‘A man embedded in society’

This chapter explores the ways in which E. M. Forster’s Maurice and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), while criticizing the oppression of homosexual men, both offer trenchant criticisms of aspects of the ‘social fabric’, including contemporary constructions of masculinity. They locate aberrance and even criminality within the texture and deep structures of society itself rather than in the homosexual men whom society abjures. Unlike Maurice, The Swimming-Pool Library – a novel imbued with Forsterian echoes – was able to engage more openly with its social and political context; unlike the repressed Maurice Hall, its protagonist, Will Beckwith, enjoys what seems to be a sexually liberated lifestyle. However, Hollinghurst shows that, despite this, there has been very little progress where the inclusion or ‘embedding’ of these men in the ‘social fabric’ is concerned. Reading the two works together suggests that unpredictability and reversals may lie within ostensibly straightforward literary lineages.

Women In and Out

Women exerted a considerable influence on Maurice, even though admirable female characters are absent from the narrative. Before the First World War, a sexually conservative reform movement called Social Purity was bringing male sexuality under particular scrutiny, making this a difficult time for Forster to be claiming that homosexuality was not morally wrong. Interpreted against this background, Maurice can be read not as a rebellion against attenuated Victorian attitudes or against women but as a challenge to the contemporary social purity movement. In this context – the difficulty of talking about homosexuality, of which the novel explores the effects – the willingness of Forster’s friend and confidante, Florence Barger, to discuss homosexuality also needs to be seen as significant. She contributed to Forster’s ability to represent homosexuality as a valid alternative to bourgeois masculinity that equated heterosexuality with morality, health and economic success.

Sexuality, Allegory and Interpretation

Both Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer and E. M. Forster’s Maurice explore success achieved in the face of society’s hostility to homosexuality. This chapter addresses both novels in terms of allegory and utopian possibility. Whilst Galgut’s adoption of biofiction in Arctic Summer aims to utilize the political and creative possibilities found in early modernist writing, the text’s tight control of narrative form and use of allegory leads to problems – that apparent newness is in fact highly scripted and controlled. Spurred by this consideration of Arctic Summer, a new approach is taken to Maurice that emphasises its openness as a text. The reader is encouraged to engage with issues of interpretation, with Maurice’s own development showing him becoming adept at reading complex, pressured situations. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is seen as an important intertext both for Maurice and the South African Anglophone tradition to which Galgut belongs. Using Walter Benjamin on natural history and allegory the chapter contends that Maurice, whilst maintaining its stress on how long-term same-sex relationships and cross-class love secure meaning in the world, also depicts a world that is always subject to change, loss and ruination.

Maurice

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

‘Flat pieces of cardboard stamped with a conventional design’

Women are both central and marginalized in Maurice. Symbolically, they are central to the ideals of respectable heterosexual life that Maurice struggles against as he grows up, but their experience is frequently pushed to the margins of the narrative. Certainly, the novel’s female characters seem at first glance to be drawn from stereotypes; on the edge of the narrative, we notice mothers, sisters and their friends. Women symbolize, for Maurice and Clive, the banality of the conventional, heterosexual masculinity that they would like to reject yet cannot help being drawn to. Nevertheless, Forster implies that Maurice and Clive do not see the female characters ‘for what they really [are]’, but instead misinterpret them due to prejudices that are just as limited as those that they are rejecting. This chapter suggests that Forster’s characterization of women in Maurice encourages the reader to imagine depths of experience, suffering and frustration that exist at the margins of the novel’s narrative. In a novel that so boldly portrays the marginalized subject of homosexual masculinity, Forster more subtly enacts the oppression and marginalization that women face within a social construct of gender and family that purports to put them at the centre.

Maurice and Religion

This chapter explores the role and representation of religion in the text of Maurice and in critical readings of the novel. Concentrating primarily on the text itself, the chapter offers close readings of those parts of the novel where religion/religions play a part, stressing their importance in the structure of the novel. This analysis retraces the influence of religion (predominantly Christianity but also ancient Greek and pagan religious thought) on the main characters’ psychological development and behaviour, especially on the way they try to deal with irreconcilable demands of religion and their own psyche. The chapter thus reflects on Forster’s attitude towards religious institutions and the changing role religion played in early twentieth-century British society and among Edwardian writers. The chapter also considers the role of religion in the reception of the novel, both in scholarship and among twenty-first-century readers. The chapter concludes by considering questions of reception and the relevance of Maurice to twenty-first-century (queer) readers as concepts of homosexuality have undergone considerable changes in parts of the world.

‘An unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort’

This chapter explores the ways in which Maurice in 1913 processed the legacy of the Aesthete Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895. Even though the only direct allusion to Wilde occurs in Maurice’s interview with Dr Barry, the presence of Wilde’s reputation emerges in the ‘aesthetic push’ at Cambridge. In principle, Maurice’s abandonment of Clive marks the moment when the narrative confirms that an aesthetic homosexuality proves unappealing. Instead, Maurice’s intimacy with Alec marks a turn toward a physically intense homosexual desire that takes its cues from Edward Carpenter’s thought. At the same time, the threat of blackmail that haunts the intimacy between Maurice and Alec also recalls the disclosures about Wilde’s involvement with homosexual extortionists. The chapter therefore reveals that the influential argument that Robert K. Martin ventured in 1983 – where he claims that the first half of Maurice focuses on a Platonic homosexuality, while the second half stresses a male same-sex passion derived from Carpenter – is not as clear-cut as he suggests. Forster’s concerted efforts to dis-identify with Wilde point to the considerable degree to which the Aesthete’s plight in 1895 continued to shape understandings of homosexuality through the period leading up to the First World War.

Maurice without Ending

During their ongoing lives, both Forster’s Maurice and Merchant Ivory Productions’ 1987 film adaptation have suffered parallel forms of critical dismissal and misrecognition which deny their cultural, political or affective significance. In the twenty-first century, however, such responses are challenged by the enduring and profound impact of both novel and film on readers/audiences, vividly evident in post-2000 Web 2.0 participatory culture. This chapter connects Maurice’s evolution across three phases of its (trans)textual history. First, the palimpsestic history of Maurice ‘the’ novel, shaped by multiple ‘peer reviewers’, divergent manuscripts and protracted textual revisions. Second, the 1987 film adaptation, which was the product of a comparably complicated, contestatory genesis and significant structural reworking. Third, Maurice’s still-unfolding public life as manifested in its twenty-first-century popular reception and further (re-)adaptations, sequels and paratexts, including fanworks. Since 2004, more than 170 Maurice fanfictions have been published online in English alone. These are of interest for the work done by fans in extending Forster’s sexual politics, utopian vision and the Maurice/Alec pairing into ‘the for ever and ever that fiction allows’ and for their solutions to perceived difficulties or limitations within the novel and/or film, conversely prompting reflection on the ‘fannishness’ of Maurice itself.

Introduction Maurice through Time

The Introduction provides the biographical, literary and critical contexts for the book. It explores how previous criticism’s concentration on the novel’s portrayal of homosexuality has not only influenced the direction of Forster studies but also exemplified wider disciplinary trends. It illustrates how, by addressing previously overlooked themes and contexts such as feminism, Aestheticism, allegory and body-soul relations, the present volume offers a ground-breaking examination of Maurice and its legacies, sharpening critical appreciation of this under-discussed work and expanding recent revisionist attention to the novel in new modernist scholarship. The fact that the novel can be read divergently, from various approaches including but not limited to those informed by the author’s own sexuality and the representation of same-sex desires in the text, and in different contexts and afterlives, not only signals its protean texture but also prompts us to reconsider our assessments of Forster the writer. What emerges from the volume, the Introduction suggests, is the complexity of the novel, as a text and as a cultural phenomenon. Providing an overview of the volume’s three sections – interpersonal relationships, contemporary contexts and afterlives – the Introduction summarizes the contours of a new multifaceted understanding of Maurice set out in the volume.

The Master and the Pupil

This chapter draws on Foucault’s ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ in an exploration of Forster’s most significant and productive inter-generational relationships of the 1930s, arguing that these queer alliances shaped – and were shaped by – not only the Maurice manuscript, but an emerging queer culture that embraced the homosexual’s ‘slantwise’ position in society. As a young queer writer struggling to reconcile the demands of his personal and professional lives, seeking a mentor and yet fundamentally dissatisfied with interwar paradigms of leadership, Christopher Isherwood found in Forster not just a friend, but a master – a model of homosexual writerly life. The master-pupil dynamics that would characterise the pair’s relationship for the remainder of their lives fused the personal with the professional, establishing an ethics of equality and mutual exchange that would ultimately underpin both Forster’s novel, and the collaborative queer aesthetic that would, under Isherwood’s care, finally bring it to birth. Having established the peculiarly generative power of their relationship, the chapter repositions both men within a complex queer dynasty, calling on contemporary theory to offer an affirmative answer to the poignant questioning in Forster’s Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson: ‘is there nothing which will survive when all of you also have vanished?’