As I have indicated above, after this publication, critical interventions on Maurice have been sporadic, and I have decided to select four that I think give an idea of the evolution of the criticism.
The first two contributions I want to mention were published respectively in 1998 and 2007. Despite the long time lapse, I think they are motivated by a similar intention to position Forster in a canon – one in the gay canon, and the other, in the canon of classic literature. The third one is also in a way concerned with the re-evaluation of Maurice within Forster’s works. The last article I will mention concerns modalities of silence in Forster’s “minor” fiction.
In his History of Gay Literature96 Gregory Woods presents the model of same-sex desire Forster articulates in Maurice. In his view, Forster provides the model for the invisible, ordinary, masculine homosexual of the twentieth century,
93 Raschke, “Breaking the Engagement”, 160.
94 Raschke, “Breaking the Engagement”, 160.
95 Raschke, “Breaking the Engagement”, 157.
96 Gregory Woods, “The Tragic Sense of Life” in Woods, A History of Gay Literature, 217-218.
a man from suburbia “who happens also to be an ‘outlaw’ because he is homosexual”.97 Maurice’s dreariness is linked to the major flaw of the book: “the laughable implausibility of its ‘happy ending’”.98 Nevertheless, Woods does not dismiss the whole novel as boring; its very flaws make it interesting; Maurice, in a sense, “has to be dull. The very ‘ordinariness’ of the invisible, masculine, homosexual man can kill a novel whose central theme is the potential respectability of homosexual love.” 99 Maurice is the “model of the undistinguished middle-class man of the twentieth-century suburbs”100 and for this reason, according to Woods, the essence of modernity.
The Cambridge Companion to Forster, published in 2007,101 follows a similar desire to appreciate the canonical figure of Forster, but aims to position him in the classical literary canon rather than in the gay one, without, it needs to be said, dismissing his sexuality. In the chapter on Maurice, Howard J. Booth emphasizes the literary elements of the novel by exploring the genres, namely the Bildungsroman and the “marriage plot”, and the schoolboy novel, of which he believes Maurice is a development.102 Maurice is different from these genres, however, because there is no trace of the tragic condition so typical of the former genre and because its aim is “to address individual maturation with the outcome of comedy, while remaining attentive to the wide range of homosexual experience”.103 In trying to define Maurice, Booth considers the novel precursor of modernist texts in its addressing self-formation in a way that anticipates the era of identity politics.
According to Booth the novel depicts Maurice and his different possible ways of living, including a socially imposed “normality”, the relationship with Clive that proves to be wrong and then the final relationship with Alec. The text narrates how Maurice learns to cope with his homosexual condition, and for this reason Booth sees the structure as a set of developing associations. Booth applies the Freudian concept of “identification”, the process through which
97 Woods, “The Tragic Sense of Life”, 218.
98 Woods, “The Tragic Sense of Life”, 218.
99 Woods, “The Tragic Sense of Life” 219.
100 Woods, “The Tragic Sense of Life”, 219.
101 David Bradshaw ed. The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
102 Howard J. Booth, “Maurice”, Bradshaw ed. The Cambridge Companion, 173-187.
103 Booth, “Maurice”, 174.
individuals form their character by identifying with strong role models, to the reading of homosexuality in the novel. Heterosexual male individuals identify with the father whose authority, reinforced by secondary identifications – social forces such as education and law – help to build their personality. The absence of these models in a homosexual individual results in the delay of such a process until suitable models are available. The homosexual characters in the novel, in this light, go through their lives in an unconscious search through different attempts for the “right” identification.
Booth also argues that the novel does not interpret homosexuality through the sexological models existing at the time. In staking this claim, Booth fails to acknowledge the influence of sexology on Forster who, as Martin and others have demonstrated, and I will argue later, was well informed about sexology thanks to the works he read through Symonds and Carpenter. In conclusion, Booth claims that the novel explores the view that homosexuality, rather than being rare, very often did not show its presence because of the pressure of normative society.
In 2001, Matthew Curr published an article that”104aims to re-establish the position of the novel by investigating its critical reception. He starts by exploring how the tendency of the New Criticism to read each novel by the same author in terms of a unity of production caused, in Maurice’s case, a comparison with Forster’s acclaimed works, thus leading to label this as the weakest in the author’s canon. He is attacked both for failing to reinscribe his novelist’s skills and for failing to come out as a homosexual. In order to recuperate Maurice, Curr suggests that we re-read the final scene of the greenwood in connection to “Terminal Note” written by Forster – and therefore the autobiographical presence – so that we can rethink the whole ending as “an explosive social revision”.105 The departure from England that is a leitmotif of Forster’s early novels comes to an end in Maurice for there is “no more need of departures, to other countries, no more expatriations of rebel souls or escapes from barbarous British rule”.106
104 Matthew Curr, “Recuperating E.M. Forster's Maurice”, Modern Language Quarterly, 62:1 (2001): 53-69.
105 Curr, “Recuperating”, 60.
106 Curr, “Recuperating”, 60.
Curr claims that the relationship between Clive and Maurice is presented by Forster as natural and therefore set in Nature, whereas Clive and Anne are set outside a natural setting to prove that Clive’s conversion is unnatural. In order to corroborate such a reading, Curr investigates the absence of nudity and desire in Clive’s marriage but he fails to pinpoint that Clive showed the same absence of sexual desire in his relationship with Maurice. Therefore it is not possible to say that this absence of physicality is specific to his heterosexual conversion; rather, it is related to the way his figure is constructed around Platonism.
What I find particularly interesting in Curr’s article is the insistence on the autobiographical presence in the novel, and the correlation between private passion and public art, which is an essential aspect in the understanding of queer posthumous writing, as I will explain the chapter eight.
3.7 Coda
The last publication I want to discuss is Vybarr Cregan-Reid’s analysis of the modalities in which Forster uses silence in his fiction.107 According to his study published in 2013, while in other “minor” fiction Forster had deployed the mechanism of silence to disguise homoerotic desire, in Maurice the silence becomes “capable of questioning the moral and social order as it exists in the teens of the twentieth century”.108 Cregan-Reid is interested in investigating how Forster deals with the definition of the homosexual body, especially in a heteronormative and heterocentric environment where “there were few existing taxonomies to draw upon and with no socially permitted way of doing so”.109 Forster experimented with different genres and modes until in Maurice he found a convincing model of being queer. Cregan-Reid’s reading of the epilogue, informed by queer theory, offers an innovative perspective. The silence that surrounds the afterlife of Maurice and Clive is what Cregan-Reid calls a
“rejection of ancestry and a repressive social order”.110 He claims that what the greenwood represents is not the opposite of socially-conventional norms which
107 Vybarr Cregan-Reid, “Modes of Silence in E.M. Forster's ‘Inferior; Fiction”, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 56: 4 (2013): 445-461.
108 Cregan-Reid, “Modes of Silence”, 455.
109 Cregan-Reid, “Modes of Silence”, 453.
110 Cregan-Reid, “Modes of Silence”, 455.
society forced into us, “but their complete absence”.111 He insists that “the silence in Maurice is “an altogether more proactive one”112 as Forster uses it politically to imply that, while the world Alec and Maurice reject is definable with words, there is no expression to explain the space to which the two characters have access. In Cregan-Reid’s words, “[Maurice and Alec] are liberated to explore outside their class and their geography in a way that marrying heterosexuals, like Clive, are not permitted to”. 113
By placing emphasis on the specificity of being queer, Cregan-Reid rejects the previous readings of the epilogue as fantasy or idyll and reveals how Forster’s representation of male desire can be analysed from a different angle. I find this reading very convincing especially for its investigation of the relation between Forster and his writing and I will use it when analysing queer posthumous writing in chapter eight.
3.8 Conclusion
I will now summarize which critical views I am indebted to and have informed my own reading of Maurice, as presented in the next chapter.
After a negative strand of reviews that focused on the literary value of Maurice, in 1979 Cavaliero started to investigate the power of homophobia in the novel, an issue that was extensively analysed in the 1980s by the gay studies approach, especially by Martin and Summers. Martin was also the first to recognise the literary value of the novel and at the same time to focus on the way same-sex desire was represented and problematized in different characters in the novel. Moreover, he also analysed the influence of sexological debates in Forster’s perception of homosexuality and how these debates structured the novel itself. His reading of the influence of Symonds, Carpenter and Whitman in the novel is still an important contribution to the criticism.
Furthermore, I am indebted to some of the interventions of the 1990s, especially Dellamora who shifts the focus to the novel’s reception. In his review on posthumous fiction, Dellamora also warns about the risk of giving a fixed interpretation of the novel that purports to be true, since in the case of Maurice,
111 Cregan-Reid, “Modes of Silence”, 455.
112 Cregan-Reid, “Modes of Silence”, 457.
113 Cregan-Reid, “Modes of Silence”, 457.
a particular status of self-censorship linked to the intervention on sexual politics requires a continuous renegotiation due to the shifting of such politics. The analysis of the social and cultural construction of masculinity, effeminacy and other issues linked to models of same-sex desire, present in the works of Sinfield and Bristow, will help me to develop my reading.
Additionally, I find particularly interesting the impact of queer theory on the criticism of Maurice especially for its challenging the idea of a “gay” stable author-Forster, thus suggesting a space for investigating the gaps, the aporias and the frictions between the author and the text. This approach is also interesting for exploring the force of desire and its power to undermine class and conventions in Maurice.
I share with Curr’s view an interest in analysing the specificity of the autobiographical presence in Maurice, especially due to the fact that Forster decided not to publish it during his lifetime. Finally, I will use Cregan-Reid’s analysis of the silence as a starting point to investigate the relation between private writing, posthumous writing and oeuvre.
Although the lack of publications recently might suggest that little remains to be said on the subject, I think there still are aspects to be analysed about the novel, especially as regards its correlation with Forster’s life, the sexological and cultural debates it is informed by, and the issue of writing a novel for posthumous publication. It is in this space I want to posit my reading of the novel.
CHAPTER 4
Homosexual characters and queer choices: E.M. Forster’s Maurice
4.1 Introduction
In my analysis of Forster’s Maurice I am mainly interested in how Forster works with the idea of homosexuality to create a fictional representation of homosexual characters. Edelman notes that as soon as homosexuality emerged as an identifiable category through cultural and social constructions for social and political-controlling aims, the representation of it emerged too.1 What we perceive as being the homosexual is the result, according to Edelman, of a
“compulsory marking of his legibility”,2 the urge to represent it and to make its body visible. In writing Maurice, I believe, Forster is working exactly on this mechanism of representation, trying to make sense of what different modes of homosexuality existed in his time. I will argue that, insofar as Forster presents the different possibilities of homosexualities and rejects heteronormative logic – especially in the elimination of the epilogue – he shows in Maurice a queer approach.
The understanding of homosexuality that Forster is depicting in Maurice is informed by the sexological discourses of the time, but also by other relevant cultural, scientific and social debates. Furthermore, Forster is combining different ideas to negotiate his own understanding which requires, also the elimination of the cultural and intellectual common views of his time he refuses.
At the same time, he is interested in exploring the social space of homosexuals in a heteronormative and homophobic context, such as in Edwardian Britain, when the novel is set. Throughout the novel, as I will show, the dynamics of social exclusion homosexual characters have to go through is fiercely criticized for its injustice and through Maurice’s words, Forster expresses his frustration for the condition of the legal system of England.
Homosexual characters in the novel are forced into a choice between expressing their desire and becoming queer subjects – which implies being
1 Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory, New York:
Routledge 1994, xiv.
2 Edelman, Homographesis, 12.
social misfits – or abandoning such a subjectivity in order to fit in society.
Elisabeth Grosz applies Deleuze’s concept of active/reactive forces to explain the possible threat posed by non-heterosexual practices and lifestyles to heteronormative society and defines queer subjectivity as an active subject position exactly for its renunciation of a comfortable space that closetedness might offer.3 Maurice and Alec will choose to occupy the space of active subjects, whereas Clive will retreat to the space of privilege offered by society by becoming a reactive subject and denying his desire.
The process that conducts the characters to this final stage is presented as a complex and articulated path of self-discovery, especially for Maurice who is presented as a mediocre character. The process of understanding his homosexuality is also slow because there are no models he can follow. Clive, instead, is the intellectual intelligent character who is aware of his interests for men since childhood and whose life is characterised by a constant search for explanation, and social acceptance of his condition through intellectual and cultural models such as Platonism and Hellenism.
During the love affair between Maurice and Clive, it is the latter who dominates the relationship and imposes his own Platonism, which implies a total exclusion of physical contact. It is only after the end of this affair due to Clive’s decision to stick to society and heterosexuality – explained by Forster as a response to social pressure – that Maurice gradually finds his own way to live his sexuality. Through a second encounter with Clive’s gamekeeper, Alec Scudder, he also learns to accept his sexual subjectivity and ultimately abandons English society for a comradeship in the greenwood with Alec. Being a member of the lower class, Alec is not troubled by the intellectual constraints of society and therefore, in Forster’s view, ready to live his sexuality and desires. The happy ending of the novel, which was imperative for Forster, sees Maurice and Alec at the threshold of a life together in the greenwood. The first edition of the novel comprised an Epilogue that Forster decided to eliminate in the following versions. 4
3 Elisabeth Grosz, “Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity”, in Hall, Queer Studies Reader, 194-211.
4 The Epilogue is now published in the appendix of the Abinger critical edition of Maurice under the editorship of Oliver Stallybrass and Elizabeth Heine, 221-224. For the evolution of the novel see Philip Gardner, “Introduction” in E.M. Forster, Maurice, Philip Gardner, ed. The Abinger
Being a queer subject means inhabiting the space between heterosexual requirements and subjectivity, a difficult task, for, as Bersani claims, “we have learned to desire from within the heterosexual norms and gendered structures that we can no longer think of as natural, or as exhausting all the options for self-identification”.5
In the first section of this chapter I will analyse how the characterization of Maurice as a mediocre boy and man allows Forster to create an alternative to the stereotype of the homosexual as an artistic and intelligent type. At the same time, Forster explores the dichotomy between social conformity and private subjectivity, finally asserting that there is no viable space for homosexuals in English society of the Edwardian era. In the second part, I will investigate the way Forster refuses the positive connection between homosexuality and Hellenism by presenting, in the characterization of Clive, the failure of the Platonic model. To reiterate this point, Forster also contrasts Hellenism and the statues at the British Museum with Alec and Maurice’s bodily presences, thus emphasizing the opposition between a dead cult and real life. Hellenism proves unable to provide any positive models to understand same-sex desire, to the extent that Clive, who has relied on it, feels left alone and he succumbs to social pressure and chooses heterosexuality.
In the third part, I will explore the issue of class as Maurice’s negotiation of his own desires finally find its climax in his decision to live outside society with Alec in the greenwood. It is a gradual achievement that occurs only after long and tormented processes.