"Only connecting" with the family: class, culture, and narrative therapy in E.M. Forster's 'Howards End.' - Family Systems Psychotherapy and Literature/Literary Criticism

Style, Summer, 1997 by Kenneth Womack

Notes

1 The Titanic and the dramatic conclusion to her maiden voyage essentially function as microcosms of the English class system, from the staggering discrepancies between the ship's first-class and steerage accommodations to the treatment of lower-class passengers during the loading of the liner's lifeboats. Some fortunate steerage survivors later recalled the menacing gates that acted as barriers against their passage to the boat deck. "Undoubtedly, the worst barriers," Wyn Craig Wade adds in The Titanic: End of a Dream, "were the ones within the steerage passengers themselves. Years of conditioning as third-class citizens led a great many of them to give up hope as soon as the crisis became evident" (277-78).

2 Family therapists define morphogenesis as the process that allows a given family system "to deviate from its usual relationship among component parts and even to amplify that deviation" (Knapp 67). In Howards End, Forster illustrates the dramatic ways in which his characters challenge habitual familial patterns by contradicting, and ultimately withdrawing from, their respective family systems over such issues as class and culture.

3 Despite what appears to be Forster's obvious affinity for Moore's teachings, the novelist's critics and biographers continue to debate the extent of his knowledge of Principia Ethica. While K. W. Gransden attributes the moral philosophies of Forster and other members of the Bloomsbury Group to Moore's influence (4), his biographer P. N. Furbank flatly concludes that Forster "never read Moore" (1: 49). Although Mary Lago also confirms Furbank's assertion, she notes that Forster admitted to aligning himself with Moore's belief "in the possibility of an ideal affection" (58). Claude J. Summers maintains, however, that Forster "imbibed" the Cambridge philosophies of Moore, whose teachings likely justified Forster's own "belief that personal relations and the contemplation of beauty yield life's most valuable states of mind" (6).

4 For additional discussion regarding literature as a means of narrative therapy, as well as a vehicle for the interdisciplinary study of family systems psychotherapy, see Barbara A. Kaufman's "Training Tales in Family Therapy: Exploring The Alexandria Quartet." Kaufman argues that "inclusion of novels in didactic contexts encourages trainees to search their own experiences, thereby maximizing the opportunity for positive therapeutic interaction and highlighting the variety of treatment approaches in the field" (70). See also Janine Roberts's Tales and Transformations: Stories in Families and Family Therapy (1994), which features an appendix that enumerates a host of existing "family systems novels."

5 Charles P. Barnard and Ramon Garrido Corrales define homeostasis as a family's tendency - no matter how detrimental it may be - to preserve constancy. "There is no question," they write, "that families devote considerable energy to maintain a certain amount of order and stability. Security," they add, "seems to be tied with a certain amount of stability and predictability" (13). William C. Nichols and Craig E. Everett explain morphogenesis as the process through which families effect radical, meaningful change. Morphogenesis, then, "involves altering the nature of the system itself so that new levels of functioning are achieved" (130).