"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

By finally drawing upon the value systems that marked her pre-marital life with Henry, Margaret begins the process of usurping her pseudo-self and emerging into a new era of selfhood.(9)

Because he still remains unable to recognize the substance of his wife's words, Henry refuses to accede to Margaret's wishes. Yet Margaret, with the powerful seeds of her newfound selfhood already planted, chooses to spend the night with Helen at Howards End, where she witnesses the nature of her sister's own self-transformation. "There is a special complexity, intricacy, and intimacy in sister relationships," Monica McGoldrick writes, because "the desire for and experience of fusion lie at the heart of the difficulty many sisters have in seeing themselves as distinct from each other" (245). The product of remarkably similar value systems based upon the veneration of friendship and culture, Margaret and Helen's relationship understandably began to fissure with Margaret's marriage. Previously unable to reconcile herself with Henry's problematic social mores and his seemingly dysfunctional relationship with her sister, Helen tells Margaret that "I am steady now. I shan't ever like your Henry, dearest Meg, or even speak kindly about him," she adds, "but all that blinding hate is over. I shall never rave against Wilcoxes any more" (328). Inexorably altered by her spiritual connection with Leonard and his celebration of nature and poetry, Helen finds herself at peace and enabled, for the first time, to accept her sister's decision to pursue a relationship with anyone beyond the boundaries of their ethical system, even a Wilcox.

Henry's sudden self-differentiation occurs via the tragic activities of his son Charles, who travels on his father's orders to Howards End on the morning after Helen's stay in an effort to learn the identity of her seducer and to expel her from the house's supposedly sacred rooms.(10) When Charles discovers a newly arrived and remorseful Leonard at the residence, he erupts in a fury of class-conscious chivalry and brandishes a sword from amongst the Schlegels' belongings. Thus beknighted with a genuine artifact of aristocratic iconography, Charles startles the unemployed clerk, who collapses from heart failure in, rather appropriately, a shower of books from the Schlegels' substantial library. The morning's sad events furnish Henry with the catalyst for his own self-awakening. Traumatized by his role in Charles's act of manslaughter, Henry's "fortress gave way," Forster writes. "He could bear no one but his wife, he shambled up to Margaret afterwards and asked her to do what she could with him," Forster continues; "she did what seemed easiest - she took him down to recruit at Howards End" (350). Now ensconced in a household that includes his wife, as well as her fallen sister, Henry completes his ethical transformation by composing a will that bequeaths Howards End to Margaret initially, and later, to his newborn nephew, Leonard and Helen's son. "After I am dead let there be no jealousy and no surprise," he informs the other, stunned surviving members of the Wilcox family (357).(11) Even Helen recognizes a change in Henry's demeanor. "I like Henry," she now confesses to Margaret, who laments that, until the recent turn of events, Henry "worked hard all his life, and noticed nothing" (352).(12)