"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

Aboard the "other boat," Mrs. March must assume single-handedly the central position as parent and sign of the socio-symbolic community. Confronted with an endangered family order, she alone must preserve a semblance of social harmony and structure and uphold the law of prohibition against so-called "pathological" sexualities. In this narrative context, the name of the mother (or nom de la mere, if you will) comes to signify conscience, the Law, or the Phallus.(10) This signification, however, is not based on a direct representation of the mother; rather, it derives from the fatherless son's reconstruction of her as a "phallic mother." Paraphrasing Lacan, Jane Gallop characterizes this conception of the mother as "the silent interlocutor, the second person who never assumes the first person pronoun, . . . the subject presumed to know, the object of transference" (115). In the last four sections of "The Other Boat," Mrs. March, as the phallicized mother, never directly assumes the first-person subject position, in spite of her socio-symbolic position as the central parent. (Only the childhood scene of the first section offers an unmediated presentation of Mrs. March among her children; located at the very beginning of the second section, Lionel's overseas correspondence to the "Mater" instantly signals the disappearance of her physical presence from the narrative.(11)) Textually, she represents the "silent interlocutor" or "second person" that harrows the adult son's conscience, but she does so with a voice projected only in terms of an indirect subjectivity localized through either the son or the narrator. Invoking the figure of the mother, this narrative of sexual transgression fabricates a dialogic relation between son and mother that reflects the "Idea of Mother and Son" Forster explained in his 1930 entry in Commonplace Book:

She dominates him in youth. Manhood brings him emancipation - perhaps through friendship or a happy marriage. But the mother is waiting. Her vitality depends on character, and asserts itself as the sap drains out of him. She gets her way and reestablishes his childhood, with the difference that his subjection is conscious now and causes him humiliation and pain. Is her tyranny conscious? I think not. Could the same relationship occur between father and daughter? No. (55)

Ultimately, the mother-son relationship proves to be as tyrannical between son and conscience as between self and culture, because the narrative of Lionel March reconstitutes the biological mother as an internalized voice of conscience. Although unconscious of "her tyranny," the "waiting" mother inhabits and inhibits "the great blank country" ("Other Boat" 193) of the son's textual "confession of the flesh" (History 19). As disembodied voice and Paternal/Maternal sign of conscience, the marginalized mother of Freudian psychoanalytics symbolically delineates the limits of the discourse of sexual transgression. In this sense, the "confession of flesh" in Forster's text effectively fixes on the indivisible dyad of transgressive son and symbolic mother - of son and an inescapable Maternal Law reinforcing the limits of Victorian England, that censorial and far-reaching "blank country."