Vital disconnection in Howards End

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2005 by Leslie White

The romantic bearing of Forster's aesthetic values briefly examined above is immediately evident in the famous epigraph of Howards End, removed from its position within the narrative presumably to declare thematic intention. As Alistair Duckworth, Alan Wilde, and others have noted, however, the epigraph exhibits a provisional element that threatens the novel's ostensible thematic aspiration and implies that its formal resolution may be a contrivance. Duckworth observes of the epigraph's punctuation that already "the ellipsis points imply an incompleteness," which betrays, he believes, Forster's "chagrined realization of his limited ability to correct society's problems or improve human life" (Forster's House 8). In romantic theory, connection and its cognates (completion, closure, etc.) are inimical to the primary qualities of persistent striving, anticipation, and majestic imperfection. Does the epigraph, then, deconstruct the text itself, as Duckworth appears to suggest, and did Forster intend this? Does it, with its ellipsis, signify a conscious admission of defeat? Or rather does it acknowledge that what follows is an attempt to dramatize the belief that the daunting quest for connection must be undertaken, whatever the conditions or consequences, if society's problems are to be corrected and human life improved? Howards End reaches and "fails" in model romantic fashion, but in this failing it offers a vision of connection for which language, or perhaps the fictional mode, was for Forster at that time unsuitable, inadequate, or elusive. Seeking common ground for German idealism and English pragmatism, the cultured intelligentsia and the commercial philistine, the unseen and the seen, the aesthetic and the ethical, Howards End eschews conventional connection in its enacting of the noble but inevitably "failed" quest for accommodation of antithetical dispositions.

Such juxtapositions as these betray the tendency of Forster's fictive imagination to range dialectically over broad metaphysical and sociopolitical concerns. This inclination not only makes plausible but perhaps even calls forth an allegorical approach to the principal conflict of Howards End, which Forster renders in an abstract language exemplified in repeated references to the "unseen" and its synonyms (infinity, the inner life, etc.). Resistant to precise definition, this language is cultish, private, and potentially disorienting to the uninitiated. To become conversant in it requires creative, individualized engagement from Forster's characters and readers alike. J. H. Miller has observed that the characters of Howards End are measured by "their openness or lack of openness to the unseen" (471). The open and responsive, attuned to reality's spiritual extensions, are intellectually and morally committed to transcending (but also transforming) the pressures of prevailing conventions and imperatives--completion, "bigness," material progress, action rather than contemplation, and so on. Or like Ruth Wilcox and Miss Avery, they instinctively act to preserve the sacred rituals, creations, and rhythms of life inherited from the past. Forster's commitment to the sanctity of personal relations and his belief in the "irreducible centrality of the individual" (Wilde, Critical Essays 7) are embodied in the three characters who respond soulfully (though inconsistently or sometimes recklessly) to the promptings of the "unseen." In various senses drawn to Wilcox "grit," energy, and power, ultimately Ruth Wilcox and Margaret and Helen Schlegel are all constitutionally resistant to them. Their responses to the "unseen"--from a conventional perspective threatening, transgressive, or merely eccentric--oppose the reductive intransigence of imperialist patriarchy.