"Whose books once influenced mine": the relationship between E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1999 by Michael J. Hoffman, Ann Ter Haar

Yet their thematic concerns converge. Howards End was published during 1910, the year in whose final month human consciousness supposedly changed - as Woolf later suggested in "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." In its social content Howards End sums up a Europe on the brink of a world war that will forever change the fortunes of England. It places in conflict two upper-middle-class families, one descended from English yeomanry (or the folk), the other from cultivated German burghers, bringing them together in a not altogether comfortable marriage and placing both families in conflict with a member of the urban poor, himself descended from yeoman stock. Without focusing on the specifics of international conflict, Howards End nonetheless presents a country that is poised between two worlds, those of "culture" (the Wilcoxes) and "civilization" (the Schlegels). In the late nineteenth century, German critics began to make an

impassioned distinction . . . between Kultur and Zivilisation. . . . German Kultur . . . was said to be concerned with 'inner freedom,' with authenticity, with truth rather than sham, with essence as opposed to appearance, with totality rather than the norm. (Eksteins 77, 79)

These were binary poles that English critics also contested during the time that Howards End was written and during the years preceding the rise of the Third Reich and the war that Woolf prefigures so vividly in her final novel, Between the Acts (1941).

If Howards End presents an English culture that is ready to disappear in the face of modernity and global conflict, The Waves chronicles an England two decades later that emerged from the First World War with the end of its colonial hegemony, the breakdown of traditional relations between the sexes, and the frustrations of individuals who wish in vain for lives like those idealized in Howards End. But they now live in an England that is no longer a model that the world can follow or its citizens believe in.

Such thematic elements are as important to The Waves as they are to Howards End, often in the way they differ from or invert more traditional modes of narrative presentation. For instance, four years after focusing so heavily in To the Lighthouse on the Freudian family drama, Woolf presents seven characters in The Waves, none of whom appears to have siblings. Similarly, allusions to parents, spouses, or children in The Waves tend to be fleeting and mostly insignificant. We hear early in the novel, for instance, that Bernard is engaged, but it is not until his final monologue that he tells us in passing that he has fathered children. In a strange response to Forster's criticism that she did not give "life" to her characters, Woolf denies the characters in The Waves almost all forms of "connection," ironically inverting a judgment she makes in her diary that Forster himself was "aloof" (3: 152). Whereas Forster portrays the extraordinary power of family bonds in Howards End, Woolf seems intent in The Waves upon ignoring the extensive, indeed determinative powers of the family.