Forster's examination of contemporaneous issues pervades the novel in multifarious layers - What is your response to this statement?

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Howards End

By: E.M. Forster

Yonatan Jay

Forster’s examination of contemporaneous issues pervades the novel in multifarious layers. What is your response to this statement?

‘Only connect…’

Howards End is E.M. Forster's symbolic exploration of the social, economic, and philosophical conditions in Edwardian culture. Written in 1910, at a time when Britain’s industrial ascendancy was dwindling, and Germany’s expansion filling the vacuum, socio-politico Anglo-German relations were particularly volatile, culminating in the Entente Cordiale in 1904. Although Howards End is a “fin de siecle” novel it lacks the European rational elucidation found in similar novels at the time, like Thomas Mann’s “The White Mountain”. Thus, Forster set out to address the question critic Lionel Trilling posed, "Who shall inherit England?" 

With reference to the above question , Forster explores the milieu of three dissimilar groups in society, each of which epitomizes a particular social class-consciousness: the literary, cultural Schlegel family, who symbolize the idealistic and intellectual aspect of the upper classes; the materialistic, pragmatic Wilcox family, who embody the "unyielding" English work ethic, bourgeoisie, and conventional social morality; and the impoverished Bast family, headed by a lower-middle-class insurance clerk who earnestly believes books, such as Ruskin, will salvage him from social and economic desolation. Forster’s fascination for Hegelian opposites permeates the novel throughout; hence the dichotomy between the working class and the noveau-riché, middleclass values and labour class destitution and the liaison between the rural environment and urban isolation.

To evoke the recurrent themes that are incessantly inferred right the way through the novel, I think it optimal to examine a specific scene. The attendance to the music hall in Chapter V. A noteworthy observation is that, the characters in Howards End and for that matter in any manuscript are merely fictitious personas of the author’s imagination. As Ian Milligan writes “Howards End is about a search for values… the novel means more than the desirability of finding a mean…” The novel for the most part is written from Margaret’s viewpoint, that point of view is not Margaret’s though; it is Forster, propagating his sentiments and using Margaret solely as a mouthpiece.        

Sisters Margaret and Helen Schlegel are sitting side-by-side, listening to Beethoven’s platonic Fifth Symphony. Margaret, the more pragmatic of the two, delights in its music, Helen on the contrary, attempts to unearth its deeper meaning. Besides from the Schlegel girls representing a bridge uniting disparate social classes through the narrative structure, they also symbolize a quest for unity and reciprocity between man and woman.

Mrs. Munt, the aunt of the two sisters comments “I do not go in for being musical; I only care for music – a very different thing.”  She takes pleasure in it merely “as a tune to tap along to”. Leonard Bast, only recently acquainted to Margaret is unable to benefit from the music, as he is too fretful on the mundane activities around him. “Leonard listened to it with reverence. He felt that he was being done good to, and that if he kept on with Ruskin, and the Queens Hall’s concerts, and some pictures by Watts, he would one day push his head out of the grey waters and see the universe.”     

Leonard is one of the characters in the novel who “cannot connect”. He is a social-climber, confined to the deprivation of his depressing abode. He aspires of becoming refined as the Schlegel girls by reading Ruskin. Forster in this respect illustrates; that to be considered upper class in Edwardian culture, one must be born into it.

Tibby, the brother of the Schlegel girls is “dyspeptic and difficile”, he takes the music for its sheer technical brilliance. He represents the ‘bored’ cerebral class. His inability to communicate is the thesis throughout the novel Forster viciously deplores. On a simpler note, Forster, a Cambridge student himself, might be allocating scorn on the ‘Oxford mentality’ for their staunchness in learning and inability to ‘connect’, hence the maxim “The dreaming spires of Oxford”.                                

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Frieda Mosebach, the Schlegel’s cousin from Germany is also present. She out of the entire German delegation has the only sensible reaction to the music. Her foremost concern is that Beethoven is “echt Deutsche”, a “true German” and impossible for universal conscious integration.

Forster writes about Beethoven’s music, that it can be enjoyed by “All sorts and conditions”, whatever their nationality, background or personality. Margaret rejected her dual-nationality to inhibit her yearning for culture.

The affiliation between Britain and Germany is conspicuously paraded in this scene. There is no explicit connection between the historical circumstance and the activity in Howards ...

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