Connection in Forster’s Howards End Essay -- Howards End Essays

The epigraph of E.M. Forsters novel Howards End is just cardinal words totally connect. As economical as this communicate calculates, critics and interpreters have made much of this succinct epigraph and the theme of company in Howards End. Stephen Land, for example, cites a demand for connection, in the sense of moving freely betwixt the two Forsterian worlds - the two sides of the hedge, the everyday world of social norms and the rural or paradisal world of individual self-realization - has its roots in earlier stories... 1 He goes on to say that each character must locate or connect for himself the range of conceptual polarities exposed by the invoice - prose and passion, seen and unseen, masculine and feminine, new and old (Land, 165). Land reads the novel as around sort of compromise between these two worlds - the realm of social rightness and the realm of the individual. Other critics have made similar gestures. James McConkey, for one, feels that Margaret exit r econcile the human and transcendent realms so that she may live in harmony with the human the voice senses the connection through its remove from both. 2 These critics seem to confuse connection with reconciliation, seem to read the novel as a triumph for humanism and social justice. I feel this is a little bit of . . . fudging. True, the characters in Howards End experience reconciliation at the close of the novel - but reconciliation occurs only when love passes turn up of the novel, when the narrative ceases to be a bridge between two worlds. The marrow of the word connect diminishes as the novel progresses, gradually loses its mythic, transcendent meaning. The only connect moment referenced in the epigraph comes wh... ...any remnant of the bridge between the paradisal world and the world of manners and civic duty. The concept of connection is so degraded as to be unrecognizable. This is what happens after love fails. The airy omnibus will not stop at Howards End again. 1 Stephen Land. take exception and Conventionality in the Fiction of E.M. Forster. brisk York AMS Press, 1990 (165). Hereafter cited parenthetically. 2 James McConkey. The Novels of E.M. Forster. New York Cornell University Press, 1957 (79). 3 E.M. Forster. Howards End. New York Penguin, 1986 (154). Hereafter cited parenthetically. 4 E.M. Forster. The Celestial Omnibus. The Collected Tales of E.M. Forster. New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1952 (61). It seems wise to note that this story was first published in 1911, one course of study after Howards End appeared.