Welfare State Romance

Forster’s works responded to the heated reformist debates surrounding the passing of the 1911 Insurance Act, and they engaged with the question whether a new social ethos of responsibility and care would need to precede, or whether it would flow from, institutional reform. What Howards End calls ‘preparedness’—i.e. the attempt to protect the most vulnerable members of society against the risk of unemployment—is central to the generic instabilities of Forster’s novel. These instabilities are further heightened in Forster’s novel fragment Arctic Summer, which fails in championing the excitements of ‘romance’ over the perceived boredom of a life guarded against risk. We need to read with rather than against the grain of these texts by taking seriously both their progressive aspirations and their reparative attention to subject positions that are excluded from the period’s projects of reform.

An Anti-Imperial Mythology

Critics have read Howards End as if Forster ‘specifically barred’ the poor from the novel (Trilling), so that only the middle classes are considered and not in a ‘truly radical’ way (Crews). Yet Forster does, after all, concern himself with the very poor in his depiction of Leonard Bast, Jacky and other characters, and extensively in the thoughts of Margaret. Furthermore, he creates the myth he says England lacks, and, considered in relationship to the main narrative events and to the novel’s imagery, this takes the form of an anti-imperialist mythology. Mythic elements include epic journeys and battles, a symbolic sword and tree, a sacrificial death and a redemptive child. In the novel’s poetic passages and in its account of Margaret’s education on the ‘hard road of Henry’s soul’, the nature of England’s imperialism is revealed and defeated by an alternative radical and feminist vision of society.

An Eco-feminist Interpretation of Howards End

This paper attempts to analyze the eco-feminist consciousness embodied in Howards End from three aspects: women’s intimacy with nature, women’s and nature’s plight in the patriarchal society and the construction of harmonious relationships between women and men, man and nature. It is evident to find that Forster has a deep concern about the conditions of women and nature in the patriarchal society and expressed his view on mutual understanding and respect in order to get of the domination of men on women and nature in Howards End.