Abstract
Readers have persistently criticized the conclusion of Howards End since the novel’s appearance in autumn 1910; early reviewers, while almost unanimous in praising the novel as a whole, anticipated with considerable accuracy the judgement on the ending that most later critics have rendered.1 In his influential critical study of Forster, Lionel Trilling voices the general feeling that ‘the nearly allegorical reconciliation is rather forced’, and expresses displeasure with the final ‘rather contrived scene of busyness and contentment in the hayfield’.2 Forster himself eventually joined this general consensus; he wrote in 1959 that the conclusion of Howards End is ‘certainly unsatisfactory, but perhaps [was] less so at the time’.3 The qualification is significant, however, because it suggests that an ending which no longer holds up in 1959 may have been worth attempting in 1910. I do not wish to overturn completely the traditional assessment of Forster’s flawed achievement in the conclusion to Howards End. But I would like to explore what he was attempting to achieve, try to see why it went wrong, and suggest how the ending anticipates later modernist endings that were more successful. Because these issues involve questions about Forster’s formal and aesthetic intentions, I would like to begin by exploring his general views on fiction and art.
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Notes
See the array of early reviews reprinted in Philip Gardner, ed., E. M. Forster: the Critical Heritage (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) pp. 127–57.
Trilling, E. M. Forster (London: Hogarth, 1944) pp. 44, 116.
For similar assessments, see James McConkey, The Novels of E. M. Forster (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957) p. 8
Frederick Crews, E. M. Forster: the Perils of Humanism (Princeton University Press, 1962) p. 112
Alan Wilde, Art and Order: a Study of E. M. Forster (New York University Press, 1964) p. 117
Robert Langbaum, ‘A New Look at E. M. Forster’, Southern Review (Winter 1968) p. 43
Wilfred Stone, ‘Forster on Love and Money’ in Oliver Stallybrass, ed., Aspects of E. M. Forster (New York: Harcourt, 1969) p. 117
Peter Widdowson, E. M. Forster’s Howards End (London: Sussex University Press, 1977) pp. 98, 101
Barbara Rosecrance, Forster’s Narrative Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) p. 147.
For an unusual defence of the ending as a triumph of androgyny, see Bonnie Finkelstein, Forster’s Women: Eternal Differences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975) p. 92. But her defence remains unconvincing; Forster clearly values traditionally feminine qualities more highly than masculine ones, and wishes Margaret Schlegel to dominate the end of the novel. The traditional reading is not necessarily ‘antifeminist’, as Finkelstein argues; it merely holds that the feminine victory seems too easy, that the novel fails to establish its plausibility.
Letter to Jonathan Spence, quoted from Spence, ‘E. M. Forster at Eighty’, The New Republic (9 May, 1959) p. 21, by J. B. Beer, The Achievement of E. M. Forster (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962) p. 177.
John Colmer, E. M. Forster: the Personal Voice (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) pp. 85–6; Rosecrance, p. 121; and note the subtitle of Widdowson’s book-length study of the novel: Fiction as History.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) pp. 26–8.
Bradley, ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’ in Oxford Lectures on Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1909) pp. 4–5.
‘Dover Beach’ in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961) pp. 161–2.
For a useful discussion of the author’s subjective consciousness in modern fiction, see Daniel R. Schwarz, ‘“I Was the World in Which I Walked”: The Transformation of the British Novel’, University of Toronto Quarterly (Spring 1982) pp. 279–97.
Forster surely must have read Wordsworth at Cambridge if not earlier, though specific external evidence is scanty. In July 1907 he visited Grasmere and seemed to regard Wordsworth with respect; see Selected Letters of E. M. Forster I, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1983).
See Two Cheers for Democracy, p. 178, and his Commonplace Book, ed. Philip Gardner (Stanford University Press, 1985) pp. 119, 188, 243
he gave a radio talk on Wordsworth in 1944 (B. J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of E. M. Forster [Oxford: Clarendon, 1985] p. 241).
A few readers have attempted to make the narrative voice more centrally important than Forster’s primary focus on the characters seems to warrant; see Francis Gillen, ‘Howards End and the Neglected Narrator’, Novel, 3 (1970)
Kinley E. Roby, ‘Irony and the Narrative Voice in Howards End’, The Journal of Narrative Technique (May 1972).
Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 23.
David Lodge notes the relation of these three terms in The Modes of Modern Writing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977) p. 46. The sources for the terms are Aspects of the Novel, ch. 8
Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1930; rev. edn 1952; rpt. 1955), Part I, ch. 2
Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’, Sewanee Review (1945).
The Prelude, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979) 1850, XIV. 199–201.
The circuitous journey in Wordsworth and other Romantics is discussed extensively by M. H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971).
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© 1988 William R. Thickstun
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Thickstun, W.R. (1988). Ideas of Order in Howards End. In: Visionary Closure in the Modern Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19163-5_2
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