Can a Marxist Like Margaret?

Abstract

Some of the criticism of Howards End turns on Forster’s own upper middle class position, dependent — like the Schlegels — on unearned income, and of writing — like most novelists — of the middle class. He explains of the Schlegel sisters, ‘in their own fashion they cared deeply about politics, though not as politicians would have us care; they desired that public life should mirror whatever is good in the life within’ (p. 41). This may be true of Forster, yet he seems more uneasy about injustice and inequality, to see the problem as more urgent, personal and immediate — yet also cautiously to shrink from radical solutions.

Howards End ‘is a story of the class war. The war is latent but actual — so actual indeed that a sword is literally drawn and a man is really killed.’ (Trilling, 1944, p. 102)

It is important to recognize that [Forster] shares with Marx the fundamental premise that ‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’. (Suzette A. Henke, 1986, pp. 117–18)

If bourgeois norms reduce all relationships to exchange values, then personal relationships must be devalued … It is a large component in Galsworthy’s description of the Forsytes in The Man of Property (1906), and of E. M. Forster’s description of the Wilcoxes, ‘the world of telegrams and anger’, Howards End’. (Joan Rockwell, 1974, p. 94)

Forster ‘is incapable of understanding the lower-middle classes He is frightened of them … It is Forster’s crippling defect that he is unable to imagine revolutionary alternatives … He is reactionary, counterrevolutionary in content and form.’ (Jonah Raskin, 1971, pp. 245, 250, 252)