E. M. Forster's reconfigured gaze and the creation of a homoerotic subjectivity

Would you care to read my novel? ... To you it will reveal a new and painful world, into which you will hardly have occasion to glance again: a tiny world that is generally unknown to all who are not born in it.

--E. M. Forster to Florence Barger regarding Maurice (Selected Letters 1: 223)

While E. M. Forster's novels can certainly be read as "straight" by mainstream audiences, they simultaneously allow a gay male readership to identify in them a distinctively homoerotic subtext, a subjectivity that allows for a reading or readings that are distinct from the conventional heteronormative interpretation. One of the major ways in which Forster achieves this dual subjectivity lies in his radical reconfiguration of the male gaze as Jacques Lacan defined it, and as both feminist and psychoanalytic critics have applied it to twentieth-century literature and film. By switching the gendered object of the male gaze from female to male, and by disrupting the progress of his narratives at important moments during which the reader is invited to gaze on a tableau in which the male body is the central focal point, Forster invented a kind of narration that powerfully expresses male homoerotic desire while shrewdly maintaining the veneer of heterosexual conventionality.

By nineteenth-century standards the tableau is not necessarily unusual; Forster is not unique in allowing his narrators to indulge in describing highly visual scenes in which little action and no dialogue intrudes. Yet while in Victorian terms the tableau functioned to emphasize a critical, dramatic moment, a point frozen in time, Forster's tableaus tend to be disruptive rather than emphatic, and dynamic rather than static in terms of their effect on the narrative. In many cases his tableaus alter and drive forth the course of the plot dramatically, as will be discussed in the cases of his novels Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908). This essay will explore the manner in which Forster reconfigures the gaze in these tableaus to create a homoerotic subjectivity particularly designed to appeal to a gay male readership. Although the responses of heterosexual women to his alteration of the gaze may have been similar to those of gay men, particular clues embed ded in Forster's texts suggest ways in which a male homosexual audience is specifically being targeted.

As the field of queer theory has emerged, scholars have begun to explore the ways writers have found to express the homosexual perspective in works written before the open acknowledgment of homosexuality became acceptable. Ed Cohen has used the term "ec-centric" to describe men of the late Victorian period whose self-awareness drove them to find ways to express their "true" selves through their writing. "Ec-centric" writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had to invent ways to represent aspects of themselves that had been unrepresentable before (88); very often one can detect a homoerotic subtext in such writers' works. Cohen points to John Addington Symonds as one of the first scholars who persistently attempted to define what he considered an "aura of difference" in literature in which he perceived such a subtext, as in Sidney and Whitman. Writing in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Symonds was perhaps the first to acknowledge and to attempt to delineate the concept of "homote xtuality" in literature. (1)

Contemporary scholars have continued Symonds's endeavor to identify and to delineate homotextuality. Ruth Robbins's work on masculinity and homoeroticism in the poetry of Oscar Wilde and A. E. Housman provides an example of what such a study can yield. Robbins refers to both of these poets' attempt to use a "poetic code" to articulate homosexual desire in their poetry (138). Of Housman she writes that "A reader would have to work at being shocked or dazzled by A Shropshire Lad-- unless, that is, (s)he was 'in the know' about the code which Housman was using" (151). Housman's poems can be read "straight," that is, they can yield a heterosexual and therefore entirely "acceptable" interpretation (151). And while Wilde's works were picked apart by his prosecutors during his public scandal in an attempt to find evidence for the author's sexuality, surely it was the vehemence of the public backlash against him that precipitated such an attack on his works. Had he not become known publicly as a "sodomite," his writi ngs no doubt would have continued to be read as "straight," just as Housman's were. As Alan Sinfield has written of The Picture of Dorian Gray, it was not necessary for Wilde to characterize his characters as homosexuals in order to fully explore his interest in homoerotic themes (100).

Forster follows Wilde and Housman, whose work he particularly admired, in producing literature that could be read as entirely conventional but also as homoerotic, and he does this by means of his visual tableaus. Certainly the homoeroticism of these tableaus was as recognizable to those of Forster's contemporaries who were sensitive to the homoerotic subjectivity he creates as it is to such readers and critics today. The episode of George Emerson's and Lucy Honeychurch's first kiss in the Italian countryside in A Room with a View provides one of the best examples of such a tableau in Forster's fiction. This tableau illustrates Forster's technique of using visual aspects alone to tell the story Moreover, it illustrates the manner in which Forster uses the tableau to disrupt the narrative and to drive all of the ensuing events of the novel. In a field overrun with violets, described as "irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam," George is described as standing at its brink, "like a swimmer who prepares" (80). The image of a swimmer invites the reader to envision the young man undressed or undressing, despite the fact that the setting is a meadow. Moreover, the scene foreshadows another important tableau later in the novel when George will go bathing. When Lucy stumbles upon George in this meadow, neither character speaks. Overcome with emotion, George presses toward Lucy and kisses her passionately, beginning a chain of reactions that will drive the remainder of the novel's plot.