[In the following essay, Olson argues that Forster's families in Howards End prefigure modern family structure.]

That contemporaneous reviewers of E. M. Forster's Howards End [hereafter referred to as HE] failed to recognize his prescient image of a radically new family structure is hardly surprising. In 1910 the institutional, middle-class family in England—static, authoritarian, and based on consanguinity and primogeniture—was still assumed as a given by most readers and novelists. As a result, few readers or novelists at the beginning of this century questioned the accepted institutional model of the family or foresaw the possibility of rejuvenating it to enhance individuality and equality in the family circle.

Thus D. H. Lawrence set the opening chapters of The Rainbow at a farm significantly called “The Marsh,” but he employed the symbolism of that name narrowly, focusing on women's defiant seizure of sexual freedom rather than remolding the entire family. Expanding on the metaphor, one might say that just as a marsh is a protected nursery richly supplied with the elements necessary for the nurturance and protection of young marine life, so a more expansive and flexible form of the family could provide a richer context for human fulfillment. Forster visualized a more egalitarian, inclusive family that would be a fertile seedbed where all its members, deeply rooted in the past and securely connected with their own emotions, might be equally enriched by energizing currents from the outside.

In his massive study, Lawrence Stone sees that the family was very gradually moving from “distance, deference and patriarchy” to what he calls “affective individualism.”¹ Though he finds the seeds of his main features of the modern family in key segments of English society as early as 1750, in the following hundred years, the development of this new family type actually regressed until the end of the Victorian period, when it began to spread slowly into other classes of English society.² Peter Gay's The Tender Passion, while focusing on examples of true love in marriage, acknowledges “the smoke screens thrown up by purposeful propriety, diligent self-censorship, and tense moral preoccupations”³ by parents whose power over their children “often enough amounted to little more than a self-indulgent resort to superior legal privileges, emotional resources, or physical strength.”⁴ Even “the most affectionate and benevolent parents exercised power over their children, husbands over their wives, masters over their servants—always for their good, usually in their name.”⁵

Though not a formal student of the family, Forster was a discerning observer of the social scene. More than merely recording what he saw, he pondered the common values of his society and dreamed of a family that would encourage greater fulfillment for the individual, the family, and eventually for all of human society. Gay points out that few men, and even fewer women, aspired in the nineteenth century to “unforced, unmercenary, wholly equal mutual love, of love without power.”⁶ Forster was one of those yearning for such family relationships; in Howards End, through Margaret, he gives passionate voice to his dreams of a new kind of functional family, which he considered fundamental to all the other unspoken social contracts of life. In the last chapter of Howards End, Forster, a prophet far ahead of his time, projects an impressionistic vision of a radically different, more elastic middle-class family structure that presaged, in 1910, many of the characteristics now common to middle-class families at the end of the twentieth century.

Certainly, Forster was deeply dissatisfied with the conventional family he saw in the first decade of this century. From his first novel, the reader is regaled with the horrors of the institutional family whose children are unmercifully manipulated by a domineering parent to fit his or her preconception of the fortress family protecting itself against the imagined insults of the world. Like Mrs. Herriton in Where Angels Fear to Tread, Henry Wilcox in Howards End is an unwitting captive of traditional Sawstonite values, epitomizing in numbing detail the conventional paterfamilias of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. His unexamined adherence to the accepted social mores inexorably leads to his collapse and his son's imprisonment and might have resulted in the destruction of his marriage to Margaret Schlegel but for her determination to nurture new family relationships based on autonomy and trust. Both Mrs. Herriton and Mr. Wilcox stand upon the foundation stones of Property, Propriety, Family Pride, and The Church. Of Mrs. Herriton, Forster says, “Pride was the only solid element in her disposition.”⁷ Shamefaced and cautious behind a defensive facade that disguises a fear of emotion, Mr. Wilcox, like Mrs. Herriton, cares too much about apparent success and too little about the lessons of the past, is spiritually dishonest, and engages in oneupsmanship for the sake of controlling every situation. Mrs. Herriton and Mr. Wilcox share with others of Sawston's stolidly conventional middle class an admiration of wealth, cleverness, and barely masked prudery, callous meddling, and a supercilious attitude toward other people. Individual members of all such families in Forster's novels are expected to sublimate their own abilities, wishes, and personalities and to defer to a hazy notion of the “good of the family” defined by the assumed head of the family according to his or her unilateral decisions.

The later years of Victoria's reign saw the beginnings of public awareness of social issues in urgent need of reform. Among those then struggling to effect changes in the social, political, and economic life of England were Beatrice and Sidney Webb; the suffragettes Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters; Henry Fawcett, M.P., and his wife, Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett, campaigning for equal educational opportunities for women; and Josephine Butler, whose battle for women's rights was loyally supported by her husband and sons to their professional detriment. At a time when the marital relationship was still defined by the “ancient common law concept of couveture—‘the husband and wife are one and the husband is that one,’ Blackstone”⁸—not one of these reformers proposed restructuring family relationships or changing the organic shape or goals of the family. All implicitly accepted the common view of the family as an immutable institution whose social, economic, and political health far outweighed in importance the personal desires of any individual member. It was the creative writer, not the social reformer, who dared to dream of personal freedom and fulfillment within the family.

Forster's authorial eye was clearly on the middle class. The various parliamentary reform acts of the nineteenth century had gradually enlarged the perimeters of the middle class until by the end of the century even a minor clerk such as Leonard Bast could be considered middle class as long as he held a position in a business office.⁹ Only with Leonard and Jackie Bast did Forster attempt to describe a family that was not educated, financially secure, and socially stable. He felt the challenge keenly and, with modest pride, thought he had met it successfully.¹⁰ Forster was more certain of his observations of the solid center of middle-class family life as he saw and experienced it. He focused on what he knew and contrasted those observations with his vision that the middle-class family could embody new definitions of such traditional values as work, property, and community.

Descended from both the prominent Thornton family of bankers and the socially and financially precarious Whichelos, Forster acknowledged that much of the freedom he achieved in his adult life was the direct result of his financial security. In the words he gave to Margaret Schlegel in Howards End, he was one of those who stood “upon money as upon islands,”¹¹ yet he was ambivalent about money. Knowing well the importance of having enough, he claimed not to like money very much,¹² and later in life ruefully admitted that “money blurs everything now, takes the edge off every character.”¹³ He absorbed generosity about money at his mother's knee¹⁴ and enjoyed giving monetary gifts, which he believed “should be large so as not to be confused with loans.”¹⁵ For the latter, he expected prompt repayment. To give quiet gifts of money, Forster felt, was “an opportunity to perform acts of loving kindness,”¹⁶ exemplifying his philosophy of “athletic love.”¹⁷

Along with money, the institutional family was linked with property in Forster's mind. Having lived in his beloved Rooksnest from before the age of four through prepuberty and establishing that connectedness with a place, a piece of English soil, that is so important in his writings, the boy of fourteen was traumatized “by his sudden exile from this rural paradise.”¹⁸ Years later, reading a paper entitled “Memory” at a meeting of the Bloomsbury Memoir Club, he said, “‘If I had been allowed to stop on here I should have become a different person, married, and fought in the war.’”¹⁹ Cast out of his Eden—and paradoxically released from the prison of property—he allowed himself to express his homosexuality, and in creating for himself an extended, nonconsanguineous family with the Buckinghams, he achieved a degree of hard-won personal freedom from the deadly weight of the institutional family. Forster's description of Hannah More—“childless herself, she became the family life that does not die with death”²⁰—a critic suggests, can be equally applied to Forster's great-aunt Marianne Thornton and the novelist himself.²¹ Margaret Schlegel also fits such a description.

Even though rigid familial boundaries were slowly eroding in his lifetime, Forster was sixty-six years old before he was his own master. As an only child, he had no one to share the Victorian burden of buffering his mother psychologically from her solitary state and the disorderly demands of society. In a judicious summation of his mother's influence, Forster wrote to a friend after her death, “Although my mother has been intermittently tiresome for the last thirty years, cramped and warped my genius, hindered my career, blocked and buggered up my house, and boycotted my beloved, I have to admit that she has provided a sort of rich subsoil where I have been able to rest and grow.”²² Something of the novelist's resignation in the face of intractable societal expectations surfaces in Philip Herriton when he muses that, though he can never escape his mother's demands, he is determined to carve out what limited freedom of movement he can.

Forster's prescience about the modern evolution of the family seems to have escaped his readers and critics, not only when his novels were first published but also later.²³ Neither I. A. Richards, commenting in 1927, nor Lionel Trilling in his 1943 full-scale study of Forster's novels, grapples with the radically different functional family structure that Forster depicts in the last chapter of Howards End. While Richards acknowledges Forster's “special preoccupation … with the continuance of life,”²⁴ Trilling is engrossed by parent-child—mainly father-son—relationships. He scarcely mentions the word “family” and perfunctorily notes that “three of the heroines are mothers of sons,”²⁵ but complains that “they lack maternal warmth” and that “their connections with their sons are tenuous.”²⁶ The warmer, more kindly, mainly female Honeychurch family is simply ignored, as is the male Emerson counterpart. About fathers, Trilling is equally cursory, subsuming his brief mention of male parenthood under the rubric of Forster's attitudes toward authority figures.²⁷ In Trilling's defense, it must be recognized that the systematic study of the family only attained critical mass in the years after World War II.

Twenty years after Trilling, James Hall is one of the earliest critics to address at length Forster's theme of the family,²⁸ but it is George H. Thomson, also writing in the 1960s, who first identifies the nongenetic configuration of Forster's new family, observing that Forster assigns to Margaret as ancestors “ancient Danish soldiers who are not her ancestors at all.”²⁹ Thomson also recognizes that the inheritance of Howards End is passing from the consanguineous family to a member of a more flexible and now extended family.³⁰

In Howards End, Forster breaks with customary family values of the early 1900s and creates, however tersely, his vision of what the family might become. Howards End begins with an unconventional family and ends with the outline of a modern one.

The unconventional family consisted of Mr. Schlegel, a widower with three children to raise; Margaret, the eldest, was but thirteen years old. When Aunt Juley Munt, their mother's sister, in accordance with the tradition of the times, offered to run the household and supply maternal affection and guidance to the children, it was Margaret who decided “they could manage much better alone” (HE, 11). At Mr. Schlegel's death five years later, the answer was the same.

Mrs. Munt, the quintessential Sawstonite—though not virulent like Mrs. Herriton—gives all the wrong advice about money and would probably do the same regarding marriage, were her wisdom solicited. But the young Schlegels have learned to think for themselves, and Margaret and Helen, if not Tibby, have achieved some degree of self-knowledge and insight into human motivation. Of Mr. Schlegel's ample philosophical legacy to his children, his most important endowment was faith in human nature. If his trust was betrayed, his response was that “‘it's better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil” (HE, 39).

In contrast to the Schlegels, the Wilcox family aspires to social orthodoxy—at least Mr. Wilcox does—and vigilantly guards against investing trust in other people. Though Mrs. Wilcox might question the necessity for people with sufficient money to be working so hard to gather more, Mr. Wilcox's world is described by the accumulation of wealth. Mrs. Wilcox's faith that war would end if the mothers of various nations could meet is countermanded by Mr. Wilcox's firm belief in the idea and practice of Empire. As for religion, Mr. Wilcox, reared a Dissenter, turns to the Church of England, but surely not for moral or spiritual guidance. Mrs. Wilcox, of Quaker background, wants “a more inward light” than the rector's sermons provide, “not so much for myself as for baby” (HE, 88). Yet she never disputed Mr. Wilcox in anything except whether to pull down the old house and rebuild Howards End, a difference of opinion in which she carried the day. Mr. Wilcox domineers over his family. As a consequence, the children grow up in his image, not their mother's, while her life is “spent in the service of husband and sons” (HE, 71).

Though Mrs. Wilcox focuses her centripetal energies on her husband and children, Forster invests her with an important additional and private dimension. What matters to her is not intellection but connection with her own intuition and roots. In describing Mrs. Wilcox's attendance at Margaret's luncheon party, Forster makes clear that what the older woman represents is fragile, imaginative, hard to grasp, and impossible for her to articulate. Her “delicate imaginings” (HE, 71)—her experience of her inner intuitive nature at work—are destroyed by rapid-fire clever talk just as surely as Margaret's tentative connection with the countryside—her experience of external Nature—is severed by being driven through it in a motor car at high speed. Mrs. Wilcox lives “nearer the line that divides daily life from a life that may be of greater importance” (HE, 74).

Mrs. Wilcox finds in Margaret something lacking in her own offspring, a feeling of connection with the past that can, potentially, lead Margaret to the inner generative power of the human spirit. Mrs. Wilcox also senses in the younger woman what she calls, through her inability to frame a more precise definition, “inexperience” (HE, 70), a description of herself that Margaret, at age twenty-nine, finds disconcerting, since she has been the putative head of their family unit for more than ten years. Privately Margaret believes that “if experience is attainable, she had attained it” (HE, 71). But intuitively she realizes at the same time that for Mrs. Wilcox experience is a larger interior world of the heart and feelings, not just the superficialities of tea cups and roasts of beef, or even concerts.

Mrs. Wilcox is like a mother to the motherless Margaret, trying to teach her something Mrs. Wilcox's own children are not interested in, something that Margaret's own mother may not have adequately instilled in Margaret before her death. At twenty-nine Margaret is not yet sufficiently attuned to the inner life; she has so far intellectualized her life's experiences; “she mistrust[s] the periods of quiet that are essential to true growth” (HE, 77). When Margaret finally discovers the deeper vein of intuition and feeling that Mrs. Wilcox suggests she needs in order to be truly “experienced” in life, her epiphany lies in the sudden recognition of her love of the spacious land, which surprises the city-bred Margaret. Her newfound appreciation of the land becomes the bridge “connecting on this side with the joys of the flesh, on that with the inconceivable” (HE, 202). The novelist makes clear that this epiphany “had certainly come through the house and old Miss Avery” (HE, 202), who shared Mrs. Wilcox's deep attachment to the land and its human history.

To her marriage to Henry Wilcox, Margaret brings many of the qualities that Forster valued. Unlike the first Mrs. Wilcox, who is willing “‘to leave action and discussion to men’” (HE, 74), Margaret never really subordinates her beliefs to her husband's. At first she makes compromises in an effort to humor her husband's ingrained attitudes, so different from hers, yet she never relinquishes her principles, and, in the early days of her marriage, Forster tells us she is undergoing a seminal change, “some closing of the gates … inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power” (HE, 259). Thus she is adequate to the crisis when Henry's Victorian values of family privacy and superficial propriety collapse in ruins when his son Charles is charged with the manslaughter of Leonard Bast.

A careful reading of the last chapter of the novel is crucial to an appreciation of Forster's vision of the modern family. Actually he anticipates the novel's destination in the final paragraph of the penultimate chapter when he announces that “a new life began to move” (HE, 331) from the moment of Henry's disintegration. In his spiritual collapse, he asked Margaret “to do what she could with him. She did what seemed easiest—she took him down to recruit at Howards End” (HE, 332).

That “recruit” in this particular context may suggest a double meaning—a newness of psychological life as well as a renewal of physical strength—seems not unreasonable, particularly as the last chapter of Howards End gives the reader a picture of that new life, those new relationships that are springing from the ground so carefully prepared by the novelist in his development of Margaret's character and equally from the collapse of Henry's life-support values: “They were building up a new life, obscure, yet gilded with tranquility. Leonard was dead; Charles had two years more in prison. One usen't always to see clearly before that time. It was different now” (HE, 334).

Critics have complained that the last chapter of Howards End is too contrived, the characters too overtly manipulated by Forster. There is much justification for such criticism. But if this chapter is approached as a capsulated view of what family relations can be, one sees a succinct summation of Forster's vision of the family to come. Interestingly enough, it was an American reviewer in 1922 who first remarked on Mr. Wilcox's transformation: “It is at Howards End that Henry Wilcox, assured, truculent, successful when he first meets Margaret Schlegel, finally attains to something of her poise and vision.”³¹

An overview of the Wilcoxes as an institutional family in the early days of this century shows Henry Wilcox holding his children on a short rein. As thoroughly orthodox as Mrs. Herriton, he too wishes to control his sons and daughter and to use them to advance his own goals, which he thoughtlessly assumes are also theirs. Though Henry desires “no doughtier comrade” (HE, 99) when dealing with the emotions and uses his son Charles as a sounding board and coconspirator over the matter of Mrs. Wilcox's will, he can countenance no assumption of equality by Charles in the family business. While carrying out much of his father's “dirty work,” Charles is kept psychologically and financially subservient.

With similar lack of consideration, Paul is sent out to Africa to run the family business, only to be unceremoniously summoned back to England to administer affairs there when Charles is sentenced to prison and Henry collapses. Paul's preferences are never asked (HE, 330); he is simply expected to accede, though it means giving up the outdoor life that satisfies him. Evie, as a daughter, is to be found a suitable husband and provided with an adequate dowry; meanwhile, to pass the time, she breeds dogs and plays tennis. The Wilcoxes might present a front of impregnable family solidarity to the world, but individually they could not endure close proximity to one another. “They had the colonial spirit, and were always making for some spot where the white man might carry his burden unobserved” (HE, 201), the burden being, in Forster's eyes, the failure to achieve family intimacy and trust.

Of the old shibboleths—Property, Propriety, Family Pride, and The Church—the last is of no help to Mr. Wilcox in his agony over Charles's imprisonment. Family Pride lies crushed and, like Propriety, in need of redefinition. As for Property—especially Money—Margaret's and Henry's view are at first widely divergent. Henry is secretive; she is open and frank about what she possesses and how to use it for beneficial purposes. To Margaret money is only “the warp of civilization” (HE, 125); the pattern, the enrichment of the tapestry, is created by the woof “‘that isn't money’” (HE, 127), all those fructifying ends to which money might be usefully applied to enhance the inner, as well as the external, life of humankind, not just of the possessor of money. From the time of their engagement, she urges him to be generous toward his children; she wants nothing monetary from him. But he uses money as a convenient lever of control.

Their ideas about work are equally divergent. While Henry gives his clerks “work that scarcely encouraged them to grow into other men” (HE, 179), for himself personally, work is equated with money and power and is a symbol of his selfhood. Margaret looks on work as desirable and liberating, implying a certain harmony between innate ability and its expression in the workplace: “‘… in the last century men have developed the desire for work, and they must not starve it. It's a new desire. It goes with a good deal that's bad, but in itself is good, and I hope that for women, too, “not to work” will soon become as shocking as “not to be married” was a hundred years ago’” (HE, 108).

Given Henry Wilcox's rigidity of character, one cannot expect him to manifest major change in the fourteen months between his breakdown and the last chapter of Howards End. Yet he does grow. In disposing of much of his accumulated wealth to his children now they have reached maturity, Mr. Wilcox demonstrates he has learned a little bit about being a nurturing father. That he credits Margaret with the idea of sharing his money with his children while he is still alive does not invalidate the fact that he personally made that decision. Nor is he forced by Margaret to leave Howards End to Helen's son; in turn Mr. Wilcox asks each of his children if they want the house; only when they all reject it does he give Margaret the gift the first Mrs. Wilcox had intended her to have.

Over the fourteen months of Henry's “recruitment” since Charles's prison sentence was pronounced, many changes in the Wilcox family are effected by Margaret's influence. “She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives” (HE, 339)—broken them up and helped put the pieces back in a more modern shape. Thus the last chapter of Howards End reveals the beginnings of a new, blended family: Henry Wilcox and his wife Margaret, his unwed sister-in-law Helen Schlegel (in 1990s parlance, a single parent) and her son. This is also the beginning of an extended family in which genetics is no longer the sole criterion for membership. Tom, the six-year-old farm boy, is a candidate for this extended family. He is not only present nursemaid for Helen's baby but as Helen anticipates to Margaret,

“They're going to be lifelong friends.”

“Starting at the ages of six and one?”

“Of course. It will be a great thing for Tom.”

“It may be a greater thing for baby.”

(HE, 333)

Here is an elliptical suggestion of the importance Forster ascribes to the social cross-fertilization possible between the descendant of yeoman stock (Tom) and the heir (Helen's baby) of an intellectual family consciously making that vital connection with the land as personified by the first Mrs. Wilcox. Here again Forster reiterates the importance he ascribes to the genetic union between Leonard Bast, “grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town” (HE, 113), a “noble peasant”³² who, though removed from his geographic roots, has not forgotten them, and Helen Schlegel, who has never had Leonard's visceral sense of connection with the land but is in her own way, with Margaret, groping intuitively yet deliberately toward that connection. Helen exults in “‘such a crop of hay as never!’” (HE, 340) just as she exults in her son who unites the genetic strength of the “noble peasant” with the intellectual vigor and sensitivity of educated people like the Schlegel sisters. Forster “cares deeply about the Leonards of England,”³³ just as he does about the urgent necessity for cerebral people to forge their own modern spiritual links with ancient long-forgotten roots in a physical place.

While the definition of the family has been enlarged to include the possibility of nonconsanguineous members, there is no evidence of active exclusion of anyone heretofore considered a family member, as Hall suggests.³⁴ Mrs. Munt and Tibby may not be the active members of the family group they once were—she is old, and he is launching out on his own autonomous life—but it is impossible to imagine Margaret and Helen ever excluding either of them from their circle; even Henry Wilcox gets along superficially well with both. Paul Wilcox may be estranged from the rest and eager to get away from them all once more by returning to Africa posthaste, but Evie has got over being angry with her father for marrying again. Because of his trial, Charles is loath to live in Howards End after his release from prison and considers going so far as to change his name. But his wife, Dolly, who is not quite so vacuous as Mr. Wilcox likes to think her, defends her family identity, saying, “‘Wilcox’ just suits Charles and me, and I can't think of any other name” (HE, 339).

Not only is the family changing in size and constitution, and its members gaining in individual independence and equality through Henry's sharing out to his children a great deal of his accumulated wealth, but Margaret's attitudes toward the use of money are being implemented practically. Explaining that upon his death his children will receive all the rest of his estate—“‘… I leave my wife no money. … That is her own wish’” (HE, 339)—Henry emphasizes Margaret's radical financial decisions. In addition to relinquishing any legal claim she had to Henry Wilcox's money by reason of marriage, she is embarked on giving away to philanthropy half of her own inheritance.

The “breakup and continuance of the family”³⁵ that Hall sees as a consistent theme in Forster's novels is not capricious; it has a salubrious function. The new Wilcox-Schlegel blended family has already learned how to give texture to the human reconciliation that can grow out of working through life's unexpected challenges. Not only Henry is changing. Margaret's earlier inability to forgive Henry for his treatment of Helen and her intention of leaving him have dissolved as the new life emerges that began to move and germinate during Henry's recruitment. Helen has learned to accept Henry and he, her. Helen has also discovered she has no wish to marry; she has her son. Though Helen's style of life was rare—even outrageous—in 1910, three-quarters of a century later it hardly raises an eyebrow. Margaret does not care for children, but she cares very much for adults and how they get along together in the family. Margaret has become a matriarch without ever being a mother.

Helen gives her all the credit for their “new birth”: “‘Just think of our lives without you, Meg—I and baby [living on the Continent] … he [Henry] handed about from Dolly to Evie. But you picked up the pieces and made us a home’” (HE, 336). Margaret acknowledges that “‘no doubt I have done a little towards straightening the tangle,’” but, signifying her having learned well Mrs. Wilcox's lesson, she adds, “‘… things that I can't phrase have helped me’” (HE, 337).

Present-day readers of Howards End may be excused for faulting the failure of critics of thirty or forty years ago to grasp Forster's brilliant dream of the twentieth-century family. In post-World War II days, and even into the 1960s, working mothers and nurturing fathers were the exception, unmarried mothers still a rarity, and blended families were only becoming more common. The traditional roles for women and men far outnumbered examples of equality between the sexes. From the vantage point of the 1990s, with several additional decades of observing changes in the family, today's readers can better comprehend Forster's prophetic vision of a new and more flexible form of the family; they will discern that contemporary middle-class families have advanced beyond the families of the 1960s toward an expression of Forster's dream of 1910. This palpable advance permits current readers to differ from Hall, who wrote in 1963 (like Trilling in 1943) that “the ending is a Jane Eyre one: the offenders are punished severely and the husband is gelded, needing thereafter only a nurse.”³⁶

Forster makes clear that Margaret's vision is not to be a nurse, serving Henry's wants, but to become an equal partner in the marriage. It can be argued that when Henry collapsed, Margaret responded as would have been expected of the typical nurturing mother and wife of 1910: “She did what seemed easiest—she took him down to recruit at Howards End,” giving up her intention of leaving him in order to cleave to her sister Helen and her expected child and exile herself to the Continent to protect the only vital family relationship she had ever had. Instead, following the ineluctable collapse of Henry's values, Margaret seizes the chance to create a new family structure encompassing both Wilcoxes and Schlegels, in which she would be the matriarch—not just a wife, not just an older sister, never a mother, but sharing equally with Henry in heading an extended family. Far from searching for an ideal father figure, as Hall implies,³⁷ Margaret had needed a mother figure; she found it in Mrs. Wilcox. Margaret had a strong father, one she admired and whose values she had thoroughly assimilated. Mrs. Wilcox was the necessary mother figure whose example of inner strength of intuition helped Margaret to root her views of familial relationships—unorthodox and radical for 1910—in a new experience of intuitive visceral knowledge, not just in intellectual hypotheses.

Likewise, in nurturing a sense of spiritual kinship among very different people, Margaret goes far beyond Hall's 1963 view that “the high barriers to community of spirit remain barriers. Helen and Margaret both try to reach understanding with people of extremely different backgrounds, temperaments, and hopes. The novel yields no ground at all to this possibility.”³⁸ On the contrary, I believe that the novel carefully prepares the ground for exactly this possibility, while recognizing the difficulty of the endeavor. The barriers are truly there, but Forster's sketch of the new structure of the family suggests the possibility of a community of spirit—what Hall earlier calls a “community-in-difference”—among people of widely varying backgrounds.

In “Pessimism in Literature,” writing of the modern novelist's search for the truth of the human condition to embody in fiction, Forster tells his audience that separation seems more truly to reflect life than does a happy ending in the form of marriage. Yet, continuing his thesis, he states that since the novelist chooses separation:

we conclude, quite unjustly, that he sees in life nothing but separation. The truth is that modern art has not succeeded in depicting all modern life. It has tried, it would like to, but it cannot … a man and an author have different aims. The author looks for what is permanent, even if it is sad; the man looks for what is cheerful, and noble, and gracious, even if it is transitory.³⁹

Forster the man may be peeping through in the last chapter of Howards End.

Is this newborn family just a passing whimsey of Forster's that is applicable to only one novel? Is it specific to Howards End? In the fragments of Arctic Summer, we see a reaffirmation of the freer, more individualist family where equality is valued over class, and love between husband and wife includes a strong companionship. The traditional foundation stones of Property, Propriety, and Family Pride—if not The Church—have been redefined.

Martin Whitby feels his wife, Venetia, is “a comrade as well as a wife.”⁴⁰ She is a working wife and a mother, autonomous, with “clear vision” (Arctic, 132), not a conventional woman, but one who, like her husband, hates pseudo-chivalry because “it's against all true intercourse with women, and all progress” (Arctic, 141). The son of a manufacturer and a Quaker, Martin attended day school before going up to Cambridge (Arctic, 130). He chose a bureaucratic post in the Treasury over a Cambridge fellowship (Arctic, 132). Martin and Venetia share outside interests, have a healthy little son named Hugo, and like, as well as love, each other. Theirs is an “orderly love” (Arctic, 132), wherein reason and passion work together (Arctic, 132), and they have produced wedded love, not wildly exciting perhaps, but comradely and satisfying over the long run (Arctic, 133). For their child, they are anxious that he “shouldn't be taught all the rubbish about ‘little girls do this’ and ‘little boys do that’” (Arctic, 155). That Hugo should grow up liking people is what is important. And Hugo's parents make no distinction between gentlemen and other men (Arctic, 155).

Thus it would seem that the new family so abruptly born in the last chapter of Howards End is no aberration. In Forster's new, modern, functional family, equality is basic; the idea of money as power is forsworn; individual autonomy is recognized; and class is being overcome, at least for the next generation. Women have choices regarding marriage and careers, and they work because work fulfills one part of their nature. Men, too, are liberated from the narrow stereotypes of conventional careers. Both parents are nurturers. No longer limited by genetics, families may by choice be nuclear or extended, or even blended. Working wives and mothers are becoming unexceptional. When money is regarded as a means, not an end, people are able to be more generous in spreading its benefits; within or outside the family, philanthropy is not considered extraordinary. The family that emphasizes companionship in its relations strengthens the individuality of each of its members, and this in turn strengthens the sense of community-cum-variety. Communal cohesion springs voluntarily from shared interests and feelings, not just from common bloodlines. People who are very different learn they can coexist and even come to respect and accept each other. Family relationships need no longer be the “white man's burden” (Forster's words) that forces people to flee to the ends of the earth to escape meaningless formality. Education of the young strives to be gender-free. The goal is a classless family of all humanity.

Forster unfailingly emphasized the spirit over the strictly legalistic. “A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man” (HE, 100). What was important to the novelist was a new framework for relationships—“love without power,” in Peter Gay's graceful phrase—between husband and wife, parents and children, the nuclear family and the extended circle.

Forster was indeed more prescient than he knew. Already in “Pessimism in Literature,” dated 1906-07, he had written:

[T]hough the facts of human nature are constant, the spirit of humanity is not, but alters age by age, perhaps year by year, and, like some restless child, continually groups the facts anew. … What new and inspiring combinations it may find, no man can say; that it will find a new combination is surely inevitable, and happy the artist who records it.”⁴¹

As the end of the twentieth century approaches, perhaps readers of Forster's fiction are becoming attuned to the resonance of his visionary ideas about the family. Certainly when he wrote Howards End in the first decade of the century, Forster was ahead of his time in identifying and recording a new shape and function for the modern family.

Notes

1. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, abridged ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 22.

2. Stone, 22.

3. Peter Gay, The Tender Passion (New York: Oxford UP, 1986), 4.

4. Gay, 106.

5. Gay, 106.

6. Gay, 107. For further insight into the nineteenth-century English middle-class family, see also F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988). For contemporary personal accounts of parent-child relations, see Linda Pollock, A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1987). For an understanding of the buffering role of servants in isolating children from parents, see Theresa M. McBride, The Domestic Revolution (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976).

7. E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, vol. 1 (London: Edward Arnold, 1975), 69.

8. Qtd. in Leonore Davidoff, “Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England,” Journal of Social History 7 (Summer 1974): 406.

9. For a discussion of the entry of clerks into the lower middle class, see Thompson 68-69.

10. Paris Review, Writers at Work, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1958), “E. M. Forster,” interview by P. N. Furbank and F. J. H. Haskell, 20 June 1952, 23-25.

11. E. M. Forster, Howards End, Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, vol. 4 (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), 58.

12. From a 1910 letter to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, qtd. in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster, a Life, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 191.

13. E. M. Forster, Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1985), 91.

14. Furbank, Forster, a Life, 1:24-25.

15. P. N. Furbank, Encounter 35 “The Personality of E. M. Forster,” (Nov. 1970): 61-68; see esp. 65.

16. Furbank, “Personality of Forster,” 64.

17. Furbank, Forster, a Life, 2:40.

18. John Colmer, E. M. Forster: The Personal Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 3.

19. Qtd. in Colmer, 3.

20. E. M. Forster, Marianne Thornton, A Domestic Biography, 1797-1887 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 41.

21. See Judith Scherer Herz, “Forster's Three Experiments in Autobiographical Biography,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 13 (Spring 1980): 64.

22. Quoted in Peter Parker, Ackerley: A Life of J. R. Ackerley (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1989), 157.

23. For contemporaneous reviews, see Philip Gardner, E. M. Forster, the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). See also Frederick P. W. McDowell, E. M. Forster, an Annotated Bibliography of Writings about Him (DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1976), and Helmut E. Gerber, “E. M. Forster: An Annotated Checklist of Writings about Him,” English Fiction in Transition 2 (Spring 1959): 4-27, bound in English Literature in Transition, vols. 1-3 (1957-60). Also see McDowell's articles in English Literature in Transition, especially “E. M. Forster: Recent Extended Studies,” 9 (Fall 1966): 156-68; “Bibliography, News, and Notes: E. M. Forster,” 10 (Spring 1967): 47-64; and “Recent Books on Forster and on Bloomsbury,” 12 (Fall 1969): 135-50. Present-day scholars certainly provide subtle insights into specific personal relationships, but no one seems to address the family as a major theme. However, Don Austin, in “The Problem of Continuity in Three Novels of E. M. Forster,” Modern Fiction Studies 7 (Autumn 1961): 219, recognizes the possibility of spiritual, as well as genetic, children.

24. I. A. Richards, “A Passage to Forster: Reflections on a Novelist,” Forum 78 (Dec. 1927): 918.

25. Trilling designates Mrs. Wilcox, Mrs. Eliott, and Mrs. Moore as his “heroines” (see Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963], 33-34).

26. Trilling, 33-34.

27. See Trilling, 87.

28. James Hall, The Tragic Comedians: Seven Modern British Novelists (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963), ch. 2, “Family Reunions.”

29. George H. Thomson, The Fiction of E. M. Forster (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1967), 185.

30. Thomson, 185.

31. Gardner, 167, a review by George B. Dutton in the Springfield Sunday Republican (Springfield, MA), 1 Jan. 1922. Dutton was a professor of English of Williams College.

32. For a discussion of what this term means and the seminal role of the “noble peasant,” see Jeane N. Olson, “The ‘Noble Peasant’ in E. M. Forster's Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 20 (Winter 1988): 389-403.

33. I am grateful to the reader of an earlier version of this article for this felicitous phrase, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

34. See Hall, 23-24.

35. Hall, 11.

36. Hall, 22-23.

37. See Hall, 18. Notice also Hall's somewhat different interpretation of Mrs. Wilcox as a mother figure.

38. Hall, 23.

39. E. M. Forster, Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings of E. M. Forster, ed. George H. Thomson (New York: Liveright, 1971), “Pessimism in Literature,” 137-38; emphasis added.

40. E. M. Forster, Arctic Summer and Other Fiction, Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster, ed. Elizabeth Heine and Oliver Stallybrass, vol. 9 (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), 122.

41. Forster, Albergo Empedocle, 140.