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Baylor Johnson

E 314V – Turner

17 September 2007

“You’re an Englishman. I’m Another.”

Englishness and Sexuality in E.M. Forster’s Maurice

Over the course of E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, the titular character slowly “step(s) into the niche that England had prepared for him” (55). More significantly, however, he slowly comes to realize that he is, in fact, attracted to men. Maurice’s growth to maturity in these two seemingly incompatible regards – as a member of Edwardian English society and as a gay man – forms the central crisis of the novel. This crisis comes to a head when Maurice seeks the help of a hypnotist, Lasker Jones, to “cure” him of his homosexuality. In their brief exchange, the novel’s conflict between sexual desire and English propriety is discussed more directly than in perhaps any other passage throughout the novel. Upon hearing from the hypnotist that other countries other than his homeland no longer regard homosexuality as criminal, Maurice asks Lasker Jones:

             “Will the law ever be that in England?”

             “I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

             Maurice understood. He was an Englishman himself, and only his troubles had ever kept him awake. He smiled sadly. “It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted” (211). 

This passage from the novel reveals two of Forster’s central arguments: that sexuality – and especially homosexuality -- is an innate human characteristic, and that the rigidity of English culture stands in the way of what is an essential, human need.

In the staging of this conversation between the doctor and Maurice, Forster has created an outlet for the novel’s frankest and most unrestrained discussion of homosexuality, wherein he is able to reveal his true opinion on the subject, and most directly explain the novel’s stand. Lasker Jones is presented as a character who is free to speak outside the conventions and restrictions of Edwardian society – he is a scientist who is interested solely in his work, and for whom many of the formalities of English society seem trivial. Where Dr. Barry, a respectable member of society, was “shocked” by Maurice’s revelation, Lasker Jones is described in contrast as “bored” with “Maurice’s type” (214). Forster uses Lasker Jones earlier in the novel to foreground his [own] stand on homosexuality when during Maurice’s first visit to him when he describes Maurice’s “trouble” as “congenital homosexuality,” suggesting an understanding that it is innate from birth (180). In creating a character who is beyond the hang-ups and taboos of the society in which the novel takes place, Forster has presented the readers with an inlet into what he believes the true nature of homosexuality. The discussion between Maurice and Lasker Jones, therefore, is significant because, as a character outside of English society, the hypnotist is used by the author to critique English society from an outsider’s perspective. When Lasker Jones says that England’s criminalization of homosexuality is at odds with human nature, it is Forster’s revelation to the reader that he believes the same.

Homosexuality, however, is not the only part of human nature which English culture is “disinclined to accept” in the novel. Sex in general is a taboo in Forster’s England. From the very beginning of the novel, sex is an unmentionable – or at least very delicate – subject, and discussions of it are discreet for fear of improprietry. At the novel’s start, while Maurice is still at school, Mr. Ducie, his teacher, takes Maurice aside and teaches him about sex with crude illustrations drawn in the sand, and Mr. Ducie then panics at the prospect of having his illustrations seen (15). Later, during the wedding night of Clive and Anne, Clive “scare(s) her terribly,” because “[d]espite an elaborate education, no one had told her about sex” (164). These isolated incidents indicate what seems to be a pandemic ignorance of sex and sexuality in the world of Forster’s novel. The teacher’s horror provides a bit of comedy early in the novel, but it is indicative of a prudishness that pervades the narrative, and the bluntness of the description of Anne’s ignorance of sexuality, despite a formal English education, stresses the absurdity of such a failure of education. That the idea of sex is so broadly condemned or ignored by society throughout Forster’s novel is indicative of the disinclination to accept human nature of which Maurice and Lasker Jones discuss.

The men’s discussion also directly touches on a recurring theme in the novel: that homosexuality is acceptable and that homosexuals are free to be happy in times and places outside their contemporary England. Given his previous experiences with Clive Durham’s obsession with ancient Greece, as well as his personal research into Tchaikovsky, Maurice’s experiences with homosexuality were all too often associated with foreign lands and different eras. It therefore stands to reason that when the hypnotist so bluntly describes England’s callousness with regard to sexuality, Maurice is described as having “understood” (it is worth noting that this is perhaps the first time in the novel that Maurice “understood” anything the first time it was explained to him) (211). The conversation with the hypnotist so crystalizes the understanding in Maurice that England would never accept what he has accepted in himself that when he encounters the King and Queen – the most important symbols of England and Englishness there could possibly be – as he walks back from the hypnotist’s office, he “despise(s) them at the moment he bare(s) his head” (214). Maurice’s discussion with the hypnotist, therefore, serves as a catalyst for change in the young man, as he realizes he can no longer go on living as a member of English society – as he had been trying to do for his entire life – because he had “wrongly … tried to get the best of both worlds.” Maurice comes to realize that the world of English society will not accept him for who he is, and therefore choses to reject it in turn.

Issues of identity are mainstays of gay literature. E. M. Forster’s Maurice complicates these issues further with the addition of a discussion on national identity. Maurice’s long (and often accidental) quest for self-awareness and happiness becomes tangled with notions of patriotism and what it means to be an Englisman. In the end, however, he realizes that an obligation to one’s own true nature must supercede any obligations to a nation or a society. It isn’t until he comes to understand that he must be a man first and an Englishman second that Maurice is able to live “happily ever after.”