SOURCE: Womack, Kenneth. “‘Only Connecting’ with the Family: Class, Culture, and Narrative Therapy in E. M. Forster's Howards End.” Style 31, no. 2 (summer 1997): 255-69.

[In the following essay, Womack examines Forster's social criticism regarding family issues in Howards End.]

Although David Lodge's Nice Work (1988) provides a surprising narrative of reconciliation between the academy and industry, its concluding pages allude to an even more pervasive cultural dilemma that has haunted English life for centuries—the mostly silent war that rages unchecked between the classes. Robyn Penrose, the novel's academic protagonist, recognizes the acuity of class and cultural distance that separates her students from a young black gardener tending the campus lawn. “The gardener is about the same age as the students,” Lodge writes, “but no communication takes place between them—no nods, or smiles, or spoken words, not even a glance. … Physically contiguous,” Lodge continues, “they inhabit separate worlds. It seems a very British way of handling class and race” (277). Lodge's depiction of the tacit acceptance of England's rigid class structure and the interpersonal distance that it produces in Nice Work signal the narrative's place in an historical tradition of British novels that highlight the social and economic discrepancies of life on the sceptered isle and its principalities. From such works as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) to Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1855) and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), British literature echoes with authorial discontent in response to the nation's historical obsessions with rank, social standing, and pedigree. England's dizzying celebration of class and the implicit honor that invariably accompanies it extends to its national folklore as well, from the anti-heroic exploits of Empire and colonialism to disaster at sea. Legend has it, for instance, that as the Titanic sank during the early morning hours of 15 April 1912, Captain Smith implored first-class male passengers to “be British, boys, be British” and surrender the ship's paucity of lifeboats to women and children. Nevertheless, more first- and second-class male passengers, including the White Star Line's derelict chief executive, J. Bruce Ismay, managed to survive the disaster than children from third-class and steerage combined (Wade 58, 67).¹

Concern for such a corrosive lack of value for the lives and experiences of the lower or disenfranchised classes underscores the narrative agenda inherent in many of E. M. Forster's fictions, including Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), which problematizes English perceptions of the lifestyles and mores of Italians, and A Passage to India (1924), a novel in which Forster surveys the social inequities and atrocities inevitably bred by a class- and race-conscious nation that engages in imperialism. In Howards End (1910), Forster assaults the superstructure of the British class system, peels back its many and variegated layers, and argues that only interpersonal connection and compassion will enable England to modify its deafening social distances, the likes of which Lodge depicts in Nice Work. The parlance of family systems psychotherapy offers a particularly useful means for explicating Forster's illustrations of class and culture and the roadblocks that they erect in England's pathways to the kind of national morphogenesis necessary for its society to bond and endure.² In Families and Larger Systems: A Family Therapist's Guide through the Labyrinth (1988), Evan Imber-Black astutely observes that “all families engage with larger systems.” Healthy, differentiated families, moreover, “are able to function in an interdependent manner with a variety of larger systems, utilizing information from these systems as material for their own growth and development” (14). Reading the layers of England's class structure as the component parts of a larger, albeit dysfunctional, family system illuminates Forster's critique of class and culture in Howards End. By supplying readers with a critical lens that identifies the nature of the feedback loops existing between the novel's characters and the diversity of their class origins, family systems psychotherapy demonstrates the manner in which Forster employs narrative therapy as a means for challenging his nation—with its collection of disparate classes and cultures—to, if nothing else, “only connect.”

The family systems paradigm also provides a meaningful critical mechanism with which to examine Forster's philosophical debt to Principia Ethica (1902), G. E. Moore's Bloomsbury-era manifesto on the social and ethical rewards of friendship and aesthetic experience.³ Often acknowledged as one of the central ethical influences upon Edwardian literary sensibilities, Moore's volume endeavors to establish basic principles for considering the notion of goodness and the governance of human behavior in the new century. Moore's moral philosophy argues for the recognition of a variety of ideal states of human existence, especially regarding the quality of the interpersonal connection that human beings share. “The best ideal we can construct will be that state of things which contains the greatest number of things having positive value, and which contains nothing evil or indifferent,” Moore writes, “provided that the presence of none of these goods, or the absence of things evil or indifferent, seems to diminish the value of the whole” (185). In Moore's postulation, this “value of the whole” signifies as the condition of life in the greater human community: first the family, that human community within which we all begin our interpersonal lives; then the world beyond one's parents and siblings, the larger family system of which Imber-Black speaks. In addition to celebrating the virtues of courage and compassion in human interaction, Moore remarks that “by far the most valuable things, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects” (188). In this way, Moore's ethical schema underscores the significance of friendship and human connection as profound avenues toward the consummation of the “value of the whole.”

Forster's own narrative interest in highlighting the social inequities of Edwardian life and the aesthetic elevation of the national consciousness demonstrates the ways in which Howards End functions as work of narrative therapy.⁴ In Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990), Michael White and David Epston augment the tenets of the family systems paradigm to account for the ways in which narrative experiences provide readers with a means for interpersonal development and growth. As White and Epston note, “In order to perceive change in one's life—to experience one's life as progressing—and in order to perceive oneself changing one's life, a person requires mechanisms that assist her to plot the events of her life within the context of coherent sequences across time—through the past, present, and future” (35). These mechanisms—works of narrative therapy—offer cogent methodologies that assist clients (or readers) in simultaneously identifying with and separating from the dilemmas that plague their lived experiences. Therapists such as White and Epston argue that the externalization of interpersonal problems through narrative therapy enables readers, then, to address their various issues via the liberating auspices of the imagination. Such stories encourage them “to explore possibilities for establishing the conditions that might facilitate performance and circulation of their preferred stories and knowledges” (76). In short, the telling and retelling of story furnishes readers with the capacity for usurping the pleasing equilibrium of homeostasis by effecting a kind of narratological morphogenesis, or the transformation of their lives through the therapeutic interpretation of their textual experiences.⁵

Howards End provides readers with a host of narrative exemplars that underscore Forster's agenda for the reinvigoration of the larger family system depicted in the novel. Populated by characters—and, of course, their families—from across the English class divide, Forster may be seen as offering a work of narrative therapy through his carefully drawn character studies and his insistence that his human creations be distinguished by their capacities for taking pleasure in aesthetic experiences and appreciating the interpersonal qualities of human interaction. As Jerome Bruner deftly observes, “There is widespread agreement that stories are about the vicissitudes of human intention” (18). In Howards End, Forster juxtaposes his characters' class standings in relation to their ability to enjoy friendship and recognize culture, as well as their intellectual movement—or, on occasion, their lack of it—toward self-sufficiency and differentiation from the larger family system. Forster suggests, then, that his characters, as they achieve selfhood beyond the homeostasis that the larger family system promises, only serve to rejuvenate that same system by virtue of their personal growth and self-enhancement.⁶ The evaluation of the characters and their experiences in Howards End—from the powerful, class-conscious Wilcoxes and the leisure-class intellectual Schlegels to the lowly aesthete Leonard Bast and Howards End itself—demonstrates Forster's particular interest in reforming the very heart of England's social conscience.

In the novel, the Wilcoxes' family home essentially functions as yet another component in Forster's indictment of English class and culture. As K. W. Gransden notes, Howards End resides—often, rather ironically, in a state of disuse—in an unusual era in English history, a “high-water-mark of economic and intellectual expansion” (55). A beloved, pastoral nirvana for Ruth Wilcox, the family matriarch, Howards End provides a physical metaphor for Moore's social ontology by challenging readers to consider the intentions—economic, intellectual, or otherwise—of each character who eventually impinges upon its environs. For this reason, Mary Lago perceptively characterizes the residence as a “signifier of the ideal” (49). All of the novel's principal characters invariably reveal the quality of their inner selves as they pass through its abstract social prism. While Ruth Wilcox perceives the house's considerable aesthetic beauty, for example, her husband Henry, a stalwart of the London financial world, only recognizes its material benefits as a parcel of property. He utterly fails to comprehend the benefits of living amidst the house's rustic charm: “Howards End is one of those converted farms,” he remarks, “picturesque enough, but not a place to live in” (141-42). In this way, Forster distinguishes each character by his or her capacity to reflect adequately the virtues of Moore's ethical schema, qualities that may yet provide the kind of narrative therapy necessary for the reinvigoration of England's social core in Forster's fictive world.⁷

If Howards End supplies Forster with a locale for testing his characters' ability to shun their class-conscious behaviors through the morphogenesis of social discourse, the character of Margaret Schlegel, Howards End's principal focalizer, exemplifies the family systems paradigm's usefulness in assessing personal growth and development. In many ways, the novel concerns itself with Margaret's social education and her battle with the enduring homeostasis of the class structure of English society. Her intellectual progress through the narrative of Howards End brings her into the orbits of a range of characters and social classes, while at the same time furnishing readers with textual examples of her experiences with triangulation, polarization, and differentiation along her path to selfhood. A lover of life and literature, Margaret, like her sister Helen, subsists on an annual income. Yet her considerable social standing hardly mitigates her ability to recognize social injustice and the value of human interaction in the life of a larger family system such as England. Nevertheless, Margaret perceives her internal need for personal growth: “I have everything to learn—absolutely everything,” she admits to Ruth Wilcox, to whom she outlines her educational goals “to be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged” (75-76).

Margaret encounters the “submerged” or lower classes in the figure of Leonard Bast after Helen—absorbed with passion during a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony—absent-mindedly steals the young clerk's umbrella. Leonard, Forster writes, “stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss,” Forster adds, “but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more,” (47). Despite his poverty, the tenuous nature of his employment, and his socially problematic relationship with Jacky, a woman of a questionable past from the extreme lower class, Leonard “hoped to come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus.” The clerk spends his spare time engrossed in works by Ruskin and Robert Louis Stevenson or listening “with reverence” to Queen's Hall Concerts (52). Although his family literally disowns him because of his affair with Jacky, Leonard intuitively recognizes the ethics of his romantic commitment to her, as well as the perilous nature of the “fallen woman” in his society's class structure: “I'm not one of your weak knock-kneed chaps,” he tells her; “if a woman's in trouble, I don't leave her in the lurch. That's not my street,” he continues. “No, thank you” (55). Like Margaret, Leonard pursues music and literature with the same passion and courtesy with which he regards his interpersonal relationships. Margaret recognizes these qualities in the clerk as well: “While her lips talked culture,” Forster writes, “her heart was planning to invite him to tea” (38).

Margaret's interactions with upper-class values in the novel occur when Helen nearly marries into the Wilcox family after visiting Howards End during one of its rare moments of occupancy. At first, Helen responds favorably to the Wilcoxes' aura of social confidence and hospitality. “They are the very happiest, jolliest family that you can imagine,” she writes to Margaret. Yet shortly before the demise of her engagement to Paul Wilcox, Helen begins to perceive that “the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness” (26). After Helen departs for an extended, post break-up visit to Germany, Margaret enters into a friendship with Ruth Wilcox, now back in London, where she suffers—unbeknownst to her family, whom, ironically, she would rather not trouble emotionally—from a terminal illness. From Forster's descriptions of Mrs. Wilcox, her friendship with Margaret would seem a foregone conclusion. “There was no bitterness in Mrs. Wilcox; there was not even criticism; she was lovable,” Forster writes, “and no ungracious or uncharitable word had passed her lips” (79). Unlike her family, Margaret empathizes with Ruth Wilcox's intense emotional response to her country home's aesthetic attributes. Thus, following her death shortly thereafter, Mrs. Wilcox's will—much to the surprise and consternation of her family—decrees that Margaret shall inherit Howards End.

The disposition of the property precipitates the novel's central crisis: Will the heart of the nation belong to proponents of friendship and culture or to hollow icons of wealth and materialism? Because they correctly assume that Margaret knows nothing of her late friend's sudden generosity, the surviving Wilcoxes choose to ignore Mrs. Wilcox's wishes—she had been “under the spell of a sudden friendship,” they reason—and maintain their ownership of Howards End. With their disregard for Mrs. Wilcox's last will and testament, the battle for the future of England had begun within the context of Forster's narrative agenda. To the Wilcoxes, Forster writes, “Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir” (103). When Margaret finally visits Howards End during her lengthy courtship with Henry Wilcox, the residence literally reverberates in honor of her arrival—“it was the heart of the house beating, faintly at first, then loudly, martially,” Forster writes. Moments later, the caretaker Miss Avery ominously mistakes Margaret for Ruth Wilcox. “In fancy, of course—in fancy,” Miss Avery remarks after confusing Margaret's identity. “You had her way of walking” (211). In addition to ushering in Margaret's intense era of personal growth, her later experiences with the class-bound Wilcoxes and the protracted redisposition of Howards End share in the process of differentiation that will ultimately result in Margaret's emergence as a fully realized self.

As Salvador Minuchin and Michael P. Nichols note in Family Healing: Strategies for Hope and Understanding (1993), “Almost nowhere in family life are triangles more notorious than in stepfamilies” (195). Margaret's courtship with and later marriage to Henry Wilcox not only initiate the creation of a stepfamily in the novel, but also inaugurate a series of events that result in her painful triangulation between her new husband and Helen. Interestingly, Margaret also finds herself in a triadic relationship between Henry's erotic past and the memory of Ruth Wilcox. In Systemic Family Therapy: An Integrative Approach (1986), William C. Nichols and Craig Everett ascribe some manifestations of triangulation between the spouse-spouse dyad and a third party to the notion of “scapegoating,” a process that “involves an attempt to dissipate or remove the stress [in the marital relationship] by pushing it away and placing it outside of the subsystem” (136). In each of the aforementioned cases of triangulation, scapegoating provides Margaret with a convenient means for disregarding the actual ethical dilemmas in her marital system in favor of the chimerical issues that she chooses to scapegoat.⁸ Metaphorically, Margaret opts to modify, if only temporarily, the higher value system that Forster celebrates throughout Howards End. Absorbed with ensuring the success of her marriage and agog over Henry's substantial wealth and property, Margaret simply chooses to ignore her husband's class “type” and his inability to connect.

Margaret initially finds herself triangulated between Henry and Helen, for example, because of her husband's haphazard advice regarding Leonard's vocational fate. Although Henry generally evinces scant concern for the plight of the lower classes, Margaret and Helen seek his advice over Leonard's tenuous employment status at the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company. It is no surprise that Henry reveals little interest in the lives of the disenfranchised members of his larger human community:

A word of advice. Don't take that sentimental attitude over the poor. … The poor are poor, and one's sorry for them, but there it is. As civilization moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch in places, and it's absurd to pretend that anyone is responsible personally. … There are just rich and poor, as there always have been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal.

(199-200)

In addition to his laissez-faire policy on the value of social reform, Henry believes that the lower classes should be kept at a discreet distance, a maneuver that he accomplishes himself through the art of gratuity. During lunch at Simpson's in the Strand with Margaret, for instance, Henry happily remarks to her that “tip everywhere's my motto. … Then the fellows know one again. … They remember you from year's end to year's end” (159). For Henry, the act of tipping provides a kind of false-friendship—a human relationship, purchased rather than cultivated through genuine social intercourse.

After Henry's careless advice regarding the Porphyrion's financial prospects results in Leonard's unemployment and near-starvation, Helen—already suspicious of the “Great Wilcox Peril” (178)—can no longer fathom her new brother-in-law's mercantile and artificial system of human relations. At one juncture, Helen exclaims, “What a prosperous vulgarian Mr. Wilcox has grown! I have very little use for him in these days” (143). Henry simply has no purpose in Helen's world, a place where poetry matters and “personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever” (181). When Henry refuses to acknowledge his culpability in Leonard's unnecessary state of unemployment, Helen dismisses any notion of tolerating his fractured social views, her triangulation of Margaret and Henry now complete: “I mean to dislike your husband and tell him so,” Helen explains to her sister, but “I mean to love you more than ever” (203). Confronted with her beloved sister and her new husband's utter inability to set aside their contradictory mores, Margaret attempts to decrease the stress on their family system by defending Henry's persona as a “type” necessary for advancing the English civilization into its present industrial and intellectual state. Margaret tries to dismiss—or scapegoat, if you will—Henry's social deficiencies as byproducts of what she defends as his essential role in England's ongoing process of nation-building, thereby removing him as a stressor on their triad. “If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut,” Margaret pleads with Helen; “there would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in. … Just savagery” (183). Even Margaret allows, though, that “some day—in the millennium—there may be no need” for Henry's type (169). Despite Margaret's best efforts to diminish Helen and Henry's differences, their lack of any common ground makes it virtually impossible for them to establish the senses of belonging and acceptance necessary, according to family therapists Mala S. and Roger B. Burt, to develop and grow as members of a functional stepfamily (12).

In addition to the increasing stress on her relationship with Helen, Margaret's marriage to Henry becomes triangulated by virtue of yet another third party, the memory of Ruth Wilcox. In one sense, the ghostly repercussions of Ruth's family's decision to disavow her last will and testament continue to haunt the Wilcoxes' capacity for finding peace in the present. Ruth and Henry's eldest, arrogant son Charles writhes in anxiety, for example, whenever Margaret inquires about the disposition of Howards End. After his father's marriage to Margaret, Charles becomes particularly troubled when Henry suggests that the Schlegels store their belongings in the vacant residence. Charles's hunger for property, rather than any belated sense of guilt over disobeying his mother's final wishes, motivates his disdain. Ruth Wilcox's ghost looms even larger after Leonard and Jacky arrive unexpectedly in the company of Helen at Margaret and Henry's Oniton home. When Jacky recognizes Henry, with whom she had an affair a decade before in Cyprus, he recoils in shame in the presence of Margaret, who quickly forgives him for an indiscretion that occurred long before their union. She finds herself strangely unsettled, however, by his deception of Ruth. Margaret realizes that Henry's “really culpable part—his faithlessness to Mrs. Wilcox—never seemed to strike him” as he begs for her forgiveness (257-58). Yet Margaret, as she ponders the awesome power of the Wilcoxes' wealth and privilege—tacitly participates in the evolution of her stepfamily's dysfunctionality: “She still loved Henry,” Forster writes, as she gazes with “deep emotion upon Oniton,” the location of her palatial new home (261).

Margaret's later discovery of Helen's secret pregnancy and Leonard's subsequent murder at the hands of Charles Wilcox, however, shatters the novel's series of triangulated relationships and serves as a polarizing mechanism that ultimately results in new frontiers of selfhood for Margaret, Helen, and Henry. Their differentiation provides Forster, then, with fertile terrain for the therapy and would-be transformation of the social values of England's larger family system. As Richard C. Schwartz notes, during polarization “each person in the relationship shifts … to a rigid, extreme position that is the opposite of or competitive with that of the other. … Because they tend to be self-confirming,” Schwartz adds, “these polarizations are likely to escalate in the absence of effective leadership” (20, 59). In Howards End, after Margaret's polarization allows her to complete her social education, she provides the kind of interpersonal leadership necessary for Helen and Henry—her partners in triangulation—to achieve selfhood as well. “This process of polarization and escalation is very familiar to systems theorists,” Augustus Y. Napier and Carl Whitaker write in The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy (1978), and may result, as with Forster's novel, in the type of “positive feedback [that] tells the system that things are changing, that the system is deviating from homeostasis” (83).

Margaret's polarized relationship with Henry unfolds in dramatic fashion after they cajole Helen into returning to England from Germany—where she awaits the birth of an illegitimate child by Leonard—in order to retrieve her beloved books from Howards End. When Margaret discovers her sister's condition, she agrees to provide a single night's refuge for Helen in the Wilcoxes' family home—now essentially a warehouse for the Schlegels' worldly goods—but Henry seethes with rage at the prospect of a fallen woman sullying Howards End's social grace and upper-class demeanor. “It was the crisis of his life,” Forster writes (319). Absorbed with the notion of punishing Helen's as of yet unidentified seducer, Henry fails to understand her desire to be among the soothing presence of her family's books and other sentimental belongings. “I cannot treat her as if nothing has happened,” Henry reasons with his wife, and “I should be false to my position in society if I did” (321). Suddenly polarized by Henry's utter inability to perceive the inequity of his stance, Margaret refuses to participate further in her chimerical defense of his socially “muddled” persona:

You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress—I forgave you. My sister has a lover—you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel—oh, contemptible!—a man who insults his wife when she's alive and cants with her memory when she's dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These, man, are you. You cannot recognize them, because you cannot connect. … No one has ever told you what you are—muddled, criminally muddled.

(322-23)

By finally drawing upon the value systems that marked her pre-marital life with Henry, Margaret begins the process of usurping her pseudo-self and emerging into a new era of selfhood.⁹

Because he still remains unable to recognize the substance of his wife's words, Henry refuses to accede to Margaret's wishes. Yet Margaret, with the powerful seeds of her newfound selfhood already planted, chooses to spend the night with Helen at Howards End, where she witnesses the nature of her sister's own self-transformation. “There is a special complexity, intricacy, and intimacy in sister relationships,” Monica McGoldrick writes, because “the desire for and experience of fusion lie at the heart of the difficulty many sisters have in seeing themselves as distinct from each other” (245). The product of remarkably similar value systems based upon the veneration of friendship and culture, Margaret and Helen's relationship understandably began to fissure with Margaret's marriage. Previously unable to reconcile herself with Henry's problematic social mores and his seemingly dysfunctional relationship with her sister, Helen tells Margaret that “I am steady now. I shan't ever like your Henry, dearest Meg, or even speak kindly about him,” she adds, “but all that blinding hate is over. I shall never rave against Wilcoxes any more” (328). Inexorably altered by her spiritual connection with Leonard and his celebration of nature and poetry, Helen finds herself at peace and enabled, for the first time, to accept her sister's decision to pursue a relationship with anyone beyond the boundaries of their ethical system, even a Wilcox.

Henry's sudden self-differentiation occurs via the tragic activities of his son Charles, who travels on his father's orders to Howards End on the morning after Helen's stay in an effort to learn the identity of her seducer and to expel her from the house's supposedly sacred rooms.¹⁰ When Charles discovers a newly arrived and remorseful Leonard at the residence, he erupts in a fury of class-conscious chivalry and brandishes a sword from amongst the Schlegels' belongings. Thus beknighted with a genuine artifact of aristocratic iconography, Charles startles the unemployed clerk, who collapses from heart failure in, rather appropriately, a shower of books from the Schlegels' substantial library. The morning's sad events furnish Henry with the catalyst for his own self-awakening. Traumatized by his role in Charles's act of manslaughter, Henry's “fortress gave way,” Forster writes. “He could bear no one but his wife, he shambled up to Margaret afterwards and asked her to do what she could with him,” Forster continues; “she did what seemed easiest—she took him down to recruit at Howards End” (350). Now ensconced in a household that includes his wife, as well as her fallen sister, Henry completes his ethical transformation by composing a will that bequeaths Howards End to Margaret initially, and later, to his newborn nephew, Leonard and Helen's son. “After I am dead let there be no jealousy and no surprise,” he informs the other, stunned surviving members of the Wilcox family (357).¹¹ Even Helen recognizes a change in Henry's demeanor. “I like Henry,” she now confesses to Margaret, who laments that, until the recent turn of events, Henry “worked hard all his life, and noticed nothing” (352).¹²

At Howards End's conclusion, Henry seems suddenly able to “notice” much more than his previous human philosophy allowed. Forster depicts him, for example, in the act of smiling at the very sight of Helen's baby, and, perhaps even more amazingly, at the presence of Tom, the son of a local field hand. As Robert Kegan notes, “Development is not a matter of differentiation alone, but differentiation and reintegration” (67). Imbued with faculties that allow him to enjoy the kinds of social and aesthetic experience advocated by Moore and Forster alike, Henry's character now appears to be the “type” of person, who—in the millennium, according to Margaret—will enable England to transcend finally the barriers of class and culture that divide its people. In The Theory and Technique of Family Therapy (1979), Charles P. Barnard and Ramon Garrido Corrales discuss the manner in which a family of differentiated selves possesses the transgenerational capacity for producing yet other selves with full senses of identity (36-37). By illustrating the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes in the process of emerging, via their conflicting experiences with Leonard and Jacky Bast, as a functional system from their initially spurious union, Forster's narrative suggests the possibility of a larger family system capable of yielding yet other fully realized selves in the future. While Leonard literally and metaphorically perishes from heart disease in the novel, his brief and intimate connection with Helen signals a sense of resolution between the classes and foreshadows the possible emergence of a new social order, of a world in which poetry and friendship matter. Perhaps even more significantly, Henry's ethical apotheosis at the novel's conclusion also suggests that the Schlegels have won the battle for Howards End—itself a fight for the heart of England, at least in Forster's ethical vision. As Paul Delany observes, Forster's narrative succeeds in one of its principal aims—“to project Schlegel values into a compelling vision of what Britain's destiny might and should be” (69).

In this way, Howards End functions as a kind of narrative therapy, as a means for establishing connection and reconciliation between the classes of a larger family system by virtue of Moore's ethical matrix. “How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes,” Forster presciently asks his readers, “when it takes all sorts to make a world?” (108). By creating a narrative that illustrates the socially debilitating effects of class and cultural inequity upon a larger family system such as English society, Forster effectively postulates a work of narrative therapy, both in the tradition of his literary precursors and also in concert with recent intellectual strides in narrative treatment as theorized and practiced by family therapists. Donald E. Polkinghorne writes that “the recognition that humans use narrative structure as a way to organize the events of their lives and to provide a scheme for their own self-identity is of importance for the practice of psychotherapy and for personal change” (178). The specialized terminology of family systems therapy likewise affords literary critics and therapists alike with a meaningful parlance through which to address story-telling and its propensity for furnishing us with the tools to alter the direction of our lives. “In cultural terms,” David Paré argues, narrative therapy operates “much like the global effort for peaceful cohabitation. It suggests a therapy focused on intercultural harmony” (35). In Howards End, Forster explicitly constructs his narrative in such a fashion as to establish fertile terrain for an “intercultural harmony” of his own design that may yet dilute the hegemony of class and privilege that problematizes England's larger family system. As Minuchin and Nichols note, “Family therapists recognize the pull of the past and that, to some extent, people live in the shadow of the family that was. But,” they add, “family therapy also recognizes the power of the present and so addresses itself to the ongoing influence of the family that is” (35). In his own work of narrative therapy, Forster extends this supposition one step further, arguing that a recognition of the complex, familial interrelations between past and present ultimately influences the course of the future that will be.

Notes

1. The Titanic and the dramatic conclusion to her maiden voyage essentially function as microcosms of the English class system, from the staggering discrepancies between the ship's first-class and steerage accommodations to the treatment of lower-class passengers during the loading of the liner's lifeboats. Some fortunate steerage survivors later recalled the menacing gates that acted as barriers against their passage to the boat deck. “Undoubtedly, the worst barriers,” Wyn Craig Wade adds in The Titanic: End of a Dream, “were the ones within the steerage passengers themselves. Years of conditioning as third-class citizens led a great many of them to give up hope as soon as the crisis became evident” (277-78).

2. Family therapists define morphogenesis as the process that allows a given family system “to deviate from its usual relationship among component parts and even to amplify that deviation” (Knapp 67). In Howards End, Forster illustrates the dramatic ways in which his characters challenge habitual familial patterns by contradicting, and ultimately withdrawing from, their respective family systems over such issues as class and culture.

3. Despite what appears to be Forster's obvious affinity for Moore's teachings, the novelist's critics and biographers continue to debate the extent of his knowledge of Principia Ethica. While K. W. Gransden attributes the moral philosophies of Forster and other members of the Bloomsbury Group to Moore's influence (4), his biographer P. N. Furbank flatly concludes that Forster “never read Moore” (1: 49). Although Mary Lago also confirms Furbank's assertion, she notes that Forster admitted to aligning himself with Moore's belief “in the possibility of an ideal affection” (58). Claude J. Summers maintains, however, that Forster “imbibed” the Cambridge philosophies of Moore, whose teachings likely justified Forster's own “belief that personal relations and the contemplation of beauty yield life's most valuable states of mind” (6).

4. For additional discussion regarding literature as a means of narrative therapy, as well as a vehicle for the interdisciplinary study of family systems psychotherapy, see Barbara A. Kaufman's “Training Tales in Family Therapy: Exploring The Alexandria Quartet.” Kaufman argues that “inclusion of novels in didactic contexts encourages trainees to search their own experiences, thereby maximizing the opportunity for positive therapeutic interaction and highlighting the variety of treatment approaches in the field” (70). See also Janine Roberts's Tales and Transformations: Stories in Families and Family Therapy (1994), which features an appendix that enumerates a host of existing “family systems novels.”

5. Charles P. Barnard and Ramon Garrido Corrales define homeostasis as a family's tendency—no matter how detrimental it may be—to preserve constancy. “There is no question,” they write, “that families devote considerable energy to maintain a certain amount of order and stability. Security,” they add, “seems to be tied with a certain amount of stability and predictability” (13). William C. Nichols and Craig E. Everett explain morphogenesis as the process through which families effect radical, meaningful change. Morphogenesis, then, “involves altering the nature of the system itself so that new levels of functioning are achieved” (130).

6. Richard C. Schwartz usefully defines the notion of the self or selfhood as “a state of mind to be achieved—a place of nonjudgmental, clear perspective” (4-5). In The Stories We Are: An Essay in Self-Creation, however, William Lowell Randall says that the stories “we tell ourselves [are] not at all neutral” (42). Indeed, he adds, an “interesting sort of feedback loop is at work: what I tell myself about myself affects how I present myself to others; how I present myself to others affects the options they make available to me; and what options they make available to me reinforce or challenge what I tell myself about myself thereafter” (43). In her valuable essay “Sisters,” Monica McGoldrick discusses the peculiar difficulties that sisters encounter while pursuing selfhood outside of their family's systemic boundaries, an issue of obvious significance to any study of the Schlegel sisters and their individual quests for personal growth and development. McGoldrick ascribes such difficulties to “the fact that women have not been raised to have an individual identity; their identity has been seen more as a receptacle for the needs of others. This perhaps influences the special fusion,” she adds, “that may exist in the relationship of sisters,” as well as in their subsequent quests for selfhood beyond the sibling subsystem (244-45).

7. In Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, Donald E. Polkinghorne notes that “the reflective awareness of one's personal narrative provides the realization that past events are not meaningful in themselves but are given significance by the configuration of one's narrative. This realization,” he continues, “can release people from the control of past interpretations they have attached to events and open up the possibility of renewal and freedom for change” (182-83). Polkinghorne's postulation of storytelling and its value as a means for effecting systemic change underscore the ways in which Forster's novel, with its social and aesthetic vision of England's future, functions as a work of narrative therapy.

8. Napier and Whitaker argue, moreover, that with scapegoating “one of the spouses can agree unconsciously to be ‘the problem.’” In this way, “at least one spouse has to be able to cope with the reality world, while the other ‘specializes’ in contact with the disturbed feelings present in both partners. … This decision”—as Howards End clearly illustrates through Henry and Margaret's initially dysfunctional marriage—“may have grave consequences for the couple” (149).

9. In poorly functioning systems such as Margaret and Henry's marriage, however, family members develop pseudo-selves—often fostered by fear and anxiety within the system—and thus, such individuals frequently remain unable to maintain any real congruence between their inner feelings and their outward behavior (Barnard and Corrales 85-87). The cathartic qualities of Margaret's dramatic emotional tirade clearly portend that she will subsequently advance into a new, functional era of selfhood.

10. Like Charles, contemporary reviewers of Howards End “assumed,” according to Lago, “that Leonard is the seducer, for a respectable middle-class girl like Helen could not be actively attracted even briefly to the ‘squalid’ Leonard” (45). Helen's empathy for and seduction of the clerk, however, allow Forster to establish his narrative of accommodation between the classes. In Forster's ethical schema, Helen truly appreciates Leonard's social and intellectual qualities: “Such a muddle of a man,” Helen remarks to her sister about Leonard, “and yet so worth pulling through. I like him extraordinarily” (155).

11. Notably, while Barbara Rosecrance problematizes Margaret's “almost absolute moral authority” in the novel, she astutely notes that Margaret's “ability to connect seems the moral prerequisite for her guardianship of Howards End” (112, 122).

12. Ironically, Henry's social transformation follows closely on the heels of Leonard's sad recognition of his lower-class fate. Before traveling to Howards End and his untimely death at the hands of Charles, Leonard discusses the social dichotomy between rich and poor in a manner strikingly evocative of Henry's previous social philosophy: “There always will be rich and poor,” he tells Margaret; “if rich people fail at one profession, they can try another. … I mean if a [poor] man over twenty one loses his own particular job, it's all over with him. I have seen it happen to others,” he explains. “Their friends gave them money for a little, but in the end they fall over the edge. It's no good. It's the whole world pulling” (237-38).

Works Cited

Barnard, Charles P., and Ramon Garrido Corrales. The Theory and Technique of Family Therapy. Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1979.

Bruner, Jerome. “Life as Narrative.” Social Research 54.1 (1987): 11-32.

Burt, Mala S., and Roger B. Burt. Stepfamilies: The Step by Step Model of Brief Therapy. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1996.

Delany, Paul. “‘Islands of Money’: Rentier Culture in Howards End.” E. M. Forster: New Casebooks. Ed. Jeremy Tambling. London: Macmillan, 1993. 67-80.

Forster, E. M. Howards End. 1910. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. 2 vols. London: Secker and Warburg, 1977-78.

Gransden, K. W. E. M. Forster. New York: Grove, 1962.

Imber-Black, Evan. Families and Larger Systems: A Family Therapist's Guide through the Labyrinth. New York: Guilford, 1988.

Kaufman, Barbara A. “Training Tales in Family Therapy: Exploring The Alexandria Quartet.” Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 21.1 (1995): 67-75.

Kegan, Robert. The Evolving Self: Problems and Process in Human Development. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Knapp, John V. Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1996.

Lago, Mary. E. M. Forster: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

Lodge, David. Nice Work. 1988. New York: Penguin, 1989.

McGoldrick, Monica. “Sisters.” Women in Families: A Framework for Family Therapy. Ed. Monica McGoldrick, Carol M. Anderson, and Froma Walsh. New York: Norton, 1989. 244-66.

Minuchin, Salvador, and Michael P. Nichols. Family Healing: Strategies for Hope and Understanding. New York: Touchstone, 1993.

Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. 1902. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1988.

Napier, Augustus Y., and Carl Whitaker. The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

Nichols, William C., and Craig A. Everett. Systemic Family Therapy: An Integrative Approach. New York: Guilford, 1986.

Paré, David A. “Culture and Meaning: Expanding the Metaphorical Repertoire of Family Therapy.” Family Process 35.1 (1996): 21-42.

Polkinghorne, Donald E. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.

Randall, William Lowell. The Stories We Are: An Essay in Self-Creation. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995.

Roberts, Janine. Tales and Transformations: Stories in Families and Family Therapy. New York: Norton, 1994.

Rosecrance, Barbara. Forster's Narrative Vision. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982.

Schwartz, Richard C. Internal Family Systems Therapy. New York: Guilford, 1995.

Summers, Claude J. E. M. Forster. New York: Ungar, 1983.

Wade, Wyn Craig. The Titanic: End of a Dream. New York: Rawson, 1979.

White, Michael, and David Epston. Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. New York: Norton, 1990.