592
PARTISAN REVIEW
determined our literary response and evaluation . Emily Bronte, who,
in
Wuthering Heights,
created a unique and powerful rendering of
transcendent passion, was single and celibate; Jane Austen is the great
and sure-voiced interpreter of a state she never entered. The ultimate
reduction of this position is the argument (pressed publicly by a recent
feminist writer who does no service to feminism) that men cannot write
about women because they have not had the experience of being
women (and, one would assume, vice versa).
The important problem is that of the artistic consequences of
Forster's need, in the five novels, to disguise his personal vantage
point, the implications of an attitude rendered yet more complex and
problematic by its appearance in the context of a novelistic cosmos of
apparently received values.
It
is the tension-poignant as the posthu–
mous revelations indicate it to be-between aspiration and reality in
Forster's own system of values that is really of interest. Here Cynthia
Ozick is perceptive when she notes that Forster is committed to the
"mainstream." Fruition and celibacy are at odds in his novels, and only
in the fantasy world of
Maurice
(and there most unconvincingly) does
consummation occur without procreation. Forster, whatever the facts
of his private experience, is committed
to
"life." Furthermore, what
Forster means by life is inextricable from the themes of inheritance and
continuance that pervade the five major novels.
In
the fictional
development of these themes, morality and biology combine in those
encounters that embody Forster's idea of humanism. Mainstream in
Forster's fiction is the operative metaphor, as for example in
The
Longest Journey,
where the hapless Rickie Elliott contemplates his
own separation from life: " ... he (Stephen) would have children; he,
not Rickie, would contribute
to
the stream; he, through his remote
posterity, might be mingled with the unknown sea."
In
its stress on
continuity and value, from mother to son, for Forster, procreation is
not only essential to the process, it frequently becomes epiphany: "On
the banks of the grey torrent of life, love is the only flower. A little way
up the stream and a little way down had Rickie glanced, and he knew
that she whom he loved had risen from the dead, and might rise again."
A preoccupation with extinction and survival, annihilation and
immortality suffuses the novels; the idea of death and resurrection is a
central Forsterian motif. Thus the importance of the baby in Forster's
novels: reward and talisman, new life suggests hope among the
prevailing contrarieties of Forster's fictional world. Gino 's infant son
in
Where Angels Fear to Tread
is such an emblem, and the strangely
foreboding sterility of that novel has its inception in the death of this
