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STEPHEN SPENDER
psychological context, would have necessitated Forster's having to pro–
vide Maurice's wife with the luxury of a personality, something which,
in the mood in which he wrote
Maurice,
he was too self-indulgent
to
do. But his not taking this step makes this a one-dimensional novel. In
the terms in which Forster presents his "case history" to us, we willingly
give up Clive, because he has been absorbed into "respectability." We
continue to side with Maurice because his homosexuality makes him a
pariah.
Maurice also suffers desperately in
his
loneliness, and at the hands
of a doctor (who disgustedly sends him away) and of a hypnotist, who
fails to "cure" him. The only cure is to accept himself, and to find a
lover. He does both, the lover being Alec, a gamekeeper (anticipating
Lady Chatterley's rescuer) on Clive's estate. The account of the mutual
mistrust between the gamekeeper and Maurice (after their first magical
meeting) is pithy, and, on the whole, admirable, especially in the scene
when their mutual fears lead to Alec's attempting to blackmail Maurice.
This relationship has more in common with that of Lady Chat–
terley and Mellors than the mere coincidence of the two gamekeepers.
Both affairs exist largely within the context of the love/hate relationship
of the English upper class with the workers. It is in fact a reIationship
in which difference of class almost replaces difference of sex, and thus
it seems far more suited to a homosexual than to a heterosexual rela–
tionship, in which difference of sex
is
already provided.
As
some
critics have pointed out, there are strong homosexual overtones in
Lady
Chatterley's Louer.
It would be far easier to substitute Maurice for
Lady Chatterley in Lawrence's novel, than to insinuate Lady Chatterley
into Forster's. In fact Mellors would get on fine with Maurice.
In the admirable "Terminal Note" which Forster, shortly before his
death, added (while preparing
Maurice
for publication), he mentions
that Lytton Strachey wrote to him "that the relationship (between
Maurice and Alec) rested upon curiosity and would only last six weeks."
Several critics have murmured "How true!" But it is not necessarily
true, for there are two main and distinctly different kinds of homosexual
relationships, one of which is based on identity and the other on "other–
ness." Maurice passes from the attempt to establish a friendship based
on identity with Clive (though to Clive, he, Maurice, being essentially
a Greek "athlete" and not an "aesthete," is already "other") to a rela–
tionship of otherness in which Alec's difference of class (remember we
are in the England of 1912) is a mystery substituting for difference of
sex. The reader who is interested in the role that substitutions of
this
kind can play in the lives of homosexuals should look at the auto-
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