"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

Since Mr. March had abandoned the family or ship, so to speak, and gone "native somewhere out East" (183), the childhood scene suggests a preoedipal or imaginary stage during which the mother-son relationship appears unchallenged by paternal authority. The authority of the abandoned mother over her children is nonetheless challenged by a prevailing patriarchal or masculine order that strictly observes gender divisions in terms of territorial space:

A sailor - an Englishman - leapt out of the hatchway with a piece of chalk and drew a little circle round her where she stood. Cocoanut screamed, "He's caught you. He's come."

"You're on dangerous ground, lady," said the sailor respectfully. "Men's quarters. Of course we leave it to your generosity."

Tired with the voyage and the noise of the children, worried by what she had left in India and might find in England, Mrs. March fell into a sort of trance. She stared at the circle stupidly, unable to move out of it, while Cocoanut danced round her and gibbered. (170)

As sole responsible parent, Mrs. March must serve as both nurturer and head of the household; yet, based on "what is customary," she is barred from following her sons into "Men's quarters" (170). In this first and fleeting staging of Mrs. March, the narrative selectively portrays her restricted role as both mother and father in a society that upholds "the old custom" of distinguishing "ladies" from "gentlemen" by rigidly preserving masculine territory (170). As the only direct presentation of her more human aspects, this scene reveals her fatigue as the abandoned parent, along with her apparently unquestioning surrender to custom. Her relative helplessness against the "independent," though "rapacious" English sailor and the gibbering Cocoanut clearly signals her ineffectual authority over her son's later seduction into "dangerous ground." By contrast with this perspective on the mother, in which her paternal authority is temporarily undermined, the narrative's earlier view exposes a less compassionate and relenting figure. Shifting from distant third-person narrative to free-indirect discourse, the narrator characterizes Mrs. March's familial and moral concerns in terms of a high-browed imperialist racism: "A clergyman's daughter and a soldier's wife, she could not admit that Christianity had ever been oriental. What good thing can come out of the Levant, and is it likely that the apostles ever had a touch of the tar-brush?" (169). This caricature implicitly echoes the discussion by Mahmoud Ali and Aziz of a Mrs. Turton, whose "haughty and venal" supremacism characterizes the "average" Englishwoman in A Passage to India (9). Purporting to represent Mrs. March's internal thoughts, which are signaled by a shift to a relatively informal or colloquial tone, the narrator establishes her as a model of moral and racial, if not supremacist, conscience, the basis for Lionel's guilty consciousness of British propriety. But Mrs. March never directly voices a distinct imperialist stance; her imperative to "play properly" and her commitment to doing "what is customary" nevertheless reinforce this severe stereotype of the Englishwoman and diminish her relative leniency towards her children's playing with Cocoanut during the voyage outside the formal boundaries of British territory (169-70).