Vital disconnection in Howards End

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2005 by Leslie White

In their singular ways, Ruth, Margaret, and Helen are Forster's "minor artists," members of his "aristocracy" between whom "there is a secret understanding ... when they meet" (Two Cheers 73). Though Ruth Wilcox is often unassertive and seemingly reduced to subaltern status, she nevertheless exerts a subtle authority over her family, even over the obtuse Henry and the brutal Charles. She "gives the idea of greatness," observes Margaret, who, aware of the pretensions of her own set, "was conscious of a personality that transcended their own and dwarfed their activities" (80). Significantly, the family somehow knows it is not to "take advantage of her" (23), as Helen notes in her second letter to Margaret. When early in the novel Ruth comes upon the contretemps between Charles and Paul over Helen, she instantly cuts through the expedient absolutism favored by Wilcoxes, and all fall silent before "the instinctive wisdom" (36) that Ruth derives from her ancestors. In such matters, Ruth intuits, "one doesn't ask plain questions. There aren't such things" (36). Her elegant mediation of the misunderstanding stuns Helen; heretofore in thrall to Wilcox power and efficiency, Helen immediately connects with Ruth and begins to discern the "panic and emptiness" that would set her against Wilcoxes, Henry and Charles in particular.

That the ancestral Howard home remains in the family at all is testament to Ruth's serene tenacity. The other Wilcoxes, of course, when they think of the house at all, see it as burdensome, out of date, an impediment to suburban progress; their interest in Howards End amounts to the vulgar desire to modernize. Through no conscious effort, Ruth somehow manages to communicate to her husband and children that the house, her feelings for it, the values it possesses offer qualities wanting in themselves that they must try to cultivate, or at least not destroy. Indeed, perhaps Ruth succeeds only to the extent that the family doesn't sell or raze the house after her death. Yet despite their insensitivity to things of the spirit, the Wilcoxes, Henry and Charles even, are to some extent transformed in Ruth's presence. Henry, after all, is drawn to women like Ruth and Margaret; perhaps his attraction to them betrays a remote desire to counterbalance his commercial bent, and a vague intimation of the advantages of the "unseen." That Henry ends up at Howards End might be a crude irony, but that he wills the house to Margaret surely has as much to do with honoring Ruth's wish that the house belong to its rightful "soul" heir as it does with marital succession. And even Charles, after Leonard's death and in an uneasy exchange with his father, "had a vague regret--a wish that something had been different somewhere--a wish (though he did not express it thus) that he had been taught to say 'I' in his youth" (280). Before Charles withdraws to familiarity behind the rigid Wilcox carapace, his mother's (and perhaps Margaret's) influence allows him a fleeting, inarticulate glimpse of the "diviner wheels" (281).