Transvaluing immaturity: reverse discourses of male homosexuality in E.M. Forster's posthumously published fiction

Criticism, Spring, 1998 by Stephen Da Silva

The opposition between immature homosexual pleasures and mature heterosexual art appears in The Life to Come also, but in the short stories, youthful homosexuality is usually privileged over the supposedly adult worlds of writing and literature. In the story "Ansell," for instance, it is precisely the first person narrator's bookishness--he is working on his dissertation--that cuts him off from his boyhood friend, the gamekeeper Ansell: "We [the narrator and Ansell] were now so very different that comparison was painful. ... I was writing a dissertation on the Greek optative for a Fellowship and Ansell was now gamekeeper."(38) When the narrator's books are destroyed in the river, he represents it in the catastrophic terms of amputation or castration--"It means--well it's as if you [Ansell] had to lose your leg" (LC 3-4). And yet it is precisely the loss of the books which allows the narrator to communicate with Ansell and to reach an idyllic homoerotic union with him at the end of the story: "Ansell began to talk. ... The weight of the books which had kept him down ... had fallen into the river, and now he was at his own level and could speak of the things he cared for" (LC 7). "Ansell has appropriated me, and I have no time to think of the future. ... Whenever we look at the place [where the books fell over into the stream], Ansell ... laughs, and I laugh too" (LC 9). It is the destruction of the books, then, which allows the narrator to return to his joyous boyhood union with Ansell and to forget about the future.

In both the journal entry and in his posthumous stories, Forster draws on the terms of a developmental narrative to conceptualize homosexuality. In contrast to the journal entry, though, which faithfully repeats a denigratory heterosexist developmental narrative, in most of the posthumously published works, Forster affirms the connection between homosexuality and youthfulness but attempts to transvalue the implications of youthfulness in order to celebrate male homosexual desire.

Youthful Homosexuality and the Return to the Past

Forster s posthumously published texts draw on many of the same terms that are used to pathologize them: if normative culture equates homosexuality with childishness, these writings too associate realizing homosexual desire with moving back in time or returning to childhood. For instance, Maurice represents the realization of homosexual fulfillment as the recovery of a lost childhood object of desire. At the beginning of the novel, Maurice loses the garden boy George, significantly because George has become "too old" (M 17). Maurice tries to convince himself that this loss is insignificant and to adapt himself to the demands of the heterosexual marriage plot: "[Maurice] whispered, `George, George.' Who was George? Nobody--just a common servant. Mother and Ada and Kitty were far more important" (M 19). But the whole of the novel can be read as Maurice's finding his way back to that lost childhood object. For closure is achieved when Maurice reaches lasting physical intimacy with the working-class gamekeeper Alec Scudder who both in his class and pastoral profession evokes the lost garden boy, George, from the beginning of story. In other words, in Maurice, realizing homosexual desire is represented as recovering a lost past.