Vital disconnection in Howards End

In the final scenes of Howards End, Schlegels are ascendant and Wilcoxes shamed and acquiescent. For many readers, however, the novel's competing impulses are resolved not in marriage, as was traditional in the novel of manners, but in the child of Leonard Bast and Helen Schlegel, presumably the inheritor of Ruth Howard Wilcox's house and land. These commentators generally regard the ending as exhibiting harmonious formal and thematic resolution, and see the promise of the famous epigraph "Only connect ..." as having been realized. Others, of course, have found the conclusion forced and implausible, and the novel's achievement undermined by plot contrivances, inadequate character development, and most notably by Forster's alleged cultural elitism. (1) Forster's privileging of Schlegelian values, now regarded as axiomatic, has been especially objectionable to some. "Forster doesn't really want connection at all," Wilfred Stone asserted nearly 40 years ago (266), epitomizing a chorus of challenges (before and since) to the novel's putative thematic vision. For Stone, Margaret and Helen Schlegel are domineering, destructive elitists who, having established at Howards End an idyllic sanctuary of "personal relations" and "the inner life," permit the devastated, uncomprehending Henry Wilcox to reside there. Stone's withering critique raised stimulating (and still germane) questions about the novel's formal and thematic integrity: Did Forster believe in the possibility of connection? What sorts of association (if any) does the novel actually advocate, and by what means might they be achieved? If Schlegels are "superior," what is such "superiority" actually worth in both personal and cultural terms? Can interaction between the antithetical dispositions ameliorate the extremes of both without effacing what is valuable in them? Most important for this essay, if Forster did not really want connection, is Howards End the "ethically evasive" novel that Stone believed it to be (258), and is its author elitist? (2)

Undoubtedly, Schlegels are more favorably presented than Wilcoxes, but their depiction is not always flattering, perhaps to mitigate the bias of which Forster must have been aware. In the final chapters, to cite but one example, Margaret appears to have transmuted into an imperialistic materfamilias, a female Henry in effect, who autocratically "straightens tangles" (288), adjusts "lopsidedness" (282), is "unable to forgive" (283), and "who had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives" (290). Initially, in privileging Schlegelian values (and thus his own) Forster seems merely to have inverted the novel's (and the culture's) prevailing hierarchy, though he certainly would have understood that the potential decadence of Schlegel "ivory-towerism" is hardly the appropriate antidote to the brutality of Wilcox hegemony, as Margaret herself often acknowledges. Clearly, then, the kind of synthesis the novel appears to advance and certainly the means for achieving it are highly problematic. Margaret's idealistic desire for a union of "the prose and the passion" and her persistent efforts to impose it are well-intentioned and may be preferable to Helen's arrogant and precipitous disengagement, but they result in an incredible resolution that emphasizes the book's thematic "failure" and reveals Forster's ambivalence concerning such a marriage.

The vexed interactions between Schlegels and Wilcoxes reflect larger (and ongoing) cultural tensions, in particular between the aesthetic and the practical. It is thus illuminating to examine the relationship between Forster's ambivalence and the novel's "failures" in the context of his ideas about art and the artist's function that were evolving as he wrote Howards End, ideas that he would only fully articulate in a series of related critical writings published more than two decades after the novel, in the thirties and forties. (3) The next section of this essay explores the character of Forster's aesthetic values as expressed in those writings, and the following sections look back to the novel and argue that it, like the critical writings, favors not a marriage but a salutary disconnection of disparate sensibilities. That is, the Schlegelian ethos--reflective, compassionate, visionary, progressive--must remain apart from the concentrated grasp of Wilcox pragmatism if art and culture are to be "passed on" (as Forster would later figure it in "Does Culture Matter?" [Two Cheers 104]) and have the transformative effect envisioned for them. Such a position, a cornerstone of Forster's aesthetics as expressed in his major critical phase, is nascent in Howards End and subverts the reconciliation that the novel ostensibly seeks.

In his study of Forster's criticism, Rukun Advani contends that Forster emphatically "refuses to be an elitist in any way" (112), that he did not regard the artist as "inherently superior to the ordinary person" and that he is "at pains to avoid giving artists the nearly superhuman status which aestheticism confers upon them" (99). (4) Forster was certainly careful to distance himself from the affectations of extreme aestheticism, yet if we turn to the critical writings we find that the positions Advani assigns to Forster are hardly unambiguous. These writings, challenging with increasing insistence any conservative or compulsory connection of the aesthetic and the practical, emphasize the sort of constructive tension between antithetical impulses that Howards End appears to advocate. In "The Ivory Tower" (1938), for example, Forster contends that a certain remove from society encourages self-development through introspection and contemplation. (5) A symbol of personal retreat, the ivory tower provides sanctuary to cultivate the temperament and sensibility essential for living imaginatively. Such a retreat into self-exploration is neither solipsistic nor socially irresponsible, and available not only to artists or to exceptional people in whatever discipline. Those emerging from the ivory tower are better prepared, Forster believes, to engage the complexity of life and art; while celebrating appreciators who become in their "minor way an artist," as he would describe them later (Two Cheers 106), he expresses regret (though not surprise) that too few aspire to such status. Falling early in his major critical phase, "The Ivory Tower" indicates Forster's ambivalence regarding connection, in that the aesthetic egalitarianism ostensibly posited here is undercut by a not altogether convincing resignation that the ivory tower will likely hold little appeal for those most in need of its benefits.