E. M. Forster Revisited

MEROPE 61-62 1 MEROPE Rivista semestrale di studi umanistici nuova serie ISSN 1121-0613 [ISBN-978-88-7497-692-8] Direttore: Francesco Marroni Comitato di Redazione: Gaetano Bonetta, Renzo D’Agnillo, Cristiana Di Biase, Roberto Garaventa, Anna Enrichetta Soccio, Tania Zulli Comitato Scientifico: Mirella Billi (Università della Tuscia, Viterbo) Ivan Callus (University of Malta) Mariaconcetta Costantini (Università d’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara) Fausto Ciompi (Università di Pisa) Gloria Lauri-Lucente (University of Malta) Martin McLaughlin (University of Oxford) Phillip Mallett (University of St. Andrews) Stefano Manferlotti (Università Federico II di Napoli) Andrew Mangham (University of Reading) Andrea Mariani (Università d’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara) Mohit K. Ray (Burdwan University, India) Frédéric Regard (Université de Paris-Sorbonne) Antonella Riem (Università di Verona) Philip Tew (Brunel University, London) Segreteria di Redazione: Francesca D’Alfonso e Michela Marroni Gli articoli proposti per la pubblicazione sono esaminati da due referees coperti da anonimato. Le eventuali revisioni richieste sono obbligatorie ai fini dell’accettazione. Con il contributo del Dipartimento di Economia Aziendale e del Dipartimento di Scienze Filosofiche, Pedagogiche ed Economico-Quantitative Università degli Studi Gabriele d’Annunzio di Chieti-Pescara Via dei Vestini n. 31 — 66100 Chieti 2 MEROPE Rivista semestarle di studi umanistici ANNO XXIV - N. 61-62 – Gennaio-Luglio 2015 – nuova serie – Euro 18,00 Sommario E.M. FORSTER REVISITED edited by Gloria Lauri-Lucente, Francesco Marroni, Tania Zulli Foreword ..................................................................................................... 5 Francesco Marroni, Troping the Heart: E.M. Forster’s Homoerotic Greenwood ............................................................................................. 9 Gloria Lauri-Lucente, Nostalgia and Nostophobia: Filming Englishness and Italianness in A Room with a View and Where Angels Fear to Tread ............................................................. 35 Anna Enrichetta Soccio, Houses, Property and Nation in Howards End ...................................................................................... 59 Tania Zulli, “Betraying the Country”: Ideological Deception in A Passage to India .............................................................................. 73 Stefania Michelucci, E.M. Forster, “The Story of a Panic”: An Anthropological Reading ............................................................. 93 Raffaella Antinucci, “A book on chivalry”: Questioning the Gentlemanly Code in Arctic Summer ............................................ 115 Neval Berber, E.M. Forster’s “Ruritanias” and Queer Masculinities ......................................................................... 145 James Corby, E.M. Forster: Muddling Through Italy ...................... 173 Ivan Callus, Friend or Country?: Narratives of Impossible Choice in Sophocles, E.M. Forster, and Beyond ....................................... 193 3 RECENSIONI ........................................................................................ 233 Raccogliendo la sfida di James Joyce: Marucci affronta l’universo joyciano (F. Marroni); Raccontare E.M. Forster: Arctic Summer fra biografia e immaginazione creativa (T. Zulli); Da Louise Ramé (1839-1908) a Ouida: uno studio sul romanzo popolare vittoriano (F. D’Alfonso); Carlotta Susca, David Foster Wallace nella Casa Stregata (C. Scarlato); Un altro Riccardo III: dubbi storici di Horace Walpole (F. Crisante); Peter Vassallo, British Writers and the Experince of Italy (F. D’Alfonso); Gloria Lauri-Lucente (ed.), Journal of AngloItalian Studies (P. Caruana Dingli). © 2015, Gruppo Editoriale Tabula Fati 66100 Chieti - Via Colonnetta n. 148 Tel. 0871 561806 - Fax 0871 446544 Cell. 335 6499393 Supplemento al n. 18 di IF (Aut. Trib. Chieti n. 5 del 20/06/2011) Direttore Responsabile: Carlo Bordoni Finito di stampare nel mese di Luglio 2015 dalla Digital Team di Fano (PU) 4 Letteratura Anna Enrichetta Soccio Houses, Property and Nation in Howards End Victorian houses were very complex structures. More than mere dwellings or private spaces where people could find physical shelter and familiar intimacy, houses were regarded as sanctuaries which encapsulated both important cultural values and generalized anxieties permeating nineteenth-century English society1. In his essay “Of Queen’s Gardens” (1865), John Ruskin described the Victorian idea of the divisions between the male and the female worlds in spatial terms — so contributing to the durable perception that the public sphere was male and the private sphere was female — claiming that the domestic space was sacred: [...] so far as [home] is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before those faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love, — so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler shade and light, — shade as of the rock in a weary land, and light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea; — so far it vindicates the name, and fulfils the praise, of home2. 1 On this topic see Karen Chase and Michael H. Levenson, The Spectacle of Intimacy. A Public Life for the Victorian Family, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000; Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 2003; Judith Flanders, The Victorian House, London, Harper Perennial, 2003; Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd (eds), Domestic Space. Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1999; Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio (eds), The House of Fiction as the House of Life: Representations of the House from Richardson to Woolf, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 2 John Ruskin, “Of Queen’s Gardens”, in The Complete Works of John MEROPE - Anno XIII n. 61-62 - Gennaio-Luglio 2015 59 Anna Enrichetta Soccio In defining the notion of the “separate spheres” which relied mainly on gender differences, Ruskin gave a clear interpretation of the ultimate significance of the nineteenth-century house. As a tangible expression of spiritual and moral values, the house became the symbol of domesticity, of hierarchy and authority as well as the embodiment of the Victorian vision of the world. Not only was the house an imaginative extension of its dwellers, their status and respectability, their tastes and beliefs, it was also the dynamic hub for such dense interconnections between public and private that it was mostly regarded as a living organism. As many studies have suggested, house, body and mind share the same images to the point that their specific characteristics are interchangeable: in his Poetics of Space, Bachelard proposes the idea of the house as “the topography of our intimate being”3; LeviStrauss develops a theory according to which people make houses in their own image and use houses and house-images “to construct themselves as individuals and groups”4, and Bourdieu describes the house as “the principle locus of the objectification of generative schemes”5. Such readings of the domestic space show that the house provides multiple reflections in terms of social identity, social organization, gender and psychology. The house is, in other words, the place where a person defines, negotiates, and reinvents him/herself; a place where the sense of family and privacy are inextricably linked with status and social recognition. In fact, as social history has largely demonstrated, domestic ideology and architecture have concurred to enforce the notion of the house as a spatial construct that reproduces class hierarchies, gendered Ruskin, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Weddenburn, Library Edition, 39 voll., George Allen-Longmans Green, London-New York, 1903-12, vol. 13, p. 122. 3 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Boston, Beacon Press, 1994, p. xxxvi. 4 On Levi-Strauss’s theory of “house-based society” and its readings see the introduction of Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (eds), About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 1-46. Here the quotation is on p. 3. 5 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 89. 60 “Howards End” distinctions and private/public dynamics of an entire nation, thus making it the locus of the tangible transformations of society over the centuries. This is all the more true with regard to Victorian England where national identity was primarily constructed around the concepts of family, morality, social status and property which were all closely connected with the cult of the house. However, amongst the many typologies of Victorian private buildings, it is the British country house that emphasizes the meaning attached to such an idea of house and, at the same time, turns out to be the British power incarnate: “In a nation where the wealthy or ruling elite rooted themselves in the country rather than in cities the country house became the emblem of national and artistic identity and destiny, of wealth and pride”6. For about four hundred years country houses have represented the soul of the nation contributing to forge an international image of social cohesion and cultural prestige based on familial and homely values. For good and bad, the country house has been regarded as a powerful symbol of the British national identity and as a paradigm for the bourgeois vision of the world and attitude towards life. By evoking the architectural discourse, Victorian and Edwardian writers have often singled out houses, and specifically country houses, as embodiments of national style in a very distinct way. One of the most interesting literary examples of the treatment of national architecture within the novel is E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) whose plot revolves entirely around houses and, in particular, around a Victorian country house7. The title of the novel in fact refers to the name of the country house where the story begins and ends, where the characters’ sense of the past and perspective upon the future are strategically forged in order to convey an image of England as a national fantasy. By purposely 6 Dan Cruickshank, The Country House Revealed: A Secret History of the British Ancestral Home, Random House Ebooks, 2012, p. 5. 7 See Francesco Marroni, “L’impossibile totalità di Howards End”, in Francesco Marroni and Mirella Billi, E.M. Forster: fantasmi e finzioni, Pescara, Tracce, 1990, pp. 28-29. 61 Anna Enrichetta Soccio focusing on real estate and houses, the novel reveals its author’s preoccupations with property, propriety and family both in terms of physical spatiality and of ideal embodiment of more spiritual values. The fact that Howards End was modelled after an actual house near Stevenage in Hertfordshire — a house in which Forster lived as a boy with his mother from 1883 to 1893 — must have played an important role on the novelist’s imagination8. Wilfred Stone writes that “houses, for Foster, were living symbols of an emotional and spiritual security that he only tasted in his half-orphaned experience [...] The spiritual reality is not separable from the material”9. However, given that the epistemic fin-de-siècle context offered a very unstable framework in which diverse forces were eroding the link between the institutional family and property, Forster’s representation of domestic spaces can be read as an appropriate milieu for the analysis of the transformations that were occurring in the traditional family and household. Published in 1910, the year in which, according to Virginia Woolf, “human character changed”10, Howards End portrays the condition of the English society in-between two worlds: the end of the Victorian age with all its contradictions and frustrations, and the beginning of the Modernist era with all its threats and novelties. Mostly regarded as a “condition-of-England novel”11, Howards End stages a story of struggle and contrasts in social classes12, personal relationships and ideologies which, despite the 8 In his biography of his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, Forster writes about that house and its significance in his life (E.M. Forster, Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography, 1797-1887, London, Arnold, 1956). 9 Wilfred Stone, The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E.M. Forster, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1962, p. 16. 10 Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vols i-iv, ed. Andrew McNeillie, London, Hogarth Press, 1986-94, iii, p. 421. 11 See, for example, Peter Widdowson, E.M. Foster’s “Howards End”: Fiction as History, London, Chatto and Windus, 1977, and Daniel Born, “Private Gardens, Public Swamps: “Howards End” and the Revaluation of Liberal Guilt”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 25, 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 141-159. 12 Lionel Trilling’s famous study on Forster speaks of “a story of the class 62 “Howards End” realistic texture that the characters animate, are part of an allegorical pattern concerning England and Englishness. Following Trilling’s suggestions, Paul Peppis further comments that “most of Forster’s literary works can be understood as national allegories that diagnose an ailing nation and offer literary cures for the malaise they anatomise”13. The critic also explains that for “national allegories” one has to mean “parables of Englishness enlivened and [...] fantasies of England reconciled”14. By looking back to the “old rural England” and forward to an utopian reconciliation between social and moral opposites, Forster’s allegory describes England and Englishness in terms of a “fable” or “romance” whose conclusion envisages, however, an “illegitimate and unconventional nation and character”15. Houses and properties help us trace the trajectory of such an allegory revealing, at the same time, the narrative strategies that Forster employs in his negotiation between the fading of the old world and the coming of a new civilization. Given that the novel’s main opposition, Wilcoxes vs. Schlegels, is played out in terms of contrasting houses and families16, it is interesting to see that in Howards End the representation of domestic space, furniture and objects is functional to render the picture of society at large. It is significant that, while emphasizing the physical continuity of characters and places, the narration war” (E.M. Forster, New York, New Directions, 1943, p. 102). 13 Paul Peppis, “Forster and England”, in The Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster, ed. David Bradshaw, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 47. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., p. 49. 16 See Stone, op. cit., pp. 237-238. Interestingly enough, in chapter XIX, Helen lists all Wilcoxes’ properties: “the Wilcoxes collect houses as your Victor collects tadpoles. They have, one, Ducie Street; two, Howards End, where my great rumpus was; three, a country seat in Shropshire; four, Charles has a house in Hilton; and five, another near Epsom; and six, Evie will have a house when she marries, and probably a pied-à-terre in the country — which makes seven. Oh yes, and Paul a hut in Africa makes eight. I wish we could get Howards End. That was something like a dear little house!” (E.M. Forster, Howards End, Introduction and Notes by David Lodge, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2000, p. 145. All references are to this edition and appear in brackets in the text). 63 Anna Enrichetta Soccio constantly implies that houses influence people and events. So does Wickham Place, the Schlegels’ house in London, whose life and death envisage Margaret’s necessity to find a permanent place where to live. At the same time, the approaching expiration of the lease and the following demolition of the building proleptically push the story towards its more natural “end”: Houses have their own ways of dying, falling as variously as the generations of men, some with a tragic roar, some quietly, but to an after-life in the city of ghosts, while from others — and thus was the death of Wickham Place — the spirit slips before the body perishes. It had decayed in the spring, disintegrating the girls more than they knew, and causing either to accost unfamiliar regions. By September it was a corpse, void of emotion, and scarcely hallowed by the memories of thirty years of happiness. Through its round-topped doorway passed furniture, and pictures, and books, until the last room was gutted and the last van had rumbled away. It stood for a week or two longer, open-eyed, as if astonished at its own emptiness. Then it fell. [...] The furniture, with a few exceptions, went down into Hertfordshire, Mr. Wilcox having most kindly offered Howards End as a warehouse (p. 219). For the Schlegels Wickham Place is a living member of the family, the one that holds all the memories and the family’s story alive. However, furniture and objects survive the place and go to Howards End, their most “natural” location, where Margaret’s search for permanency17 will finally come to full realization. Instead, for the Wilcoxes, who lack of any sense of belonging to a place, Howards End is simply a house (p. 84), with the obvious exception of Ruth Wilcox, the proprietor of Howards End for whom “[Howards End] had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir” (p. 84). Ruth’s personality is entirely in tune with the house 17 When Margaret is told that Oniton Grange has been let, she disappointedly replies: “”Where are we to live? said Margaret, trying to laugh. ”I loved the place extraordinarily. Don’t you believe in having a permanent home, Henry?””(p. 221). 64 “Howards End” — as if character and building lived in unison. In Helen’s letter to Margaret at the beginning of the novel, the description of the house and garden, although conducted from Helen’s point of view, follows the movements of Mrs Wilcox who is walking in and out and giving life to whatever she touches: Mrs. Wilcox trailing in beautiful dresses down long corridors [...] Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow, whose corner to the right I can just see. Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday — I suppose for rabbits or something, as she kept on smelling it [...]. And finally Mrs. Wilcox reappears, trail, trail, still smelling hay and looking at the flowers (p. 3, italics mine). The dominant metaphor is here mainly provided by Mrs Wilcox’s regal stride: her “trailing” along the domestic interiors and outside in the open air leaves indelible marks upon the reader’s mind. As appears evident, Forster chooses linguistic strategies which are more usual in poetry, such as repetition, anaphora, inversion and alliteration, in order to reproduce the sound of the dress upon the ground while Ruth is strolling along “her” familiar spaces. The contiguity of character and house so early in the novel is as an important semantic pivot of the story. In fact, such a narrative construction allows the reader to proceed with the identification of a place with one or more characters as part of a fictional technique that is based on symbolism18. And symbolically speaking, the pattern created by the use of houses and objects turns to be particularly helpful in recognizing the oppositions between classes, genders, attitudes and ideologies. Except for the fact that, at the end of the story, all these categories — classes, genders, attitudes and ideologies — find an unexpected resolution in an all-encompassing view of the world where oppositions are completely eliminated like in an Arcadian utopia. Typically, the identification between property and proprietor 18 John Edward Hardy, “Howards End: The Sacred Center”, in Critical Essays on E.M. Forster, Boston, Mass., G. K. Hall and Co., 1985, p. 124. 65 Anna Enrichetta Soccio is part of the Victorian sense of domesticity. In the case of Howards End, such a correlation is enhanced by the fact that the proprietor is a woman, Mrs Wilcox, whose narrative function links property, domesticity and the role of women at home together. The interesting aspect is that in the first ten chapters of the novel — that is to say, until Ruth Wilcox’s death — the images of the woman and her house are inseparable: “[Margaret] discerned that Mrs. Wilcox, though a loving wife and mother, had only one passion in life — her house — and that the moment was solemn when she invited a friend to share this passion with her” (p. 73). Even more exalting is the definition of the house as “the Holy of Holies into which Howards End had been transfigured” (p. 73). By speaking of the only “passion in life”, “Holy of Holies”, “transfiguration”, the narrator makes use of a religious language which suggests the idea of the house’s sacredness not only for Mrs Wilcox but also for Margaret who is so far unaware of the effects that the house may exert upon the “spiritual” women who venture beyond its doors. Even more interestingly, after Mrs Wilcox’s death, Margaret thinks more and more often of the importance of places. Convinced that “money is the warp of the world”, Margaret is asked what is instead “the woof” for her: she replies “Wickham Place” just like “[f]or Mrs Wilcox it was certainly Howards End” (p. 111). Margaret comments on the evidence that “places may ever be more important than people” but, quite surprisingly, she “expect[s] to end [her] life caring most for a place” (p. 111). In more than one sense, the novel’s ending fulfils such premises making Howards End the only place where Margaret will be able to realize herself as a woman, a wife, a sister. Neither Wickam Place, the Schlegels’ house in London, “irrevocably feminine” (p. 38), nor the Wilcoxes’ house in Ducie Street, “irrevocably masculine” (p. 38), nor Oniton Grange which Margaret imagines as her future home, but only Howards End comes to be “alive”. In her first visit to the house, Margaret is completely captured by the infinite energy that emanates from the place: [...] all people dead, nothing alive but houses and gardens. The obvious dead, the intangible alive, and — no connection at all between them! Margaret smiled. Would 66 “Howards End” that her own fancies were as clear-cut! Would that she could deal as high-handedly with the world! Smiling and sighing, she laid her hand upon the door. It opened. The house was not locked up at all (p. 171). Characteristically, while houses are depicted as human beings, human beings appear as inanimate things. Howards End is “alive”19, no matter if it is inhabited or not, and it is Margaret, the most natural and eligible owner of the house, that perceives its special “soul” and makes it the symbol of moral unity and national identity. That Margaret is legitimately the spiritual heir of the house is the sense of Ruth’s note to her husband just before dying. In her perceptiveness, Ruth immediately recognizes Margaret as the only one who is capable of seeing the house’s transfiguration and perceiving the house’s heartbeat. In Margaret, Ruth sees a more evolved version of herself though she admits that they represent different views of the world. As Thomas Churchill rightly points out: “Ruth is inherently feminine while Margaret is an inveterate feminist. Ruth did not need ‘to connect’, she was”20. Margaret can never become Ruth nor achieve Ruth’s spiritual stature; yet, Margaret’s growth is entirely within the same code of values as Ruth’s. For this reason, she is the only character who is able to combine the idea of house as genealogy and real estate with the idea of house as home and family. At first paradigmatically juxtaposed in a binary structure, the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes — the aesthetic and the utilitarian, the ideal and the realistic — are finally “connected” at Howards End, a place which re-emerges as a symbol of familiar unity and of 19 In Chapter XVII, when Margaret is still looking for a house, acutely replies to Henry making a clear distinction between the way in which women perceive houses and the way in which men treat them: “Gentlemen seem to mesmerize houses—cow them with an eye, and up they come, trembling. Ladies can’t. It’s the houses that are mesmerizing me. I’ve no control over the saucy things. Houses are alive. No?” (p. 132). 20 Thomas Churchill, “Place and Personality in Howards End”, Critique, 5, 1 (Spring/Summer 1962), p. 69, italics in the text. 67 Anna Enrichetta Soccio national tradition. The furniture and objects from Wickham Place give the house the cultural energy and the imaginative power which are necessary to complete Forster’s vision of the future of England. By uniting “[t]he feudal ownership of land” with “the modern ownership of movables” (p. 128), the country house becomes a paradigm for a renewed England. In other words, in his effort “to reconstruct Englishness and relocate an authentic England”21, Forster turns back to “the old rural England” just to give his readers a restored, though profoundly re-shaped vision of a nation that is “notably illegitimate and unconventional”22. In fact, Forster’s national allegory is far from being a celebration of the traditional bastions of the glorious English past. Rather, the location in the countryside serves the specific purpose to affirm that a true renovation of English society can start from a place that represents the “essence” of England and the most authentic roots of Englishness. If throughout the novel a sense of uneasiness about places and houses constantly hovers above so contributing to enhance the confusion between house and family, family and real estate, the end of the novel, in its idyllic idealization of a mythic land, offers a “connected” vision of England which comes out from different classes, genders, types, and views of the world. A new generation is coming to the fore as a hope of re-generation for a better future: From the garden came laughter. ”Here they are at last!” exclaimed Henry, disengaging himself with a smile. Helen rushed into the gloom, holding Tom by one hand and carrying her baby on the other. There were shouts of infectious joy. “The field’s cut!” Helen cried excitedly — “the big meadow! We’ve seen to the very end, and it’ll be such a crop of hay as never!” (p. 293) In this final passage, Nature, seen from the perspective of both its animal and vegetable kingdoms, triumphs over human struc21 22 68 Peppis, op. cit., p. 49. Ibid. “Howards End” tures: the new generation, represented by Tom and by Helen’s baby, “connects” the land (that is, space) with the future (that is, time). And the image of the hay23 — the same hay that Mrs Wilcox is smelling here and there in Helen’s opening letter — closes circularly the novel by conjoining the end with the beginning in a cohesive vision of England. Only in this final synthesis, the reader can finally understand Margaret’s reflection on the vitality of her own nation: England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of all her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary motion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the brave world’s fleet accompanying her towards eternity? (p. 150, italics mine). Unsurprisingly, the narrator acknowledges that England’s grandeur lies in its tangible concreteness, in a bunch of grass from the cut meadow, in the smell of hay. Yet, Forster seems to suggest that England’s grandeur also lies in its ability to transform and regenerate itself in a new though “unconventional and illegitimate”24 nation, being unconventionality and illegitimacy 23 For further analysis of the hay motif, see Burkhard Niederhoff, “E.M. Forster and the Supersession of Plot by Leitmotif. A Reading of Aspects of the Novel and Howards End”, Anglia, 112, 1994, pp. 341-363, E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel, Toronto, 1950, p. 51, James McConkey, The Novels of E.M. Forster, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1957, p. 126, and George H. Thomson, The Fiction of E.M. Forster, Deroit, Mich., Wayne State University Press, 1967, p. 181. 24 Peppis, op. cit., p. 57. Jeane N. Olson appropriately writes: “ In the last chapter of Howards End, Forster, a prophet far ahead of his time, projects an impressionistic vision of a radically different, more elastic middle-class family structure that presaged, in 1910, many of the characteristics now common to middle-class families at the end of the twentieth century” (“E.M. Forster’s 69 Anna Enrichetta Soccio recognized as those values that can lead the nation towards still unknown spiritual frontiers. That the “legitimate” heir of the house and, metonymically speaking, of the nation, is ultimately Leonard Bast’s son puts great emphasis on Forster’s need of reconciliation between the antagonistic worlds of the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels. The new “uncontaminated” generation represents the only possible solution for the civilizing process to eliminate inequality and shape the nation’s destiny. Ironically, the “rainbow bridge” evoked at the beginning of chapter XXII which exemplifies the holistic quality that Margaret attributes to Howards End — the only place that can accommodate differences25 — is the legacy bequeathed to the child of Leonard and Helen, the two characters in the novel who have a problematical relationship with houses. On the one hand, Leonard lives in what house-agents call a semi-basement (and other men call “a cellar”, p. 40), a “dark as well as stuffy” (p. 42) “little hole” (p. 41) in Camelia Road, a very popular London area where blocks of flats are built next to other blocks of flats as in a Dickensian vision of the city where buildings are “all very like one another”26, where the law of sameness reigns over any attempt to be different. Leonard’s house is, in other words, the antithesis of everything a house is supposed to be, and is, of course, the antithesis of both Ruth’s myth of the house and Helen’s opinion about real estates. On the other hand, Helen thinks that “furniture [...] alone endures while men and houses perish, and that in the end the world will be a desert of chairs and sofas — just imagine it! — rolling through infinity with no one to sit upon them” (pp.137Prophetic Vision of the Modern Family in Howards End”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 35, 3 (Fall 1993), p. 348). 25 It is interesting that, in the final chapter when Helen tries to remember Leonard, Margaret invites her sister to rejoice of her being different against the malady of sameness: “It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences — eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey” (p. 288). 26 Here we cannot help remembering the famous description of Coketown in Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). See Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Paul Schlicke, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 26. 70 “Howards End” 138). Bizarre and unusual as it may seem, Helen’s position highlights the importance of considering the spiritual inside as more valuable than the material outside: in this sense, Leonard becomes central to Forster’s discourse on modern civilization. Only Leonard, the “bastard” who has no house, no roots, no culture, “who is victimized by the civilizing forces that are shaping his nation’s identity”27 is able “to connect his inner life with the outer”28. Through his final journey to Howards End and his confession to Margaret to beg forgiveness, Leonard becomes the very symbol of the long-awaited connection of “prose” and “passion”. In the end, Leonard’s death, just as Ruth Wilcox’s death before — to which it has been compared for the use of similar symbols, language and binary structure — provides a moment of reflection for Margaret who finds that his death is “natural, but unreal” (p. 281). The choice of such contrasting adjectives conveys Forster’s ambiguity in interpreting Leonard’s position 29, which is, nonetheless, the same ambiguity that informs the whole story: the novelist purports a reading of the future by looking back to the idealized past (represented by Howards End, the house) but at the same time he bequeaths the difficult task to renew the sense of the national identity to a fake genealogy with no guarantee of success. After Leonard’s death, Margaret, who had started “from Howards End [...] to realize England” (p. 174), finishes to give shape to her perception of the nation at Howards End. The process of adjusting her sense of space to her sense of nation encompasses different stages, all directed to the reconciliation between opposites and to the achievement of a permanent connection of “the prose in us with the passion” (p. 159). The final scene offers a national 27 Pat C. Hoy II, “The Narrow, Rich Staircase in Forster’s Howards End”, Twentieth-Century Literature, 31, 2/3, E.M. Forster Issue (Summer-Autumn, 1985), p. 234. 28 Ibid., p. 233. 29 On Forster’s ambiguous treatment of Leonard, see Mary Pinkerton, “Ambiguous Connections: Leonard Bast’s Role in Howards End”, TwentiethCentury Literature, 31, 2/3, E.M. Forster Issue (Summer-Autumn, 1985), pp. 236-246. 71 Anna Enrichetta Soccio allegory in which the divisions that are dramatized throughout the novel — aesthetic / utilitarian, nature / civilization, poor / rich, etc... — are ultimately bridged and so open up to a positive future of England. “Live in fragments no longer”(p. 159) is Margaret’s deep yearning: to her, who “had chosen to see [life] whole” (p. 138), only Howards End can stand out as a locus of harmony out of the chaos of contemporary life. Paradoxically endowed with past as well as modern values, “the repository of national past and the nursery for the national future”30, Howards End is regarded as the metaphor of a unified national spirit against the complexity and fragmentation of modern civilization. Only that, by celebrating the return to the “old rural England” Forster escapes modernity and its complexities. 30 Henry S. Turner, “Empires of Objects: Accumulation and Entropy in E.M. Forster’s Howards End”, Twentieth-Century Literature, 46, 3 (Autumn 2000), p. 341. 72