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munion of the saints. The point about such a communion is that its
members know and love one another absolutely. The absolute is as it
were a leap beyond sexual fusion, because although a homosexual act
may seem an assertion of identity between two lovers, it is also an as–
sertion of difference, since people are not identical, only spirits are. On
the other hand, given the persecution of homosexuals by the English
society of 1912 which Forster describes, the communion between men
which excludes women (as Maurice's dream certainly does) may make
a relationship in which there is tenderness but no orgasm seem hypo–
critical, and therefore the homosexual act may seem necessary in order
that the lovers may assert their defiance of conventions. At any rate
Maurice, looking back on his affair with Clive, holds it against Clive
that he only half-offered himself and held back from the complete
sexual act.
With that abruptness with which deaths happen sometimes in For–
ster's novels, Clive, in the course of an illness, and as the result of the
attentions of the nurse, "involuntarily" discovers that he is "normal."
He marries, and becomes absorbed into the upper-class English milieu
which both he and Maurice have, as part of their love, rebelled against.
Here Forster is true to life. Where sexual abnormality is bound up with
rebellion against the norms of society, then a switch to normality may
also mean accepting those norms, even though the change of direction
in
love may be genuine and the social norms false. Forster depicts the
deterioration of Clive convincingly enough. At the same time one feels
that he has seized on an easy way of presenting the contrast between
the acquired heterosexuality of Clive and the unchanged dedicated homo–
sexuality of Maurice to the advantage of Maurice, since normality is
presented entirely in terms of the upper-class English country life of
shooting animals and of conservative politics. The really interesting ques–
tions of whether, in loving a woman, Clive "betrayed" Maurice, and
whether Clive might have become a better person as the result of
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change of sexual direction which was inevitable to him, are blurred,
because Clive is simply reabsorbed into the class represented by his
family and that of his uninteresting wife (who scarcely exists as a char–
acter). The issue of a conflict between two different kinds of love is
depicted as a choice between detested social respectability among de–
testable people living in detestable houses and pursuing detestable pol–
itics and blood sports, and refusing to accept these values, as Mau–
rice now does refuse, because as a homosexual he feels himself re–
jected by them. To deal with the matter as a conflict between two
different ideas of love, each perhaps to be respected within its own
