"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

In effect, "The Other Boat" bears the long-standing legacy of Victorian vigilance over sexual normalization, namely that of bourgeois heterosexuality. Its focus on Lionel's deviation documents Foucault's claim that homosexuality responded with a "reverse" discourse: "homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified" (History 101). The narrative confessions of Lionel's sexual transgression thus reflect the indirection, if not ambi-direction, of the post-Freudian writer's attempt to write within yet against a heritage of sexual conduct paradoxically characterized by "an injunction to silence" and an "incitement to speak" the truth of sexuality (History 4, 18). The posthumous publication of "The Other Boat" (not to mention that of Maurice and the remaining stories of buggery in The Life to Come) testifies to Forster's own inability to transgress publicly the boundaries of a social conscience or repression signified by an England most notably represented by the maternal figure. Thus, Forster's final censorship of any direct evidence of Lionel March's homosexual activities parallels the author's necessary suppression of these homoerotic texts from his record of conventional literary publications.

While Captain March's disclosure of homosexual transgression tests and exposes the limits of British codes of normative sexuality, it also reveals the extent to which the officer's conscience is held in check by the chaste and chastising mother. The maternal image of Mrs. March hence becomes both sign of and impetus for suppression. But it is through her son's guilt-ridden projection that she ultimately personifies both individual and British social conscience. Allotted a peripheral part in the actual plot, she nonetheless proves to be a potent phantasm of her transgressive son's tormented psyche, an image signifying both repressed desire and repressive prohibition. As the preoedipal and post-oedipal single parent, Mrs. March is still identified only by her marital and maternal names; by virtue of her procreating in the name of the father, she secures a position in the symbolic order that formally locates her on the side of the socio-symbolic community.(8) Absent from the social and family structure because of his own transgression of "tribal" codes of propriety, Lionel's father exists in name only since the patrilineal surname alone survives, the father's Christian name having been expunged from social discourse because of his disgraceful abandonment of this community. On board the S.S. Normannia, such community and "tribal" order are chiefly held in check by an ad hoc group of British passengers who, reports Lionel in his correspondence with his mother, "make up two Bridge tables every night besides hanging together at other times, and get called the Big Eight, which I suppose must be regarded as a compliment" (171).(9) Referring to the "Big Eight" as a gauge for social propriety and an agency of exclusion, Lionel relates to Cocoanut how his own name has been purged of his father's identity: "He has made our name stink in these parts. As it is I've had to change my name, or rather drop half of it. He called himself Major Corrie March. We were all proud of the 'Corrie' and had reason to be. Try saying 'Corrie March' to the Big Eight here, and watch the effect" (183-84).