After the end of his relationship with Clive, Maurice experiences the emergence of sexual desires that he had to suppress in the previous relationship. These lustful feelings are important insofar as they pave the way for the process of Maurice’s growth that the narrator calls “the flesh educating the spirit (128)”, a step in the development of the relationship between Alec and Maurice. It is in the relationship between Maurice and Alec that Forster formulates his ideas of
“masculine love” as expressive of a possible queer rejection of the social order.
I have already analysed in 2.4 the issue of class in same-sex relationships as understood by Symonds and Carpenter, and also through the influence of Whitman.50 In a rigid class system like the British one in the Edwardian period, homosexual men seemed to articulate their sexuality around an infraction of this system. According to Sedgwick, in the English (homo)sexual system “bourgeois men had sexual contacts only with virile working-class youths”,51 in a sort of paradigm. Forster’s debt to Symonds and Carpenter, both in his life and his writing, is especially evident in Maurice.
In an entry in his diary dated 10th of January 1912, Forster acknowledges his admiration for Symonds:
J.A. Symonds. Feel nearer to him than any man I have read about – too near to be irritated by his flamboyance, which I scarcely share.
But education (Classics, Renaissance, Eng. Lit.) – health (tendency to phthisis) – literary interest in philosophic questions, love of travel, inclination to be pleasant, and, above all, minorism; true, he married, but he had better not have. […] He was a brave and intelligible man, and I am proud to be in some ways so like him, and mean to think of him in difficulties, though having a weaker brain and a stronger sense of humour, I may get through life more easily. […] ‘Rough handsome young men’. It's odd. He has met Walt Whitman by now, if the dead
50 See 2.4.
51 Sedgwick, Between Men¸ 204.
are meetable […] I too shall meet them, and though Whitman will have most to say to me, I shall have most to say to Symonds.52
Forster draws a parallel between Symonds and himself based on their belonging to “minorism”, which is a term he uses to refer to homosexuality throughout his private writing. His comment on Symonds’s marriage also casts a new light on Clive’s marriage and therefore we can read his conversion to heterosexuality in the novel as a clear attempt to conform to social predicaments. The reference to ‘”rough handsome young men” could be linked to Forster’s own words in his diary written in 1935 where he adds to the roughness a social class. He writes: “I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket”.53 These words allow us to connect Symonds’s and Forster’s sexual preferences, and at the same time, help to explain the importance of the demolishing of social class barriers in Forster’s depiction of the love affair between Maurice and Alec.
The other strong idea at the basis of Forster’s investigation of sexuality is the notion of comradeship theorized by both Symonds and Carpenter, again through a specific reading of Whitman. I have already mentioned how Symonds praised Whitman for his depiction of masculinity in love between comrades.54 Symonds also tried to put into practice this kind of relationship and he claims to want to live respecting Whitman’s “ideal of comradeship”.55 It was through Whitman that he learnt to “appreciate the working classes”.56 Symonds also lived also this ideal in his comradeship with a Venetian gondolier, Angelo Fusato.57
52 E. M. Forster, “Locked Journal”, diary manuscript, Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge.
Now published in E.M.Forster, The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster,Vol. 2 The ‘Locked diary’ (1909-67), Ed. Philip Gardner, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.
53 E. M. Forster, “Section Memoir. Sex”, AMs memoir in the “Locked Journal” diary manuscript, Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge. It is a section where Forster comments on his first sexual impulses. It is divided into four sections and the quotation above is from the final section entitled “My Writing”. The comment was written in 1935 in response to the possibility of a scientific analysis of his books proposed by the sexologist Norman Haire.
54 Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 115. See 2.4.
55 Symonds, Memoirs, 191.
56 Symonds, Memoirs, 191.
57 See Bristow, Effeminate, 141.
The search for a friend, as presented by Forster in Maurice’s early dreams, eventually finds its evolution in the notion of comradeship whose debt to Carpenter is acknowledged by Forster in the “Terminal Note”:
Maurice dates from 1913. It was the direct result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Millthorpe. Carpenter had a prestige which cannot be understood today. He was a rebel appropriate to his age. […] He was a socialist who ignored industrialism and a simple-lifer with an independent income and a Whitmannic poet whose nobility exceeded his strength and, finally, he was a believer in the Love of Comrades, whom he sometimes called Uranians. It was this last aspect of him that attracted me in my loneliness. For a short time he seemed to hold the key to every trouble.58
From Carpenter and Symonds Forster takes the idea of the presence in same-sex relationships of a disruptive force for the social class system. In his Whitman-like poetry collection entitled Toward Democracy,59 and published in 1883, Carpenter advocates the importance of a society freed from any constraints and based on the concept of democracy, by which he means a sort of radical way of life where class and social barriers do not exist. This model of democracy is what Carpenter establishes at Millthorpe with his partner George Merill.60 Forster writes that Carpenter “discarded his own [class] and gained happiness by doing so”61 which explains his own vision in Maurice. Homosexual subjectivity configures itself, in this view, as a challenge to the social order and presents what Edelman has called “the negativity opposed to every form of social viability”.62 It is in opposition with the system of sex/gender/sexuality.
In the structures of the novel, Alec is the final fulfilment of Maurice’s early dreams: the figure he saw becomes a real person. The first time Maurice sees Alec is at Penge, during a visit to Clive and his wife. Maurice sees Alec “dallying with two of the maids, and felt a pang of envy” (142). They are giggling and Maurice imagines them kissing: “all over the world girls would meet men, to kiss them and be kissed; might it not be better to alter his temperament and toe the
58 Forster, “Notes on Maurice”, 215
59 Carpenter, Towards Democracy.
60 In a similar way, Symonds lived a long affair with a Venetian gondolier called Angelo Fusato.
See Symonds, Memoirs, 271-283.
61 Forster, “Edward Carpenter” in Two Cheers For Democracy. Abinger Edition, ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Edward Arnold, 1972, 206.
62 Edelman, No Future, 9.
line?”(142). Forster positions this encounter with Alec while Maurice is going through an attempt to convert to heterosexuality. Left alone after the end of his relationship with Clive, Maurice tries to overcome his sadness by following Clive’s example and conforming to mainstream society. His rational attempts are troubled by lustful encounters and by a growing sense of impotence towards his feelings. Once again Forster tries to highlight the gap between feelings and social requirements thus paving the way to a full understanding of his choice to place the affair between Maurice and Alec outside society.
It is on the same night at Penge that Maurice feels restless after Clive’s visit to his room:
[Maurice] drew the curtains and fell on his knees, leaning his chin upon the window sill and allowing the drops to sprinkle his hair.
“Come!” he cried suddenly, surprising himself. Whom had he called?
He had been thinking of nothing and the word had leapt out. (151-152)
This episode echoes Maurice’s calling in his earlier dreams of the garden boy, George, when the same uncontrollable and unconscious urge forced Maurice to call for someone. Maurice’s last attempt to convert to heterosexuality is to try hypnosis with Mr Lasker Jones:
He [Maurice] wanted a woman to secure him socially and diminish his lust and bear children. […] during the long struggle he had forgotten what Love is, and sought not happiness at the hands of Mr.
Lasker Jones, but repose. (155).
Once again the narrator intervenes to explain Maurice’s choices and to underline that, having being unable to find happiness or a guide, Maurice searches for security and the comfort that Clive seems to have found in the easiness of a heterosexual relationship. Clive is, at this point, the only model Maurice feels he can look to in order to find guidance.
The following day Maurice goes to London to see the hypnotizer just to leave that meeting even more troubled by the impossibility of a conversion. He decides then to return to Penge and during a walk through the park at night Maurice meets Alec and he stops to have a conversation with him. Maurice
asks questions about Alec’s imminent departure from Penge, of which he had heard about from Mr Borenius, the rector of Penge.
On his return to his room Maurice feels again restless for all the events of the day, last but not least, the conversation with Alec:
He moaned half asleep. There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get it – love – nobility – big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend…
He really was asleep when he sprang up and flung wide the curtains with a cry of “Come!” The action awoke him; what had he done that for? (165)
The vision Maurice has here, the dream of a queer space which is not defined by the logic of the heteronormative society, is what he will construct by fracturing the social order with Alec when, returning to bed, he materializes as if answering Maurice’s call:
The head and the shoulders of a man rose up, paused, a gun was leant against the window sill very carefully, and someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, “Sir, was you calling out for me?... Sir, I know…I know,” and touched him.
(166)
Maurice is again surprised by his own action, and the series of calls he had uttered in his earlier dreams, which remained unanswered, finally find a resolution with the arrival of Alec. All previous episodes concluded with
“nothing” or “nobody” whereas at the end of the novel, for the first time, a real person answers the call and engages Maurice in his first sexual relationship.
This final episode of Maurice’s restlessness results this time in the rejection of all constraints and in the sexual act between Maurice and Alec. If the relationship with Clive is built upon intimacy that does not involve any physical dimension, the relationship with Alec starts with sexual activity. Maurice and Clive do not sleep together, while Alec and Maurice “woke deep in each other’s arms” (170). Physical love at first causes Maurice some perplexity only because he relates it to his previous relationship with Clive: “Whither was he tending, from Clive into what companionship?” (170). It is only when Maurice completely rejects Clive’s model of same-sex Platonic passion, together with its social
patterns, that he can fully understand the new dimension of this relationship and he can read same-sex desire through a new lens.
When Maurice and Alec play cricket together later in the day Maurice starts thinking about the possibility of their union:
His mind had cleared, and he felt that they were against the whole world, that not only Mr. Borenius and the field but the audience in the shed and all England were closing round the wickets. […] They intended no harm to the world, but so long as it attacked they must punish, they must stand wary, then hit with full strength, they must show that when two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph. (174-175).
The choice of this language of war is worth commenting upon as it gives the idea of a battle between a minority under siege, whose reaction could be violent if needed, and an enemy world. The dichotomy between the private sphere and the public domain is soon amplified by Clive’s intervention, which represents conventional social order. The idea of two male-outlaws and the possibility of such a union are suggested in Maurice’s thoughts, although in this particular moment it remains within society’s boundaries.
It is Alec who takes the initiative to contact Maurice after he leaves Penge through a telegram he invites him to meet at the boathouse. At first Maurice is afraid he is facing a possible blackmail situation: “A nice situation! It contained every promise of blackmail, at the best it was incredible insolence […]
he had gone outside his class, and it served him right” (179). The blackmail issue is a reference to the situation created by the scandals of the end of nineteenth century and reiterated by the Wilde trials, which I have already mentioned.63 Maurice is still forming his homosexual subjectivity, negotiating between his desire and his belonging to social conformity and he is uncertain of what to choose. His reaction recalls the one he had after Clive’s declaration of love: he is unable to develop a personal understanding. Maurice’s mediocre mind finds itself a spokesman of society thus adhering to a position, which is not really his. The socially conservative structure of Edwardian society of Maurice’s time sees as an abomination every possible challenge to such a system, as I
63 See my analysis on the issue of blackmail I have already mentioned in 2.4.3. See also Nadel,
“Moments in the Greenwood” in Hertz- Martin eds., E.M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations.
have explained. In his first reaction Maurice’s thoughts are filtered by this conventionality, which is due to an ignorance of different models and his incapability of processing valid alternatives.
Despite the fear of blackmail, Maurice is driven by a force he cannot control through his mind and reason, a force similar to the one which compelled him to call out of the window:
But all that night his body yearned for Alec’s, despite him. He called it lustful, a word easily uttered, and opposed to his work, his family, his friends, his position in society. In that coalition must surely be included his will. For if the will can overleap class, civilisation, as we have made it will go to pieces. But his body would not be convinced.
Chance had mated it too perfectly (179).
The pressure of social constraints is overcome by the strength of his body as something he cannot change, thus reinforcing again the idea of homosexuality as an innate state and underlining the importance of physical expression in same-sex relationship. There is a juxtaposition between the body on the one hand and society on the other, the latter also including the will. The possible impact of the classes overlapping is, in Maurice’s view at this time, a collapse of civilization.
Since he receives no reply from Maurice, Alec decides to write a second letter where he confesses his longing to sleep with him again:
Mr. Maurice. Dear Sir. I waited both nights in the boathouse. […] So please come to “the boathouse” tomorrow night or next. […] Dear Sir, let me share with you once before leaving Old England if it is not asking to much. I have key, will let you in. I leave per S.s. Normannia Aug 29. I since cricket match do long to talk with one of my arms round you, then place both arms round you and share with you, the above now seems sweeter to me than words can say. I am perfectly aware I am only a servant that never presume on your loving kindness to take liberties or in any other way.
Yours respectfully, A. Scudder. (179-180).
The stress of Alec’s words is on the physical, on the sexual drive because, contrary to Clive who distrusts the body through his Platonism, he believes that the body is where truth lies. If Clive has an intellectual approach towards same-sex desire and Maurice’s mediocrity makes it hard for him to find
a model to understand his feelings, Alec is free from any social and cultural constraints. Being lower class he has not been exposed to cultural models neither directly – like Clive – nor indirectly – like Maurice through Clive. His approach to life is direct and so is his approach to desire. In the novel we are given no account of his childhood and we are not given details of when he is first aware of same-sex desire, as in the case of Maurice and Clive.
After his sexual affair with Alec, Maurice is more confused and worried about his situation, and even more determined to find a remedy to his sexuality through hypnosis. He decides to consult again Mr Lasker who suggests that he goes abroad where homosexuality is not punished by law:
“I’m afraid I can only advise you to live in some country that has adopted the Code Napoleon,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“France or Italy, for instance. There homosexuality is no longer criminal.”
“You mean that a Frenchman could share with a friend and yet not go to prison?”
“Share? Do you mean unite? If both are of age and avoid public indecency, certainly.”
“Will the law ever be that in England?”
“I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” (183)
Forster dramatizes the debates on the legal situation in this dialogue and focuses on the difference between England and the European countries. It is an important criticism of the injustices of the English legal system that Forster – influenced by both Symonds and Carpenter as I mentioned above – makes against English society and also another statement on the natural condition of homosexuals. Moreover, the use of the term “share” echoes Alec’s words thus signifying the beginning of a process of identification Maurice starts with Alec.
The stress on the legal situation is reiterated by Forster’s use of language to describe the effects of the physical act on Maurice:
By pleasuring the body Maurice had confirmed – that very word was used in the final verdict – he had confirmed his spirit in its perversion, and cut himself off from the congregation of normal man (185, my emphasis).
Echoing legal language, Maurice’s condition is called a final verdict on a pre-existing nature, a force which cannot be controlled and that leads him to an outlawed condition. The juxtaposition between homosexuality and mainstream society is dramatized in a procession of the Royal family Maurice bumps into on his way home from the hypnotiser:
Echoing legal language, Maurice’s condition is called a final verdict on a pre-existing nature, a force which cannot be controlled and that leads him to an outlawed condition. The juxtaposition between homosexuality and mainstream society is dramatized in a procession of the Royal family Maurice bumps into on his way home from the hypnotiser: