"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

Margaret's interactions with upper-class values in the novel occur when Helen nearly marries into the Wilcox family after visiting Howards End during one of its rare moments of occupancy. At first, Helen responds favorably to the Wilcoxes' aura of social confidence and hospitality. "They are the very happiest, jolliest family that you can imagine," she writes to Margaret. Yet shortly before the demise of her engagement to Paul Wilcox, Helen begins to perceive that "the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness" (26). After Helen departs for an extended, post break-up visit to Germany, Margaret enters into a friendship with Ruth Wilcox, now back in London, where she suffers - unbeknownst to her family, whom, ironically, she would rather not trouble emotionally - from a terminal illness. From Forster's descriptions of Mrs. Wilcox, her friendship with Margaret would seem a foregone conclusion. "There was no bitterness in Mrs. Wilcox; there was not even criticism; she was lovable," Forster writes, "and no ungracious or uncharitable word had passed her lips" (79). Unlike her family, Margaret empathizes with Ruth Wilcox's intense emotional response to her country home's aesthetic attributes. Thus, following her death shortly thereafter, Mrs. Wilcox's will - much to the surprise and consternation of her family - decrees that Margaret shall inherit Howards End.

The disposition of the property precipitates the novel's central crisis: Will the heart of the nation belong to proponents of friendship and culture or to hollow icons of wealth and materialism? Because they correctly assume that Margaret knows nothing of her late friend's sudden generosity, the surviving Wilcoxes choose to ignore Mrs. Wilcox's wishes - she had been "under the spell of a sudden friendship," they reason - and maintain their ownership of Howards End. With their disregard for Mrs. Wilcox's last will and testament, the baffle for the future of England had begun within the context of Forster's narrative agenda. To the Wilcoxes, Forster writes, "Howards End was a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir" (103). When Margaret finally visits Howards End during her lengthy courtship with Henry Wilcox, the residence literally reverberates in honor of her arrival - "it was the heart of the house beating, faintly at first, then loudly, martially," Forster writes. Moments later, the caretaker Miss Avery ominously mistakes Margaret for Ruth Wilcox. "In fancy, of course - in fancy," Miss Avery remarks after confusing Margaret's identity. "You had her way of walking" (211). In addition to ushering in Margaret's intense era of personal growth, her later experiences with the class-bound Wilcoxes and the protracted redisposition of Howards End share in the process of differentiation that will ultimately result in Margaret's emergence as a fully realized self.