"Contrary to the prevailing current?" Homoeroticism and the voice of maternal law in Forster's "The Other Boat." - E.M. Forster

Style, Fall, 1995 by Tamera Dorland

The elusive and cryptonymic "m'm m'm m'm" are disjointedly designated as both "here" and "there," "in" and "out" of the holes of what Cocoanut locates as the "thin part of the sheep," or ship (167). The half-caste's vocalic mispronunciation of "ship" in itself betrays a biblical notion of bestial sodomy, while implying an area of this "other boat" (and perhaps of carnal knowledge) that is shared by Cocoanut and the Lascar, but not by the innocent and vulnerable March children. Consequently, the "new game" of "m'm m'm m'm," once reported to Mrs. March, is promptly checked by her injunction to "Go back and play properly" at soldiering (169).

Suggesting a game of unspeakable impropriety, Cocoanut's sounds take on multiple meanings. The bilabial utterance of "m'm m'm m'm" sounds like a rapid repetition of "mum" if we replace the apostrophe with the more common English schwa and represent this substitution with the grapheme "u." The term "mum" thereby subjects the contraction "m'm" to various denotations: the suppression of speech or the injunction to be silent; the act of masquerading, or masking oneself; or, thirdly, the informal yet chiefly British reference to "Mama." Given this potential multivalence, the unnameable "m'm m'm m'm" conflates the idiomatic expression, "mum's the word," with notions of concealment and mother; hence, as the March children reveal the "new game" to their mother, they phonetically and syntactically link her name with this cryptonym of suppression and deception: "M'm m'm m'm, mummy" (169).(22) This effectively, although innocently, adumbrates Captain Lionel March's vigilant efforts to mask any word of his "offence against decency" aboard the S.S. Normannia (174). In addition, Cocoanut's neologism works with the notion of "mummery" ("a pretentious or hypocritical show or ceremony"), which aptly portrays the upstanding officer's conscious attempts to keep up appearances and continue playing at soldiers, so to speak, for Colonel Arbuthnot and the Big Eight sahibs - not to mention for his "mum," with whom he corresponds while at sea.

Lionel's overseas correspondence with his mother functions as primary evidence of his contrition and his need to allude to yet mask his reunion with Cocoanut: "He is on board too," he tells his mother, "but our paths seldom cross" (171). Most notably, this epistle to the "Mater," which opens the story's second section and signals the narrative's transition from the "other boat" to the second boat, constitutes the core of Lionel's "stumbling confession." In projecting his mother as his confessor, as a Jehovah-like "voice condemning him and all her children for sin, but condemning him most," Lionel necessarily locates her "outside carnality" and deprives her of senses, sensations, and sensuality (193). He is mocked by Cocoanut because, by idealizing his mother as "the very soul of purity," Lionel denies the possibility of her sexuality and establishes her as the absolute gauge by which to condemn and restrain his own (185). Lionel later reveals his self-repulsion as he confesses his attempt to imagine his mother engaging in sexual intercourse: "Earlier in the evening, when Cocoa mentioned her, he had tried to imagine her with his father, enjoying the sensations he was beginning to find so pleasant, but the attempt was sacrilegious and he was shocked at himself" (193). That Lionel appears shocked at the vicarious sexual sensations the image of parental intercourse incites falls in line with Freud's discussion of "primal phantasies" commonly generated by neurotics (Introductory 371). Syntactically ambiguous, the phrase "enjoying the sensations" may refer: to Lionel and to either the mother or the father, any of whom may be enjoying sexual pleasures. But Lionel's sense of profaning his puritanical mother arises from his locating her inside carnality and vicariously identifying with either her or the father as lover. If his identification is with the father as the mother's lover, then the image clearly suggests oedipal and perhaps incestuous implications. But if his identification is with the mother, then it appears equally sacrilegious, yet more "unnatural," and more clearly posits her as the son's object of transference. Lionel envisions his mother, as the cynosure of his fantasy, in his own sexual position. More significantly, he locates himself in the position of his mother, the feminine object of a male lover, as had Cocoanut in the earlier scene.(23) His shock then appears a response not only to the incestuous implications of this imagined scene of parental intercourse, but also to the feminization of his role as homosexual lover.