User:Boxclocke/Sandbox

Baylor Johnson

E 314V – Turner

17 September 2007 – Revised 30 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 what become apparent to him as two 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 exchange, the novel’s conflict between sexual desire and English propriety is discussed more directly than in any other passage throughout the novel. Upon hearing from the hypnotist that countries other than his homeland no longer regard homosexuality as criminal, Maurice asks:

             “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 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 essentialist view of homosexuality. Lasker Jones is presented as a character free to speak outside the conventions and restrictions of Edwardian society – he is an American for whom many of the formalities of English society would be foreign, as well as scientist who who regards his patients with objectivity and without judgment. Where Dr. Barry, an Englishman and respectable member of society, was “shocked” by Maurice’s revelation, Lasker Jones is described in contrast as “bored” with “Maurice’s type” (214). These opposing reactions of the American and English doctors to Maurice’s homosexuality again show how the novel’s English society is condemnatory of the main character and his identity crisis. Earlier in the novel, Lasker Jones presents the novel’s essentialist view of when he describes Maurice’s “trouble” as “congenital homosexuality,” “congenital” meaning inherent from birth (180). His understanding of homosexuality, therefore, stands in contrast to those of English characters such as Alec (and indeed Maurice, who at this point is attempting to rid himself of his urges) who believe that homosexuality is something that can be controlled and even overcome. In creating a character whose perceptions of people are not restrained by the taboos of the society depicted within the novel, Forster has presented the readers with a character who not only exists apart from said society, but is also able to actively critique it. The discussion between Maurice and Lasker Jones about England, therefore, is significant because the hypnotist is capable of critiquing 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 a revelation of the central conflict of the novel – essentialism vs. constructivism, here embodied by English culture vs. Maurice’s own innate sexuality.

Homosexuality, however, is not the only part of human nature which English culture is “disinclined to accept” in the novel. Sex in general – and in fact, any discussion of it – 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 impropriety. 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 also an early indicator of a prudishness with which society is plagued throughout the novel, 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 another example of the disinclination to accept human nature that Maurice and Lasker Jones discuss.

Their 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, and the fact that Lasker Jones is an American, Maurice’s experiences with homosexuality were frequently associated with foreign lands and different eras. It therefore stands to reason that when the hypnotist so bluntly describes contemporary English culture’s callousness with regard to sexuality, Maurice is described as having simply “understood” what the doctor meant (it is worth noting that this is perhaps the only time in the novel that Maurice “understood” anything the first time it was explained to him) (211). The conversation with the hypnotist so crystallizes 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 that exist, 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” (214). Maurice comes to realize that the world of English society will not accept him for who he is, and therefore chooses to reject it in turn. He turns his back on his culturally-defined role as an English gentleman, and ultimately chooses to live in a relationship with Alec.

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 frustrated by the culturally constructed ideals of patriotism and what it means to be an “Englishman.” In the end, however, he realizes that an obligation to one’s own true nature must supersede 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’s identity crisis is resolved. When Maurice chooses the identity which makes sense to him naturally as a gay man as opposed to the one fabricated for him as a proper Englishman, he and Alec are able to live “happily ever after.”