BARBARA ROSECRANCE
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baby. In
The Longest Journey,
Stephen's child, fulfilling Rickie's
prophecy, reincarnates their mother as inheritor of England's rural
values. In
A Room With a View,
victory goes to those capable of
passing on the inheritance, the self-aware woman and passionately
heterosexual man.
Howards End
closes with child and meadow,
England's now vanishing heritage, and in
A Passage to India,
Fielding
and Stella Moore await an offstage heir to mitigate the sterility of the
attempts at personal relations that have consumed the novel's energy.
This ending recreates the pattern of death and resurrection and the
preoccupation with continuance, but it also contains an important
ambiguity, a significant tension that is present in all the novels and can
now explicitly be seen in relation to Forster's conflict between his
private sexuality and his commitment to the values of the mainstream.
From the beginning, Forster preached "connection," and Alan
Wilde's recen t description of this" familiar ideal" as a "not altogether
solid basis for his belief in personal relations" suggests the contradic–
tions that Forster, like Gide and Lawrence, transformed into humanist
values. The "familiar ideal" seems to present itself in the novels as a
war between convention and instinct, repression and passion, as the
attempt to find wholeness, a fullness of experience, in the context of
close personal unions. In the novels which precede
Howards End,
the
protagonists must repudiate convention and overcome repression to
achieve this wholeness.
In
Howards End
Forster goes further, to preach
the inclusion of opposing qualities, summed up in the formula, "only
connect." In both the earlier novels and in
A Passage to India ,
Forster's
protagonists reach for a greater consciousness of the va lues they need to
become whole-for what Forster asserts is a commitment to "life," to
its relationships and responsibilities. This is the meaning of connec–
tion, and, as I have noted, instinctual forces find their outlet in the
creation or promise of new life. Wittier than Lawrence and less
polemical, Forster seems close to Lawrence in his pleas for instinct and
passion as the basis of wholeness in an increasingly impersonal
industrial society. Forster and Lawrence did share the large theme of
self-realization, as well as personal sympathy, but Forster's greater
elusiveness, noted early by his contemporary John Maynard Keynes,
becomes nowhere more apparent than when we confront the essential
ambiguity in the "fami liar ideal."
Only in
A Room With a View,
the most lighthearted of all the
major novels, does this ideal approach fulfillment. Here the connec–
tion is successful as Lucy Honeychurch rejects convention and aestheti–
cism and becomes whole, by confronting "the holiness of direct
