 243. All subsequent references are from this edition, and page numbers are provided in the text.

8. One critic who has observed that the narrator is female is Kinley Roby, ‘Irony and Narrative Voice in Howards End’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 2 (May 1972), but his argument differs sharply from mine because he uses the evidence that Forster has created a female narrator to argue for Forster's separation from and condemnation of the narrator's narrow and biased attitudes: ‘The contrast between the action of the novel and the narrator's view of that action suggests that the narrator and the group for whom she claims to speak see the world neither steadily nor as a whole. … Forster seems to be suggesting that the narrator and those like her cannot have their “islands”, their illusions and, at the same time, a world worth inhabiting’ (p. 123).

9. There is some evidence from contemporaneous reviews that Forster's narrator and the narrative point of view were problematic. Indeed, some reviewers were persuaded that E. M. Forster must be a woman who had adopted a male pseudonym. Elia Pettie of the Chicago Tribune, in support of her argument that Forster was female, wrote: ‘In feeling the book is feminine’ (cited in Philip Gardner [ed.], E. M. Forster: The Critical Heritage [London and Boston, 1973], p. 160). Gardner also notes in his introduction that Pettie's conviction had British precedent: ‘The idea [that Forster was female] had already been whispered in passing’ (p. 5).

10. Philip Gardner, E. M. Forster (London, 1977), has also noted of Howards End, identifying Forster with his narrator, that ‘at times Forster's [comments] to the reader lack his usual authority and aplomb’ (p. 25).

11. It is a commonplace to recognise that Forster's novel is built upon oppositions. He himself said about the book's composition: ‘I am grinding out my novel into a contrast between money and death’ (cited in King, Forster and His World, p. 49). Other critics have generally cited the clash between the material and spiritual lives, the seen and the unseen, Bentham and Coleridge, Lloyd George liberalism and classical liberalism. My own interpretation takes the gender conflict as pre-eminent.

12. The subject of androgyny has become a vexed one in contemporary feminist discourse. In early stages of the feminist movement, the argument for equal treatment of women and men seemed to depend on detecting similarities: the masculine in the feminine and the feminine in the masculine. Then androgyny seemed the ideal. Subsequently, women have wanted to argue for the authority of the female perspective and values, and androgyny as a concept has become less attractive. It is interesting, in this light, that Forster doesn't advocate the merging of traits androgyny implies but instead insists on preserving distinctions. He is, in that regard, closer to the spirit of a contemporary discourse that speaks of escaping hierarchies.

13. Glen Caveliero suggests a similar point but does not develop it in A Reading of E. M. Forster's Novels (Totowa, NJ, 1979). Caveliero writes: ‘Although it is possible to detect an anti-female bias in his work, it is really in the interests of feminine values and fulfilment that he writes, and the kind of wisdom he advocates goes well beyond the contemporary sexual polarisations. Even as a homosexual he was ahead of his time’ (pp. 127-8). Also, Anne Wyatt-Brown, in ‘Howards End: Celibacy and Stalemate’, Psychohistory Review, 12: I (Fall 1983), 29, argues that Forster lends ‘his own feelings to Margaret; surely the pressures of virginity that drove her into Henry Wilcox's arms were his own’.

14. Contemporaneous reviewers testify to Forster's success at representing female friendship. An unsigned reviewer in the Atheneum wrote: ‘the great thing in the book is the sisters' affection for each other … personal relationships … have never, we venture to say, been made more beautiful or more real’ (cited in Gardner, Critical Heritage, p. 151). Forster's success here, and I would argue that he does succeed, is the more remarkable if we consider that Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own (New York, 1929): ‘“Chloe liked Olivia”, I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature’ (p. 86). Woolf argues that the representation of female friendship depends on female writers and so seems to forget Forster's novel. But his treatment of women must have impressed her at one time. Vanessa Bell invited Forster, after the publication of Howards End, to speak at the Friday Club on ‘The Feminine Note in Literature’. According to Furbank, ‘Virginia told him [Forster] afterwards it was the best paper the Club had heard so far’ (Forster: A Life, 1, 193).

    It is an interesting, if small, point that critics Wilfred Stone, Cave and Mountain, p. 239, and Elizabeth Heine, ‘E. M. Forster and the Bloomsbury Group’, Cahiers d'Etudes & de Recherches Victoriennes & Edouardiennes (CVE), 4-5 (1977), 47-8, have pointed to Virginia and Vanessa Stephen as models for the Schlegel sisters although Forster himself claimed the three sisters of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson as his models (‘The Art of Fiction’, Paris Review, 1 [1953], 37).

15. Although I find différance a fruitful concept for allowing us to see Forster's achievement in a new light—for allowing us to perceive a radical dimension to his art obscured by previous insistence that he belongs to a nineteenth-century tradition of liberal humanism—I am not doing a Derridean deconstruction on this text. Indeed, the conclusion I postulate—Margaret's ultimate spiritual insight outside language—Derrida would probably see as a metaphysics. I am, however, inevitably led to see the parallels between Forster's conception of connection and Derrida's notion of différance, both of which are crucial to the problem of sexual difference.

16. The tendency among critics has been to pose the Schlegel sisters together in opposition to the Wilcoxes. Frederick Crews is one critic who appreciates the distinctions Forster has drawn between Helen and Margaret and the similarities between Helen and Henry: ‘Henry and Helen together are people who isolate and simplify rather than allowing their imaginations to play across a broad range of related circumstances. … Both the Wilcoxes and Helen are unwilling to come to grips with prosaic reality’ (E. M. Forster, p. 120).

17. Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York, 1981), p. 256.

[This essay begins with the point that Forster was not part of the literary and cultural movement called ‘modernism’, associated with Eliot, Woolf, Pound, Joyce, etc. Langland, however, negates the importance of this apparent limitation by suggesting that there is something new in Howards End—an attempt to defy patriarchal logic and rationality through writing in a feminine mode, even as though the narrator was a woman. This is a feminist reading of Howards End which has begun with the question whether male writers can undo patriarchy in their own writings, and the answer here seems to be positive: the text comes down on the side of the feminine—‘deconstructing’ the terms which place male above female, and which marginalise the terms which in ideology belong to the feminine—the inner life, intuition, for instance. ‘Deconstruction’ comes from the theorist Jacques Derrida, whose work aims at showing how structures of thought privilege certain powerful Western myths—including, of course, myths sanctioning imperialism. At one point Langland argues that Forster returns to patriarchal/imperialist ideology, but then concludes by finding in his adherence to and investment in the mother, Ruth Wilcox, and his sense of the importance of what cannot be put into language—a commitment to unspoken knowledge—ways in which the text sides with the feminine. The question remains, however. Delany (essay 4) fastens on the text's political limitations: Langland fastens on its strengths with regard to gender politics, about which Delany said nothing. The question of the critical status of Howards End remains, depending on which reading is found to be more satisfactory. Can an undoing of patriarchy mean a change in politics? Does an attention to the feminine entail changes that make a difference in public life? Langland leaves the question open. Ed.]