"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 later discovery of Helen's secret pregnancy and Leonard's subsequent murder at the hands of Charles Wilcox, however, shatters the novel's series of triangulated relationships and serves as a polarizing mechanism that ultimately results in new frontiers of selfhood for Margaret, Helen, and Henry. Their differentiation provides Forster, then, with fertile terrain for the therapy and would-be transformation of the social values of England's larger family system. As Richard C. Schwartz notes, during polarization "each person in the relationship shifts . . . to a rigid, extreme position that is the opposite of or competitive with that of the other. . . . Because they tend to be self-confirming," Schwartz adds, "these polarizations are likely to escalate in the absence of effective leadership" (20, 59). In Howards End, after Margaret's polarization allows her to complete her social education, she provides the kind of interpersonal leadership necessary for Helen and Henry - her partners in triangulation - to achieve selfhood as well. "This process of polarization and escalation is very familiar to systems theorists," Augustus Y. Napier and Carl Whitaker write in The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy (1978), and may result, as with Forster's novel, in the type of "positive feedback [that] tells the system that things are changing, that the system is deviating from homeostasis" (83).

Margaret's polarized relationship with Henry unfolds in dramatic fashion after they cajole Helen into returning to England from Germany - where she awaits the birth of an illegitimate child by Leonard - in order to retrieve her beloved books from Howards End. When Margaret discovers her sister's condition, she agrees to provide a single night's refuge for Helen in the Wilcoxes' family home - now essentially a warehouse for the Schlegels' worldly goods - but Henry seethes with rage at the prospect of a fallen woman sullying Howards End's social grace and upper-class demeanor. "It was the crisis of his life," Forster writes (319). Absorbed with the notion of punishing Helen's as of yet unidentified seducer, Henry fails to understand her desire to be among the soothing presence of her family's books and other sentimental belongings. "I cannot treat her as if nothing has happened," Henry reasons with his wife, and "I should be false to my position in society if I did" (321). Suddenly polarized by Henry's utter inability to perceive the inequity of his stance, Margaret refuses to participate further in her chimerical defense of his socially "muddled" persona:

You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress - I forgave you. My sister has a lover - you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel - oh, contemptible! - a man who insults his wife when she's alive and cants with her memory when she's dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These, man, are you. You cannot recognize them, because you cannot connect. . . . No one has ever told you what you are - muddled, criminally muddled. (322-23)