Maurice (novel) - Wikipedia
Maurice (novel)
_Forster.jpg) UK first edition cover | |
| Author | E. M. Forster |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Gay novel |
| Publisher | Hodder Arnold |
Publication date | January 1971 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 256 |
| ISBN | 0-713-15600-7 |
Maurice is a novel by E. M. Forster. A tale of homosexual love in early 20th-century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays through university and beyond. It was written in 1913–1914, and revised in 1932 and 1959–1960.[1][2] Forster was an admirer of the poet, philosopher, socialist and early gay activist Edward Carpenter, and following a visit to Carpenter's home at Millthorpe, Derbyshire in 1913, was inspired to write Maurice. The cross-class relationship between Carpenter and his working-class partner, George Merrill, presented a real-life model for that of Maurice and Alec Scudder.[3][4]
Although Forster showed the novel to a select few of his trusted friends (among them SIegfried Sassoon, Lytton Strachey, Edward Carpenter, Christopher Isherwood, Xiao Qian and Forrest Reid),[5][6] it was published only posthumously, in 1971. Forster did not seek to publish it during his lifetime, believing it to have been unpublishable during that period due to public and legal attitudes to same-sex love. A note found on the manuscript read: "Publishable, but worth it?". Forster was determined that his novel should have a happy ending, but also feared that this would make the book liable to prosecution while male homosexuality remained illegal in the UK.[7]
There has been speculation that Forster's unpublished manuscript may have been seen by D.H. Lawrence and influenced his 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which also involves a gamekeeper becoming the lover of member of the upper classes.[8]
The novel has been adapted by James Ivory and Kit Hesketh-Harvey as the 1987 Merchant Ivory Productions film Maurice, for the stage, and as a 2007 BBC Radio 4 Classic Serial by Philip Osment.
Plot summary[edit]
Maurice Hall, age fourteen, discusses sex and women with his prep-school teacher Ben Ducie just before Maurice progresses to his public school. Maurice feels removed from the depiction of marriage with a woman as the goal of life.
Some years later, while studying at Cambridge, Maurice befriends a fellow student Clive Durham. Durham introduces him to ancient Greek writings about same-sex love, including Plato's Symposium, and after a short time the two begin a romantic relationship, which continues until they have left university.
After visiting Rome, Durham falls ill; on recovery, he ends his relationship with Maurice, professing he is heterosexual and marrying a woman. Maurice is devastated, but he becomes a stockbroker, in his spare time helping to operate a Christian mission's boxing gym for working-class boys in the East End, although under Clive's influence he has long since abandoned his Christian beliefs.
He makes an appointment with a hypnotist, Mr. Lasker Jones, in an attempt to "cure" himself. Lasker Jones refers to his condition as "congenital homosexuality" and claims a 50 per cent success rate in curing this "condition". After the first appointment, it is clear that the hypnotism has failed.
Maurice is invited to stay with the Durhams. There, at first unnoticed by him, is the young under-gamekeeper Alec Scudder (called Scudder for large passages of the book), who has noticed Maurice. One night, a heartbroken Maurice calls for Clive to join him. Believing that Maurice is calling for him, Alec climbs to his window with a ladder and the two spend the night together.
After their first night together, Maurice panics, fearing he will be exposed as a homosexual. Alec is wounded by Maurice's refusal to answer his letters, and threatens to expose him. Maurice goes to Lasker Jones one more time. Knowing that the therapy is failing, he tells Maurice to consider relocating to a country where same-sex relationships are legal, such as France or Italy. Maurice wonders if same-sex relationships will ever be acceptable in England, to which Lasker Jones replies "I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature."
Maurice and Alec meet at the British Museum in London to discuss the blackmail. It becomes clear that they are in love with each other, and Maurice calls him Alec for the first time.
After another night together, Alec tells Maurice that he is emigrating to Argentina and will not return. Maurice asks Alec to stay with him, and indicates that he is willing to give up his social and financial position, as well as his job. Alec does not accept the offer. After initial resentment, Maurice decides to bid Alec farewell. He is taken aback when Alec is not at the harbour. In a hurry, he makes for the Durhams' estate, where the two lovers were supposed to have met before at a boathouse. He finds Alec, who assumes Maurice had received the telegram Alec had sent to his residence. Alec had changed his mind, and intends to stay with Maurice, telling him that they "shan't be parted no more".
Maurice visits Clive and outlines what has happened with Alec. Clive is left speechless and unable to comprehend. Maurice leaves to be with Alec, and Clive never sees him again.
Original ending[edit]
In the original manuscripts, Forster wrote an epilogue concerning the post-novel fate of Maurice and Alec that he later discarded, because it was unpopular among those to whom he showed it. This epilogue can still be found in the Abinger edition of the novel. This edition also contains a summary of the differences between various versions of the novel.
The Abinger reprint of the Epilogue retains Maurice's original surname of Hill. (Although this surname had been chosen for the character before Maurice Hill (geophysicist) was even born, it certainly could not be retained once the latter had become a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, Forster's own College. It might, of course, have been changed before that time.)
The epilogue contains a meeting between Maurice and his sister Kitty some years later. Alec and Maurice have by now become woodcutters. It dawns upon Kitty why her brother disappeared. This portion of the novel underlines the extreme dislike that Kitty feels for her brother. The epilogue ends with Maurice and Alec in each other's arms at the end of the day discussing seeing Kitty and resolving that they must move on to avoid detection or a further meeting.
Reception[edit]
Critical reception in 1971 was, at best, mixed. C.P. Snow, in The Financial Times, found the novel 'crippled' by its "explicit purpose", with the ending "artistically quite wrong" (a near universal criticism at the time).[9] Walter Allen in the Daily Telegraph, characterised it as "a thesis novel, a plea for public recognition of the homosexual", which Forster had "wasted" himself doing, instead of an autobiographical work.[9] For Michael Ratcliffe, in The Times, it stands as "the least poetic, the least witty, the least dense and the most immediately realistic of the six novels".[9] Philip Toynbee, in The Observer, found the novel "deeply embarrassing" and "perfunctory to the point of painful incompetence", prompting him to question "whether there really is such a thing as a specifically homosexual sensibility". Toynbee went on to state that he could "detect nothing particularly homosexual about Maurice other than it happens to be about homosexuals."[9]
Somewhat more positively, Paddy Kitchen, in The Times Educational Supplement, thought that the novel "should be taken on the terms it was conceived and not as some contender to... Howards End." In delineating "a moral theme", Forster is, in Kitchen's view, "the ideal person."[9] V.S. Pritchett, in The New Statesman, found the character of Alec "a good deal better drawn" than Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover, although found the dull Maurice, shorn of Forster's "intelligence and sensibility", to be hardly believable.[9] But Cyril Connolly, in The Sunday Times, found "considerable irony" in the fact that it is Maurice, not Clive, the "sensitive young squire", who "turns out to be the incurable."[9]
For George Steiner in The New Yorker, the modest achievement of Maurice served to magnify the greatness of A Passage to India:
Adaptations[edit]
The novel was made into a film Maurice (1987), directed by James Ivory and starring James Wilby as Maurice, Hugh Grant as Clive, and Rupert Graves as Alec.
A stage adaptation, written by Roger Parsley and Andy Graham, was produced by SNAP Theatre Company in 1998 and toured the UK, culminating with a brief run at London's Bloomsbury Theatre. Shameless Theatre Company staged another production in 2010 at the Above the Stag Theatre in London.[10] Above the Stag staged it again in September/October 2018, as part of the theatre's first season in their new premises.[11] It was directed by James Wilby. The US premiere opened on 24 February 2012 at the New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco.[12]
A retelling and continuation of the novel by William di Canzio, titled Alec, was published in 2021.[13]
See also[edit]
- Ernesto, a novel by Umberto Saba written in 1953 and published posthumously in 1975
References[edit]
- ^ Miracky, James J. (2003). Regenerating the Novel: Gender and Genre in Woolf, Forster, Sinclair and Lawrence. New York City: Routledge. p. 55. ISBN 0-4159-4205-5.
- ^ Isherwood, Christopher (2010). Katherine Bucknell (ed.). The Sixties: Diaries, Volume Two 1960–1969. New York City: HarperCollins. p. 631. ISBN 978-0-06-118019-4.
- ^ Symondson, Kate (25 May 2016) E M Forster's gay fiction . The British Library website. Retrieved 18 July 2020
- ^ Rowse, A. L. (1977). Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature, and the Arts. New York City: Macmillan. pp. 282–283. ISBN 0-88029-011-0.
- ^ Laurence, Patricia Ondek, 1942- (2003). Lily Briscoe's Chinese eyes : Bloomsbury, modernism, and China. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. p. 196. ISBN 978-1-61117-176-1. OCLC 835136845.
- ^ Phillips, Richard; Shuttleton, David; Watt, Diane (2000). De-Centering Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis. Routledge. p. 135. ISBN 9780415194662.
- ^ Forster 1971, p. 236.
- ^ King, Dixie (1982) "The Influence of Forster's Maurice on Lady Chatterley's Lover" Contemporary Literature Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter, 1982), pp. 65-82
- ^ a b c d e f g h Reprinted in Gardner, Philip (ed) (1973) E.M. Forster: The Critical Heritage London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 433-481. ISBN 0 7100 7641 X
- ^ "ATS Theatre: Maurice". Archived from the original on 31 July 2012. Retrieved 10 October 2010.
- ^ "Review of Maurice". Retrieved 26 July 2019.
- ^ "NCTC – Maurice". Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 19 February 2012.
- ^ Chee, Alexander (21 September 2021). "The Afterlives of E.M. Forster". The New Republic. ISSN 0028-6583. Retrieved 19 October 2021.
- Sources
- Forster, E. M. Maurice. London: Edward Arnold, 1971.
External links[edit]
 | Wikiquote has quotations related to Maurice (novel). |
- Maurice plot summary and links at Aspects of E. M. Forster.
- Transvaluing Immaturity: Reverse Discourses of Male Homosexuality in E.M. Forster's Posthumously Published Fiction, Stephen Da Silva, Spring 1998.
- Heroes and Homosexuals: Education and Empire in E. M. Forster, Quentin Bailey, Autumn 2002.
- Roaming the Greenwood, Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books, Vol. 21 No. 2, 21 January 1999.
- Maurice at the British Library
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' 모리스 '( Maurice )는 E.M. 포스터 가 1913년 에 집필한 소설 (출판은 사후인 1971년 ), 또 그것을 원작으로 1987년 에 제작된 영국 영화 .
20세기 초반의 영국 을 무대로 서로 끌어들이면서도 대조적인 인생을 걸어가는 동성애 의 남성들을 그린다.
스토리 [ 편집 ]
동성애가 범죄로 여겨진 20세기 초반의 영국 케임브리지 . 범용한 청년 모리스는 지적인 클라이브와 친밀해지고, 곧 서로 연애감정을 안게 되지만, 고결한 클라이브는 육체관계를 거절하면서 학생시절을 마친다. 사회에 나와 어른이 되고 나서도 붙지 않고 떠나지 않는 우정은 계속되지만, 스스로의 성충동을 어쩔 수 없이 고독하게 괴롭히는 두 사람은, 곧 서로를 다치게 되게 된다. 정치가를 목표로 하는 클라이브가 상류의 여성과 결혼한 것을 계기로, 친구 관계가 부활한다. 모리스는 클라이브 저택의 젊은 사냥터 번 알렉에게 성 지향을 간파한다.
일본어 번역 [ 편집 ]
- 『모리스』카타오카 시노부 역, 후소샤 , 1988년
- 『모리스』 카타오카 시노부역, 후소샤 엔터테인먼트 문고(개역판), 1994년 ISBN 978-4594014568
- 『모리스』카가야마 타쿠로 역, 코분샤 고전 신역문고 , 2018년 ISBN 978-4334753788
===
Maurice
by
4.06 · Rating details · 35,716 ratings · 2,855 reviews
Maurice is heartbroken over unrequited love, which opened his heart and mind to his own sexual identity. In order to be true to himself, he goes against the grain of society’s often unspoken rules of class, wealth, and politics.
Forster understood that his homage to same-sex love, if published when he completed it in 1914, would probably end his career. Thus, Maurice languished in a drawer for fifty-seven years, the author requesting it be published only after his death (along with his stories about homosexuality later collected in The Life to Come).
Since its release in 1971, Maurice has been widely read and praised. It has been, and continues to be, adapted for major stage productions, including the 1987 Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby. (less)
Forster understood that his homage to same-sex love, if published when he completed it in 1914, would probably end his career. Thus, Maurice languished in a drawer for fifty-seven years, the author requesting it be published only after his death (along with his stories about homosexuality later collected in The Life to Come).
Since its release in 1971, Maurice has been widely read and praised. It has been, and continues to be, adapted for major stage productions, including the 1987 Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Hugh Grant and James Wilby. (less)
Paperback, 256 pages
Published December 17th 2005 by W. W. Norton Company (first published 1971)
4.06 ·
· 35,716 ratings · 2,855 reviews
listen that might be just my opinion but if a lgbt book from 1913 has a happy ending there is absolutely no excuse for gays dying in books in 2019
Jun 01, 2021chai ♡ rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: classics, read-in-2021, adult, fiction, lgbtq-rep, lgbtq-achillean
kicking off pride month with a gay classic!
Mar 27, 2014Glenn Sumi rated it really liked it · review of another edition
E.M. Forster ( Howards End , A Room With A View ) finished this gay-themed novel in 1914, and though he showed it to some close friends, he didn't publish it in his lifetime. It eventually came out after his death, in the early 1970s.
What a gift to have a novel about same sex love written a century ago by one of the premier 20th century British authors!
When Forster penned Maurice, homosexuality was so taboo that there was no name for it. For a man to be with another man was a criminal offense. One of the most touching things about this very moving book is seeing the protagonist – the closeted, very ordinary stockbroker Maurice – struggling to describe who he is and what he's feeling. He eventually comes up with something about Oscar Wilde. So very sad.
But how triumphant for Forster to have written this book and dedicated it "to a happier year." No one would argue that this is Forster's best novel. But it's an invaluable document about a group of men who experience the love that dare not speak its name (to borrow from Wilde).
I appreciate the fact that Maurice, unlike Forster himself, is a very unremarkable man: he's conservative, a bit of a snob, not very interested in music or philosophy and rather dull. But he's living with this extraordinary secret that affects his entire life. And the book shows how he deals with it, in his secretive relationship with his Cambridge friend Clive Durham, and later with gamekeeper Alec Scudder. ---
It would have been so easy for Forster to write a novel about a sensitive, soulful, brilliant, sympathetic character. How could we not love him, even though he's gay? But that seems to be part of his point. Maurice is a middle-class Everyman – certainly he's not as intelligent as Clive – but isn't he as worthy of love as anyone else?
정미님의 글을 읽고, 모리스에 대해 찾아보았습니다. 책읽는 것은 시간이 걸려, 우선 영화부터 보았습니다. 동성애를 느끼는 자기의 아이덴티티를 찾아가는 것은 알겠는데 계급관계 위에선 영국신사라는 것이 거슬리게 보이던군요. 결국 계급관계를 넘어서 사랑을 찾는 이야기는 마음에 들고요. 그런데 몇가지 평을 읽었더니 제가 생각하지 못한 점을 지적하더군요. 모리스가 그리 뛰어난 사람이 아니라는 거에요. 그뿐아니라 그점이 중요하다는 거에요. 설명은 밑의 인용문에.
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나는 모리스가 포스터 자신과 달리 매우 눈에 띄지 않는 사람이라는 사실에 감사합니다. 그는 보수적이고 약간 속물이며 음악이나 철학에는 별로 관심이 없고 오히려 둔합니다. 하지만 그는 평생을 좌우하는 이 특별한 비밀을 안고 살아가고 있습니다. 그리고 이 책은 그가 케임브리지 친구인 클라이브 더럼(Clive Durham), 그리고 나중에는 사냥터지기 알렉 스커더(Alec Scudder)와의 비밀스러운 관계에서 어떻게 대처하는지 보여줍니다.
Forster에게는 민감하고, 영혼이 풍부하고, 훌륭하고, 동정적인 인물에 대한 소설을 쓰는 것은 매우 쉬웠을 것입니다. 그런 사람이라면 게이인데도 어떻게 그를 사랑하지 않을 수 있겠습니까? 그러나 그것은 그의 요점의 일부인 것 같습니다. Maurice는 중산층의 평범한 사람입니다. 확실히 그는 Clive만큼 똑똑하지 않습니다. 그래도 그는 다른 누구보다 사랑받을 가치가 있지 않겠습니까?
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Some details in the book are dated. The language at times feels stilted. The class system isn't as pronounced today as it was then. And of course there's a whole new attitude towards homosexuality and thousands of books to reflect that.
But there are still people and organizations trying to "cure" others of homosexuality (think of the group Exodus); young people are still committing suicide because of their sexuality; gays and lesbians are still choosing to live a closeted life by marrying members of the opposite sex; and let's not forget that in some parts of the world, being gay is cause for death.
So really: how dated is this book?
Considering that authors decades after Forster wrote veiled gay characters in straight drag, or killed off one or more characters (see: Brokeback Mountain), how revolutionary is it to have a gay love story with a happy ending?
It's absolutely revolutionary.
Now: who's going to write the sequel? (less)
---
Some details in the book are dated. The language at times feels stilted. The class system isn't as pronounced today as it was then. And of course there's a whole new attitude towards homosexuality and thousands of books to reflect that.
But there are still people and organizations trying to "cure" others of homosexuality (think of the group Exodus); young people are still committing suicide because of their sexuality; gays and lesbians are still choosing to live a closeted life by marrying members of the opposite sex; and let's not forget that in some parts of the world, being gay is cause for death.
So really: how dated is this book?
Considering that authors decades after Forster wrote veiled gay characters in straight drag, or killed off one or more characters (see: Brokeback Mountain), how revolutionary is it to have a gay love story with a happy ending?
It's absolutely revolutionary.
Now: who's going to write the sequel? (less)
Jan 14, 2020Elle (ellexamines) rated it it was amazing
The second dream is more difficult to convey. Nothing happened. He scarcely saw a face, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend.”
Maurice follows the story of Maurice, a gay man in the early 1900s, as he falls in love, gets his heart broken, and gets his heart repaired. This book hit me… really hard.
There are two love stories here, one between Maurice and his school partner, and one between him and a garden worker. In one of these, his class colleague asks for their relationship to never go beyond kissing; he is always at arms’ length, until he is discarded altogether. In one of these, he is free to love as he is, freed from the bounds of false intellectualism and performance.
It’s not clear from the summary how sectioned this book is, but it is decidedly split: the first half deals with Clive and the eventual breakdown of that relationship, while the second half deals with Maurice’s attempts to ‘cure’ himself and then eventually, with Alec. I found the first half of this novel interesting. The second half made me cry of happiness. It’s infused with so much more hope.
The final scene focuses point of view on Clive, framed in the light, while Maurice is a voice in the dark; that, though, is his happy ending. Maurice ends the novel in love in the dark, while Clive ends the novel thinking that his lack of love in the light is superior. (It is we, as the audience, who must make our own decisions on that matter.) I enjoyed the movie, which I saw before reading the book, a lot. Though it’s easy to quibble with certain changes made from the book to the movie, there’s one bit I particularly like: the final shot, in which Clive looks out at the greens, wondering what he could have had, had he not been afraid.
In so doing, Forster creates an idea of love in the dark as a positive thing. This reminded me of that quote from Black Sails:
“In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom in the dark once someone has illuminated it.”
I love how Jami @JamiShelves put it in her review:
“Forster invokes the concept of the Greenwood as a metaphor for relationships existing outside the socially accepted framework for romance. The Greenwood exists as an unrestrained space, drawing connotations of 'the wilderness'. The country acts as a locus for desire, its existence outside the restraints of society and allowing desire to flourish unrestrained.”
There’s something profound about giving a happy ending to two men falling in love in a time where they were few and far between. In the outro, E.M. Forster says this:
“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”
When this book was written, in 1913 and 1914, this seemed almost ridiculous, that two men could fall in love, and not marry, and be happy. Forster wrote this novel almost to challenge that idea. This book could not even published until after his death, in 1971, and was then incredibly controversial. This book made me feel like I believe in love again.
Also, and this is only a minor spoiler, but I think about this scene a lot:
“You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”
(view spoiler)
TW: conversion attempts & suicidal ideation.
(view spoiler)
Blog | Twitter | Instagram | Spotify | Youtube | About | (less)
Jul 30, 2020Carolyn Marie Castagna rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: all-time-favorites, classics-i-ve-read
Maurice is a book, among few others, where I’d like to not only share a select few quotes with you, but transcribe the whole story from start to finish. I’d also love to delve deep into the story behind the book, and its creator E. M. Forster. Maurice is “his story” in two senses of the term: firstly, it is a story that was born from his mind and his hand, and secondly, from his own experiences.
He begins this book with the dedication: “Begun 1913, Finished 1914, Dedicated to a Happier Year.” Forster made arrangements to have it remain unpublished until after his death in 1970. At the time that he wrote this, homosexuality was illegal in England. A character from Maurice says at one point in the story, “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” Homosexuality was eventually legalized in 1967, just 3 years before Forsters death. Imagine waiting and wishing your whole life for your own country's acceptance, and getting it at age 88. Out of his 91 years of living, only 3 were ones of legal freedom. While reading about Maurice’s own internal struggle, I couldn’t help but feel that Forster was using Maurice as a way to give voice to his own private toil. “He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.”
Forster showed, in a heartbreaking yet beautiful way, how Society can influence people to the point of dishonesty. Forced to put up walls between their true self and who they think they should be. Leading to them not only betraying who they “love,” but betraying themselves. One of the characters askes the other, “After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”
At times Maurice being a “gentleman” seemed sexist, elitist, and proud. Yet, there comes a point when station, position, sex, and education don’t matter. That is the profound truth about love, it conquers all. “He educated Maurice’s spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought ‘Am I led; am I leading?’ Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.”
Being a novelist, Forster had a power that neither England, God, or anyone could tamper with. That is, he could give Maurice the life and ending that was never given to himself. He held the pen, he was Maurice’s creator, and being so meant that he was in control of his own character’s fate. Fiction warrants everything, all the author needs to do is write. “At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world.”
E. M. Forster on writing the ending of Maurice:
“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and _____ still roam the greenwood.” (less)
He begins this book with the dedication: “Begun 1913, Finished 1914, Dedicated to a Happier Year.” Forster made arrangements to have it remain unpublished until after his death in 1970. At the time that he wrote this, homosexuality was illegal in England. A character from Maurice says at one point in the story, “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.” Homosexuality was eventually legalized in 1967, just 3 years before Forsters death. Imagine waiting and wishing your whole life for your own country's acceptance, and getting it at age 88. Out of his 91 years of living, only 3 were ones of legal freedom. While reading about Maurice’s own internal struggle, I couldn’t help but feel that Forster was using Maurice as a way to give voice to his own private toil. “He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.”
Forster showed, in a heartbreaking yet beautiful way, how Society can influence people to the point of dishonesty. Forced to put up walls between their true self and who they think they should be. Leading to them not only betraying who they “love,” but betraying themselves. One of the characters askes the other, “After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”
At times Maurice being a “gentleman” seemed sexist, elitist, and proud. Yet, there comes a point when station, position, sex, and education don’t matter. That is the profound truth about love, it conquers all. “He educated Maurice’s spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought ‘Am I led; am I leading?’ Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.”
Being a novelist, Forster had a power that neither England, God, or anyone could tamper with. That is, he could give Maurice the life and ending that was never given to himself. He held the pen, he was Maurice’s creator, and being so meant that he was in control of his own character’s fate. Fiction warrants everything, all the author needs to do is write. “At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world.”
E. M. Forster on writing the ending of Maurice:
“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and _____ still roam the greenwood.” (less)
Apr 23, 2014Jasmine rated it really liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: in-english, fiction, 2015, classics, bloomsbury, lgbt, penguin-classics-edition, e-m-forster, modernism
"Begun 1913
Finished 1914
Dedicated to a Happier Year”
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) wrote Maurice (*) as a relatively young man, aged 34, at a time when old Europe was starting to fall apart. However, it was not published until 1971, a year after his death. Maurice is probably the first literary work of fiction to deal with male homosexuality in such an open, sincere fashion. At the time it was written, men in the UK could still be imprisoned for ‘acts of gross indecency’, as in the Oscar Wilde trial. Publishing this book at that time would have destroyed the deeply admired English novelist. Of course, E. M. Forster’s readers had no idea that the author of very successful novels such as Howards End and A Passage to India loved men. Nevertheless, he let his work be reviewed by his literary friends who knew of his sexuality: He was loosely connected with the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, the literary and artistic circle with such prominent members as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. For the time, the members of the Bloomsbury Group had a very open and unconventional approach to sexuality, and among this group E. M. Forster’s novel could be discussed openly. In public, however, he successfully covered up his sexuality, and I wonder if this might be one of the reasons why I found Forster’s Howards End rather frigid and detached. I second Katherine Mansfield when she complains about Howards End: “E.M. Forster never gets any farther than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea " (Introduction p. xxiv).
Well, in Maurice, E. M. Forster pours hot boiling water over spicy tea leaves.
Forster intriguingly describes Maurice Hall’s journey of self-discovery and his sexual awakening. Maurice comes from a conventional middle-class background with a lukewarm mentality. He is very much an average guy (even though Forster describes him as rather good-looking and athletic): not very intellectual, and a bit arrogant. His being sexually different initially comes across as a hindrance to his plans to follow in his deceased father’s footsteps: “Maurice was stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him.” (p.45). Nevertheless, early in the novel Forster gives hints that Maurice has always known he is ‘different’: Maurice remarks early on “I think I shall not marry”, and he is rather baffled when he realises that he is overwhelmed by the fact that his mother’s garden boy George – with whom he used to play in the ‘woodstack’ when he was a boy – gave notice and left. Maurice is, after all, a snob and he would never consider himself a friend of George. Nevertheless, George’s departure unsettles him and he does not really know why he has these special feelings.
Feelings of this kind become clearer when he moves to Cambridge for his studies and meets Clive Durham, with whom he fells in love. Clive’s pedigree is more sophisticated: he descends from landed gentry. Clive is deeply torn about his sexuality, even though he makes the first step in admitting his feelings for Maurice. Foster does not shy away from describing romantic moments between the two and he shows perfectly his skills in evoking beauty:
‘I knew you read the ‘Symposium’ in the vac,’ he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
‘Then you understand – without me saying more –‘
‘How do you mean?’
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, ‘I love you.’ (p. 48)
Clive considers himself a Hellenist and he celebrates “the love that Socrates bore Phaedo…love passionate but temperate” (p.85). They both set out on a philosophical journey of self-discovery about their sexuality and their place in society. Forster tries to be as open as possible in his depiction of them. We learn that both, especially Clive, have misogynistic tendencies. Alas, it is Forster himself who does not give the reader the opportunity to appreciate a fully rounded female character in his book.
This brings me to Forster’s theory of flat and round characters. In E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, he explains: “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way” (p.81). Maurice in particular passes his creator’s test with flying colours. Even though he might be snobbish, arrogant and misogynistic at the beginning of the narrative, the reader cannot ignore how he develops into a more tolerant and self-aware person, capable of tender feelings. What made this reader root for Maurice was his sincerity towards himself and thus his integrity. Despite all his inner struggles, he allows himself to be who he is; this makes him such an attractive character, not only to the reader but also to others characters in the book. Of course, only we as readers know his innermost thoughts and feelings. Forster offers us a deep insight into these thoughts, where we can learn how sincere and full of integrity Maurice becomes:
“He would not deceive himself so much. He would not – and this was the test – pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.” (p. 51)
Indeed, he loses his first love to conformity. Clive decides to adapt to his family’s requirements and "beautiful conventions" and grows slowly away from Maurice. Ironically, it is on Clive’s journey to Greece that he lets Maurice know by letter that “…I have become normal, I cannot help it” (p.101). Not long after, he marries and settles in at Penge (his late father’s estate) as the squire everybody expected him to become. Forster gives us only a few glimpses into Clive’s inner thoughts and monologues, but they are enough to make the reader understand that Clive lives in denial and self-deception.
“One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.”(p.124)
In the meantime, Maurice goes through hell. He begins to doubt his own sexuality and increasingly feels lonely. Forster’s description of Maurice’s journey of self-loathing and loneliness gets directly under the reader’s skin. These are powerful passages which help enormously in empathising not only with Maurice, but with thousands of other men in real life who have had to go through a similar hell.
“Yet he was doing a fine thing – proving on how little the soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn’t a God, he hadn’t a lover – the two usual incentives to virtue.” (p.126)
He eventually seeks advice from a doctor he has befriended, confessing that he is “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”. I don’t want to spoil the doctor’s answer, but I can assure you that it did not help Maurice’s self-esteem at all.
It is on the peak of his crisis that he meets the third important character in the book: Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper at Penge, Clive’s estate. Forster likes to let different characters from different social classes bump into each other, as his novel Howards End shows brilliantly. Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper, who everybody in Maurice’s circle simply calls ‘Scudder’, belongs to the ‘class of outdoors-men’. He is a man of nature with natural instincts. The reader cannot really unravel his inner thoughts; Forster leaves us almost in the dark. This is certainly deliberate: Scudder remains the active, pushy, slightly aggressive and sexually attractive, almost mysterious ‘country lad’ for the reader. Today he would probably be categorised as bisexual. He instinctively feels Maurice’s pain and reacts accordingly to his nature. With Alec Scudder, Maurice eventually reaches sexual fulfilment.
“They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward.” (p.212)
Alec Scudder, who in the book represents carnality, the rural and nature (in comparison to Clive, who stands for the intellectual and platonic love) will eventually be the key to Maurice’s ‘liberation’. Together with Maurice, the reader discovers, after several bumps in the road, the route to Maurice and Alec’s happiness. This happy ending to Forster’s novel has much been discussed. I was not entirely convinced, even though it has its roots in real life: namely in the concept of ‘Uranian love’(**) and the relationship between Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, who Forster visited in 1913 and who were an inspiration for this book. I am not sure if it is really a happy ending for Maurice and Alec, but I think it was the best possible end to the book, given the socio-political situation at the time. Forster writes in his Terminal Note: “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise” (p.220). I, for my part, tend to agree with Forster’s Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey, who wrote in a letter to E.M. Forster that “the relationship of the two rested upon curiosity and lust and would only last six weeks” (Terminal Note, p. 222). I can sympathise with Strachey’s train of thought: Maurice and Alec are first and foremost attracted sexually to each other and only later recognise that “what unites them is the need to fight a common enemy” (Introduction, p. xxii).
Despite these minor flaws, Maurice is still an important novel. E. M. Forster wrote it in 1913/14 and revised it in 1960. In his Terminal Note, written in 1960, he recognises a change in the public attitude towards homosexuality: “the change from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt” (Terminal Note, p. 224). Still, it took another seven years until the laws criminalizing acts of ‘gross indecency’ by men were abolished in England. Today, the legal situation in Europe has improved significantly; one could only have dreamed of it fifty years ago. This is of course a very positive development. In the meantime, we should be aware that there are still nations where LGBT people are persecuted, incarcerated and even put to death for their sexuality. The human race still has a long way to go.
Let me thus go a step further and suggest that it is not enough to implement legally protected equality, even though this must be an unalienable right. We as a society ask our governments for rights which guarantee equality. But, I ask myself, does society really embrace and integrate diversity in everyday life? Forster writes pointedly: “We had not realized that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it” (Terminal Note p. 224). I can only speak for my part of the world and my generation, but I feel part of a monolithic world where sexual diversity has not yet reached unconscious acceptance and self-evident equality, and where definitions such as ‘gay’ and ‘homo’ are still used (unconsciously?) as an insult. Just look at the advertising industry, mainstream TV or cinema: one rarely finds ‘rainbow families’ or same-sex couples. And of course the male action hero is supposed to be heterosexual. While there has been constant change for the better during the past few years, it is still slow; and I am afraid we still have a long wait before there is a gay James Bond and nobody thinks anything of it.
Until then, books like Maurice have lost none of their relevance.
**********************************************
(*) I highly recommend the Penguin Classics Edition with an introduction and notes by David Leavitt.
(**) “Uranians: The term has its origins in Plato’s Symposium, in which Pausanius argues that men who are inspired by Heavenly Aphrodite (Aphrodite Urania) as opposed to Common Aphrodite (Aphrodite Pandeumia) “are attracted to the male sex…their intention is to form a lasting attachment and partnership for life”. In the 1860s and 1870s, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs promulgated the German Urning, the English version of which was subsequently put into circulation by Edward Carpenter and the art historian John Addington Symonds.” (Notes by David Leavitt, p. 232). (less)
Finished 1914
Dedicated to a Happier Year”
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) wrote Maurice (*) as a relatively young man, aged 34, at a time when old Europe was starting to fall apart. However, it was not published until 1971, a year after his death. Maurice is probably the first literary work of fiction to deal with male homosexuality in such an open, sincere fashion. At the time it was written, men in the UK could still be imprisoned for ‘acts of gross indecency’, as in the Oscar Wilde trial. Publishing this book at that time would have destroyed the deeply admired English novelist. Of course, E. M. Forster’s readers had no idea that the author of very successful novels such as Howards End and A Passage to India loved men. Nevertheless, he let his work be reviewed by his literary friends who knew of his sexuality: He was loosely connected with the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, the literary and artistic circle with such prominent members as Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. For the time, the members of the Bloomsbury Group had a very open and unconventional approach to sexuality, and among this group E. M. Forster’s novel could be discussed openly. In public, however, he successfully covered up his sexuality, and I wonder if this might be one of the reasons why I found Forster’s Howards End rather frigid and detached. I second Katherine Mansfield when she complains about Howards End: “E.M. Forster never gets any farther than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea " (Introduction p. xxiv).
Well, in Maurice, E. M. Forster pours hot boiling water over spicy tea leaves.
Forster intriguingly describes Maurice Hall’s journey of self-discovery and his sexual awakening. Maurice comes from a conventional middle-class background with a lukewarm mentality. He is very much an average guy (even though Forster describes him as rather good-looking and athletic): not very intellectual, and a bit arrogant. His being sexually different initially comes across as a hindrance to his plans to follow in his deceased father’s footsteps: “Maurice was stepping into the niche that England had prepared for him.” (p.45). Nevertheless, early in the novel Forster gives hints that Maurice has always known he is ‘different’: Maurice remarks early on “I think I shall not marry”, and he is rather baffled when he realises that he is overwhelmed by the fact that his mother’s garden boy George – with whom he used to play in the ‘woodstack’ when he was a boy – gave notice and left. Maurice is, after all, a snob and he would never consider himself a friend of George. Nevertheless, George’s departure unsettles him and he does not really know why he has these special feelings.
Feelings of this kind become clearer when he moves to Cambridge for his studies and meets Clive Durham, with whom he fells in love. Clive’s pedigree is more sophisticated: he descends from landed gentry. Clive is deeply torn about his sexuality, even though he makes the first step in admitting his feelings for Maurice. Foster does not shy away from describing romantic moments between the two and he shows perfectly his skills in evoking beauty:
‘I knew you read the ‘Symposium’ in the vac,’ he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
‘Then you understand – without me saying more –‘
‘How do you mean?’
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, ‘I love you.’ (p. 48)
Clive considers himself a Hellenist and he celebrates “the love that Socrates bore Phaedo…love passionate but temperate” (p.85). They both set out on a philosophical journey of self-discovery about their sexuality and their place in society. Forster tries to be as open as possible in his depiction of them. We learn that both, especially Clive, have misogynistic tendencies. Alas, it is Forster himself who does not give the reader the opportunity to appreciate a fully rounded female character in his book.
This brings me to Forster’s theory of flat and round characters. In E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, he explains: “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way” (p.81). Maurice in particular passes his creator’s test with flying colours. Even though he might be snobbish, arrogant and misogynistic at the beginning of the narrative, the reader cannot ignore how he develops into a more tolerant and self-aware person, capable of tender feelings. What made this reader root for Maurice was his sincerity towards himself and thus his integrity. Despite all his inner struggles, he allows himself to be who he is; this makes him such an attractive character, not only to the reader but also to others characters in the book. Of course, only we as readers know his innermost thoughts and feelings. Forster offers us a deep insight into these thoughts, where we can learn how sincere and full of integrity Maurice becomes:
“He would not deceive himself so much. He would not – and this was the test – pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and always had loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who returned his love had been lost, he admitted this.” (p. 51)
Indeed, he loses his first love to conformity. Clive decides to adapt to his family’s requirements and "beautiful conventions" and grows slowly away from Maurice. Ironically, it is on Clive’s journey to Greece that he lets Maurice know by letter that “…I have become normal, I cannot help it” (p.101). Not long after, he marries and settles in at Penge (his late father’s estate) as the squire everybody expected him to become. Forster gives us only a few glimpses into Clive’s inner thoughts and monologues, but they are enough to make the reader understand that Clive lives in denial and self-deception.
“One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.”(p.124)
In the meantime, Maurice goes through hell. He begins to doubt his own sexuality and increasingly feels lonely. Forster’s description of Maurice’s journey of self-loathing and loneliness gets directly under the reader’s skin. These are powerful passages which help enormously in empathising not only with Maurice, but with thousands of other men in real life who have had to go through a similar hell.
“Yet he was doing a fine thing – proving on how little the soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn’t a God, he hadn’t a lover – the two usual incentives to virtue.” (p.126)
He eventually seeks advice from a doctor he has befriended, confessing that he is “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”. I don’t want to spoil the doctor’s answer, but I can assure you that it did not help Maurice’s self-esteem at all.
It is on the peak of his crisis that he meets the third important character in the book: Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper at Penge, Clive’s estate. Forster likes to let different characters from different social classes bump into each other, as his novel Howards End shows brilliantly. Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper, who everybody in Maurice’s circle simply calls ‘Scudder’, belongs to the ‘class of outdoors-men’. He is a man of nature with natural instincts. The reader cannot really unravel his inner thoughts; Forster leaves us almost in the dark. This is certainly deliberate: Scudder remains the active, pushy, slightly aggressive and sexually attractive, almost mysterious ‘country lad’ for the reader. Today he would probably be categorised as bisexual. He instinctively feels Maurice’s pain and reacts accordingly to his nature. With Alec Scudder, Maurice eventually reaches sexual fulfilment.
“They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them. That, besides companionship, was their reward.” (p.212)
Alec Scudder, who in the book represents carnality, the rural and nature (in comparison to Clive, who stands for the intellectual and platonic love) will eventually be the key to Maurice’s ‘liberation’. Together with Maurice, the reader discovers, after several bumps in the road, the route to Maurice and Alec’s happiness. This happy ending to Forster’s novel has much been discussed. I was not entirely convinced, even though it has its roots in real life: namely in the concept of ‘Uranian love’(**) and the relationship between Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, who Forster visited in 1913 and who were an inspiration for this book. I am not sure if it is really a happy ending for Maurice and Alec, but I think it was the best possible end to the book, given the socio-political situation at the time. Forster writes in his Terminal Note: “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise” (p.220). I, for my part, tend to agree with Forster’s Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey, who wrote in a letter to E.M. Forster that “the relationship of the two rested upon curiosity and lust and would only last six weeks” (Terminal Note, p. 222). I can sympathise with Strachey’s train of thought: Maurice and Alec are first and foremost attracted sexually to each other and only later recognise that “what unites them is the need to fight a common enemy” (Introduction, p. xxii).
Despite these minor flaws, Maurice is still an important novel. E. M. Forster wrote it in 1913/14 and revised it in 1960. In his Terminal Note, written in 1960, he recognises a change in the public attitude towards homosexuality: “the change from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt” (Terminal Note, p. 224). Still, it took another seven years until the laws criminalizing acts of ‘gross indecency’ by men were abolished in England. Today, the legal situation in Europe has improved significantly; one could only have dreamed of it fifty years ago. This is of course a very positive development. In the meantime, we should be aware that there are still nations where LGBT people are persecuted, incarcerated and even put to death for their sexuality. The human race still has a long way to go.
Let me thus go a step further and suggest that it is not enough to implement legally protected equality, even though this must be an unalienable right. We as a society ask our governments for rights which guarantee equality. But, I ask myself, does society really embrace and integrate diversity in everyday life? Forster writes pointedly: “We had not realized that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it” (Terminal Note p. 224). I can only speak for my part of the world and my generation, but I feel part of a monolithic world where sexual diversity has not yet reached unconscious acceptance and self-evident equality, and where definitions such as ‘gay’ and ‘homo’ are still used (unconsciously?) as an insult. Just look at the advertising industry, mainstream TV or cinema: one rarely finds ‘rainbow families’ or same-sex couples. And of course the male action hero is supposed to be heterosexual. While there has been constant change for the better during the past few years, it is still slow; and I am afraid we still have a long wait before there is a gay James Bond and nobody thinks anything of it.
Until then, books like Maurice have lost none of their relevance.
**********************************************
(*) I highly recommend the Penguin Classics Edition with an introduction and notes by David Leavitt.
(**) “Uranians: The term has its origins in Plato’s Symposium, in which Pausanius argues that men who are inspired by Heavenly Aphrodite (Aphrodite Urania) as opposed to Common Aphrodite (Aphrodite Pandeumia) “are attracted to the male sex…their intention is to form a lasting attachment and partnership for life”. In the 1860s and 1870s, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs promulgated the German Urning, the English version of which was subsequently put into circulation by Edward Carpenter and the art historian John Addington Symonds.” (Notes by David Leavitt, p. 232). (less)
Jan 21, 2020✨ jami ✨ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: classics, lgbtqiap, gay-mc, 2020-reads, owned-books, favorites
“I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you.”
this book sent me all the way through it and I was genuinely moved by the tenderness.. the yearning... the way e.m forster wrote a happy ending for two men because he thought it was time gay men got to be happy in fiction... the explorations of class and freedom and longing... Maurice's journey to self-discovery and coming of age ... the way that clive his first love is depicted and the closure he gets from him .. the fact the end of this book is literally "I fucked your gamekeeper in your bedroom and then in a hotel and now I realise I don't care for you at all gotta bounce!".. also e.m forster has such beautiful and emotional writing
“A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense, Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”
I adore this book and e.m forster (less)
Maurice is said to be Forster's homage to same-sex love. It is so. Belonging to the same lot, Forster must have felt a strong need to express himself through fiction. When he wrote it in the early part of the 20th century, the time was not ripe for its publication. Same-sex love was an offense in England, in which criminal charges can be brought, so Forster had to wait till a better time. It never came during his lifetime, although homosexuality was legalized in England by the end of the 1960s. And though the book was published posthumously, Maurice will remain an important work of Forster and gay literature.
The novel isn't autobiographical. Forster stresses that. He says that he wanted to make his main character, Maurice, so unlike him - "someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, ... and rather a snob". But the emotions are his. You can feel that in every sentence.
The story is focused on Maurice and his awakening to his own sexuality. Maurice doesn't understand his own nature until he was "shocked" into finding the truth about him through his Cambridge friend, Clive. Theirs was a platonic relationship, however, and this continues for few years. But even during this time, they both are aware of their precarious situation. Both young men, out of Cambridge, are expected to carry on the torch that is handed over to them. They are expected to marry and contribute to the next generation. Forster writes about Maurice: "The thought that he was sterile weighed on the young man with a sudden shame". Maurice knows that he is physically alright, but he is mentally impeded and cannot carry on the duties expected of him. The matter is made worse by the knowledge that he cannot live by the accepted notions of society. Although he keeps the knowledge a secret from it, deep down he knows that he is a "social outcast". But the crisis isn't that. It is yet to come to Maurice in the form of a moral blow, mentally agonizing himself to the point of suicide. This is when Clive becomes "normal" (in which it is to be understood that he was becoming attracted to women) and decides to end their "friendship". Now Clive can carry the torch, whereas Maurice had to burn in its flames. The agony that Maurice goes through amounting to utter madness is heartbreaking. Forster's portrayal of Maurice in his crisis is sincere and touching. "I swear from the bottom of heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants" is his soul's outcry. But Forster offers Maurice a chance of heeling through Alec Scudder, a man of a lower class than him. Through his relationship with Alec, Maurice experiences a full sexual awakening which helps him ultimately to defy the barriers of class, conventions, and normality to finally find his true self and with it, happiness.
Forster confesses he wanted to write a happy ending for Maurice. Perhaps, he wanted to see people like him having happier futures like other men in their own choosing. To be a homosexual or heterosexual is not a choice. We don't "choose" to be one or the other. It's part of our human nature. It's beyond our doing and cannot be controlled by us. The English lack of understanding of this simple truth comes under severe criticism from Forster when he says that "England has always been disinclined to accept human nature". During Forster's life several attempts were made to legalize homosexuality although not successful till towards the end of 1960s. However, although couldn't be legalized, these legal manoeuvers should have brought social knowledge and through knowledge, sympathy, understanding, and acceptance. But to Forster's utter dismay, none came. When Maurice goes to consult a doctor to find whether he could be "healed" of his homosexuality, he daren't utter the word. Instead, he says “I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort!” Imagine how one would feel if one cannot express his own true nature even to a doctor. Forster wants to bring to light through Maurice this unfair social prejudice against a section of men who in return had to suffer "hell" in enduring it.
The centerpiece of the novel is Maurice's story, yet, Forster doesn't abandon Clive. Due to some physiological change, he becomes what we call today a bisexual, and Forster shows us that he has no easy time either. Clive's relationship with his wife is mostly platonic. He suffers from belonging to two different worlds and is desperately trying to find some ground through politics. Through all these expositions, Forster, quite honestly, shows the true side of human nature. He seems to say that being muddled is part of human nature and that it's quite alright. And he invites social sympathy and understanding to heal these confused sufferers.
The story of Maurice is nothing much. And the personalities of the characters make them quite aloof. But Forster catches the attention of the readers with his beautiful, thought-provoking, and emotional awakening writing. He makes us question whether much has changed from his time. We are now in the 21st century, yet, even at present, we can see enough Maurices being persecuted socially. Although in many countries homosexuality is legally accepted, this hasn't completely altered their situation as social outcasts. Some cultures still look at homosexuals with disgust. Legality cannot bring acceptance, only human sympathy and understanding can. And that is what we must thrive to achieve as Forster dreamt in his Maurice. (less)
The novel isn't autobiographical. Forster stresses that. He says that he wanted to make his main character, Maurice, so unlike him - "someone handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, ... and rather a snob". But the emotions are his. You can feel that in every sentence.
The story is focused on Maurice and his awakening to his own sexuality. Maurice doesn't understand his own nature until he was "shocked" into finding the truth about him through his Cambridge friend, Clive. Theirs was a platonic relationship, however, and this continues for few years. But even during this time, they both are aware of their precarious situation. Both young men, out of Cambridge, are expected to carry on the torch that is handed over to them. They are expected to marry and contribute to the next generation. Forster writes about Maurice: "The thought that he was sterile weighed on the young man with a sudden shame". Maurice knows that he is physically alright, but he is mentally impeded and cannot carry on the duties expected of him. The matter is made worse by the knowledge that he cannot live by the accepted notions of society. Although he keeps the knowledge a secret from it, deep down he knows that he is a "social outcast". But the crisis isn't that. It is yet to come to Maurice in the form of a moral blow, mentally agonizing himself to the point of suicide. This is when Clive becomes "normal" (in which it is to be understood that he was becoming attracted to women) and decides to end their "friendship". Now Clive can carry the torch, whereas Maurice had to burn in its flames. The agony that Maurice goes through amounting to utter madness is heartbreaking. Forster's portrayal of Maurice in his crisis is sincere and touching. "I swear from the bottom of heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants" is his soul's outcry. But Forster offers Maurice a chance of heeling through Alec Scudder, a man of a lower class than him. Through his relationship with Alec, Maurice experiences a full sexual awakening which helps him ultimately to defy the barriers of class, conventions, and normality to finally find his true self and with it, happiness.
Forster confesses he wanted to write a happy ending for Maurice. Perhaps, he wanted to see people like him having happier futures like other men in their own choosing. To be a homosexual or heterosexual is not a choice. We don't "choose" to be one or the other. It's part of our human nature. It's beyond our doing and cannot be controlled by us. The English lack of understanding of this simple truth comes under severe criticism from Forster when he says that "England has always been disinclined to accept human nature". During Forster's life several attempts were made to legalize homosexuality although not successful till towards the end of 1960s. However, although couldn't be legalized, these legal manoeuvers should have brought social knowledge and through knowledge, sympathy, understanding, and acceptance. But to Forster's utter dismay, none came. When Maurice goes to consult a doctor to find whether he could be "healed" of his homosexuality, he daren't utter the word. Instead, he says “I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort!” Imagine how one would feel if one cannot express his own true nature even to a doctor. Forster wants to bring to light through Maurice this unfair social prejudice against a section of men who in return had to suffer "hell" in enduring it.
The centerpiece of the novel is Maurice's story, yet, Forster doesn't abandon Clive. Due to some physiological change, he becomes what we call today a bisexual, and Forster shows us that he has no easy time either. Clive's relationship with his wife is mostly platonic. He suffers from belonging to two different worlds and is desperately trying to find some ground through politics. Through all these expositions, Forster, quite honestly, shows the true side of human nature. He seems to say that being muddled is part of human nature and that it's quite alright. And he invites social sympathy and understanding to heal these confused sufferers.
The story of Maurice is nothing much. And the personalities of the characters make them quite aloof. But Forster catches the attention of the readers with his beautiful, thought-provoking, and emotional awakening writing. He makes us question whether much has changed from his time. We are now in the 21st century, yet, even at present, we can see enough Maurices being persecuted socially. Although in many countries homosexuality is legally accepted, this hasn't completely altered their situation as social outcasts. Some cultures still look at homosexuals with disgust. Legality cannot bring acceptance, only human sympathy and understanding can. And that is what we must thrive to achieve as Forster dreamt in his Maurice. (less)
Jun 15, 2018Katie Lumsden rated it it was amazing
Possibly my new favourite book of the year so far. I absolutely loved this one - beautiful, moving, such a powerful read.
May 15, 2016Puck rated it liked it · review of another edition
Shelves: classics, romance, underrated, lgbtqia
If Dorian Gray is the dramatic, scandal-creating gay classic, than Maurice is the snobbish yet emotionally moving gay classic. Written in 1913-14 but only published sixty years later, this is a book that is impressive - not because of its romance - but because of the character's personal journey towards self acceptance.
Began 1913, finished 1914. Dedicated to a happier year. With this heartbreaking opening statement, the story begins. We get to follow Maurice Hall as he grows up and starts to realize that he's attracted to men. This is not an easy realization: this story takes place, and was published, in England at the beginning of the 20th century. A time in which gay men (and women) are "nonsense!" or "get send to asylums, thank god!"
So this book is already unique for being so open and honest about (Maurice's) homosexual relationships. Despite knowing society's views, Maurice is certain of his love for his fellow student Clive Durham, a young man fan of the Classics like the story of Achilles & Patroclus. And while Clive and Maurice are a far cry from those Greek heroes - the English men are snobbish and have misogynistic tendencies - their love is treated with emotion and tenderness surprising for its time.
“He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.”
Yet it is exactly this romance between Maurice and Clive (and Maurice and his future partner) that didn't convince me. The love between the first couple felt too intellectual and stiff - befitting for their characters - but it made me unable to ‘root’ for them. With the second couple, love became too serious too quickly; their love was more lust instead of true. I had some similar problems with the romance in A Room with a View: I felt for the characters, just not for their (not-existing) chemistry.
But who cares about romance when the author is able to make you feel for a snobbish gay prat? Maurice's struggle and ultimately acceptance of his own sexuality is very moving and remarkable; because as mentioned in the author's final words "it made this book harder to publish. If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well.” [page 220]
It's this bleak and grim reality - which echoes a bit in today's society - that proves all the more why people should read Maurice. Like my friend Lydia said in her review: “it makes me wonder what other books were written throughout history and never published, because they had a theme of same-sex love.” (less)
Began 1913, finished 1914. Dedicated to a happier year. With this heartbreaking opening statement, the story begins. We get to follow Maurice Hall as he grows up and starts to realize that he's attracted to men. This is not an easy realization: this story takes place, and was published, in England at the beginning of the 20th century. A time in which gay men (and women) are "nonsense!" or "get send to asylums, thank god!"
So this book is already unique for being so open and honest about (Maurice's) homosexual relationships. Despite knowing society's views, Maurice is certain of his love for his fellow student Clive Durham, a young man fan of the Classics like the story of Achilles & Patroclus. And while Clive and Maurice are a far cry from those Greek heroes - the English men are snobbish and have misogynistic tendencies - their love is treated with emotion and tenderness surprising for its time.
“He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.”
Yet it is exactly this romance between Maurice and Clive (and Maurice and his future partner) that didn't convince me. The love between the first couple felt too intellectual and stiff - befitting for their characters - but it made me unable to ‘root’ for them. With the second couple, love became too serious too quickly; their love was more lust instead of true. I had some similar problems with the romance in A Room with a View: I felt for the characters, just not for their (not-existing) chemistry.
But who cares about romance when the author is able to make you feel for a snobbish gay prat? Maurice's struggle and ultimately acceptance of his own sexuality is very moving and remarkable; because as mentioned in the author's final words "it made this book harder to publish. If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well.” [page 220]
It's this bleak and grim reality - which echoes a bit in today's society - that proves all the more why people should read Maurice. Like my friend Lydia said in her review: “it makes me wonder what other books were written throughout history and never published, because they had a theme of same-sex love.” (less)
Jan 29, 2013Mark rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: absolutely-fabulous, gay-fiction, classics
Perfect! There is probably nothing I can write that hasn't been written before about this work from one of our great English authors. It has no doubt been criticised, scrutinised, analysed, investigated, praised and acclaimed, I will just write about how the book made me feel.
The style of English was so refreshing to read. A style and mastery that has been long since forgotten. It has a beauty to it that flows and melts coming from an era where conversation really was an art. Where every word was carefully picked and every sentence construction built to hold, last and sit precisely. A rare treat. Forster manages to describe the emotions of gay love by eluding to it but never the vulgar. I ask myself what would he think about our modern romances and language if he could read them today.
The book itself was like having my own personal time portal, swept back to a time, though noble also ignorant. A look into, class, social etiquette, traditions, and values of an era gone by. Into this was born Maurice and his fight for happiness begins. He goes through a personal hell and back, jilted by Clive who turns to women, here I reckon Clive was probably what we know to be bi today and was easier for him to bow to the pressures of society although quite possibly a sexless marriage to Anne. Maurice finds his absolution and love in the arms of Scudder the game keeper. An unlikely combination but Scudder's naive acceptance of his homosexuality is refreshing in it's nature. A character that creeps out of the background and has a more profound effect on Maurice than originally anticipated. Maurice goes through an emotional hell and back, looking at his sexual orientation as an abomination, a disease that has no cure, though treatments are sought the internal struggle remains until it nearly drives him to suicidal feelings. This would be all quite normal for this day and age and attitudes from society, you would have no other choice but to stay firmly in the closet and remain there! An extremely lonely feeling.
This book was far ahead of its time, therefore the publication after the death of the author in 1971, when society was ready to embrace its message. All I can say for anyone who wishes to read a classic from a master then READ THIS BOOK! It was a pioneering work of its day and anyone who takes their m/m romance literature seriously should read it as a shining example of how we've got to where we are today. (less)
The style of English was so refreshing to read. A style and mastery that has been long since forgotten. It has a beauty to it that flows and melts coming from an era where conversation really was an art. Where every word was carefully picked and every sentence construction built to hold, last and sit precisely. A rare treat. Forster manages to describe the emotions of gay love by eluding to it but never the vulgar. I ask myself what would he think about our modern romances and language if he could read them today.
The book itself was like having my own personal time portal, swept back to a time, though noble also ignorant. A look into, class, social etiquette, traditions, and values of an era gone by. Into this was born Maurice and his fight for happiness begins. He goes through a personal hell and back, jilted by Clive who turns to women, here I reckon Clive was probably what we know to be bi today and was easier for him to bow to the pressures of society although quite possibly a sexless marriage to Anne. Maurice finds his absolution and love in the arms of Scudder the game keeper. An unlikely combination but Scudder's naive acceptance of his homosexuality is refreshing in it's nature. A character that creeps out of the background and has a more profound effect on Maurice than originally anticipated. Maurice goes through an emotional hell and back, looking at his sexual orientation as an abomination, a disease that has no cure, though treatments are sought the internal struggle remains until it nearly drives him to suicidal feelings. This would be all quite normal for this day and age and attitudes from society, you would have no other choice but to stay firmly in the closet and remain there! An extremely lonely feeling.
This book was far ahead of its time, therefore the publication after the death of the author in 1971, when society was ready to embrace its message. All I can say for anyone who wishes to read a classic from a master then READ THIS BOOK! It was a pioneering work of its day and anyone who takes their m/m romance literature seriously should read it as a shining example of how we've got to where we are today. (less)
Jun 25, 2021Vanessa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: books-i-own, classics, favourites
Some people often get entangled in fiery debates on whether certain classics should still be deemed relevant or not. How do we define "relevance" if not in what human beings have always gone through in their lives, in all historical periods? Then, Maurice is definitely one of the most relevant classics nowadays. Not only it should be praised for its exquisite prose (Forster is one of the finest authors I've ever read) but it's particularly important and interesting to read from a social and from a historical point of view. Lots of anthropological essays could be written on this book and if this doesn't make a classic relevant, I don't know what else could. (less)
Aug 08, 2021Larry H rated it really liked it
One of E.M. Forster's lesser-known novels, Maurice is a classic gay love story that was ahead of its time.
Wait, what? I’m not only reading a backlist title but also a classic? Look at me, expanding my horizons!!
Maurice was written in 1913 and 1914, but Forster (author of A Room with a View and Howard's End , among others) knew that publishing it would destroy his career. He stipulated it couldn’t be released until after he died. It was published in 1971.
While certainly much of the language used in the book is very old-fashioned and some (if not all) if the attitudes around class are different, it’s amazing how ahead of his time Forster was.
This is the story of Maurice, a young man we first meet when he is 14. It follows him through his education and his path toward the life expected of him. But when he strikes up a friendship with a fellow classmate, he realizes how different his life is from what he thought, and how ultimately he needs to follow his own path in order to be happy.
Who would’ve thought you’d ultimately get a gay Edwardian love story with a happy ending, not one where the characters are trapped in marriages of convenience or something worse happens? The movie adaptation of Maurice is wonderful—it was one of the first gay love stories I saw.
I had a conversation with a friend the other day about people reviewing classics long after they were published. While I think it’s difficult to view a classic in a sphere different than the one in which it was written, it’s fascinating to find a book so ahead of its time yet it needed to be hidden until much later.
Check out my list of the best books I read in 2020 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2020.html.
See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com.
Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/. (less)
Wait, what? I’m not only reading a backlist title but also a classic? Look at me, expanding my horizons!!
Maurice was written in 1913 and 1914, but Forster (author of A Room with a View and Howard's End , among others) knew that publishing it would destroy his career. He stipulated it couldn’t be released until after he died. It was published in 1971.
While certainly much of the language used in the book is very old-fashioned and some (if not all) if the attitudes around class are different, it’s amazing how ahead of his time Forster was.
This is the story of Maurice, a young man we first meet when he is 14. It follows him through his education and his path toward the life expected of him. But when he strikes up a friendship with a fellow classmate, he realizes how different his life is from what he thought, and how ultimately he needs to follow his own path in order to be happy.
Who would’ve thought you’d ultimately get a gay Edwardian love story with a happy ending, not one where the characters are trapped in marriages of convenience or something worse happens? The movie adaptation of Maurice is wonderful—it was one of the first gay love stories I saw.
I had a conversation with a friend the other day about people reviewing classics long after they were published. While I think it’s difficult to view a classic in a sphere different than the one in which it was written, it’s fascinating to find a book so ahead of its time yet it needed to be hidden until much later.
Check out my list of the best books I read in 2020 at https://itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-best-books-i-read-in-2020.html.
See all of my reviews at itseithersadnessoreuphoria.blogspot.com.
Follow me on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/the.bookishworld.of.yrralh/. (less)
4 Stars
I’m not well versed in historic stories of the British upper class, but I’m happy to say that despite the fear, despite having to hide, Maurice finds love, grabs on, and refuses to let go.
Though published posthumously, all the stars for having been written at all in a time of blatant unacceptance.
I’m not well versed in historic stories of the British upper class, but I’m happy to say that despite the fear, despite having to hide, Maurice finds love, grabs on, and refuses to let go.
Though published posthumously, all the stars for having been written at all in a time of blatant unacceptance.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Pnin:
This is, of course, a "gay novel" - perhaps the early prototype of the pandering, panegyric course which that genre has taken: the road from internal struggle to external/societal struggle, to personal acceptance and then to the (not reached in Maurice) ultimate acceptance and embrace from the society or community at large. To be sure it is an interesting story, but with inevitable issue of being pigeonholed by its very protagonist's proclivities. I have been thinking very much about the statement that "gay novels don't sell" - and I would largely agree with this sentiment. For the same reason gay movies don't sell, etc. Of course there is the significance of numbers: homosexuals (apparently) constitute only ten-percent of the population at large, a small market. But if you consider the proliferation of successful black-novels, for example, certainly there success rides not on their portrayed demographic, but rather the entire market. I'm sure very few of the devout readership of the Harry Potter series are wizards or other magically inclined persons, but they buy and read them nonetheless. How important is it to share the characteristics of the protagonist or narrator? I enjoy Lolita although I am not a pedophile and if anything have an aversion to children (messy and whiny cretins that they are), I can read Jane Eyre and enjoy it despite my lack of female accouterments. There are bestsellers about blind kids and autistic kids and black folks and Asian-Americans and all sorts of minority demographics which the overall market for literature devour, with that "minority voice" being consider a testament to the literary value of the work. So why isn't it the same for queer literature? I confess that even I am not frequently moved by it, unremoved as I am, unless it is an otherwise moving narrative, such as Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.
Homosexuality is a unique struggle, I think, and should make for compelling literature, but yet it is hard to portray. Unlike race, gender, ethnicity, it is a very internalized characteristic, which can't be seen with the eyes at all (without a high percent of false-positives, anyway!). It is a matter of the heart, a matter of desire. A novel can be written with a black protagonist and they can desire anything: success, love, freedom, etc. - anything. But for a novel to be a gay novel that particular sexual desire is prone to the foreground, as in the present novel, as in Giovanni's Room et cetera. Perhaps the best portrayal of homosexuality is The Great Gatsby, wherein I would contend that Nick Carraway is gay - something alluded to indirectly if not obtusely throughout the novel, but far from canonically agreed upon. But even Fitzgerald's ambiguous narrator fails to address the particular queer experience, and as such appeals to a wider audience. Is it that the queer experience is too different, or is it that it is not different enough? Perhaps it has the sense of being self-indulgent? I am not sure. How can anyone be sure how their plight relates to anyone else's? Perhaps literature helps, but certainly no one's struggle, real or fictional, is exactly the same.
And maybe it is for that reason that queer novels fail, as they do? I don't feel that Fitzgerald (or Melville, or Twain, or Lee, or whomever wrote what is considered the top contender) meant to write the "Great American Novel" when he wrote The Great Gatsby (or Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, etc.) - he wrote the story of Jay Gatsby, of Nick Carraway et al. That book, which is a compressed carbuncle of the human condition of one man, is one which appeals to many individuals, Americans etc., because we can see in another's struggle a glimmer of our own individual struggle. Same in Jane Eyre, we see not an orphan struggling a very specific struggle, but rather an individual struggling against the every extrapolating problem of life. I think it is perhaps the problem of the "Gay novel" that it tries to extrapolate itself, it is not internalized and it is not specific, it aims from the starting point to be universal to a small subsection of the population. It tries to generalize the struggle of gay men (or women, which is not the case in Maurice), and so loses its individual power. Search for identity, for love, for acceptance, etc. are all universal struggles, even for the most "normal" of individuals. While the goal of literature may be to make the particular universal, it is only implicitly done. It is impossible to make the universal particular.
The plight of Maurice is both particular and generalized, and so maybe it is a half-failure or a half-victory. Maurice's struggles are particular to him: the dynamic between he and Clive in particular is very much the friction between two individuals, the family pressure for Maurice to become the glittering replacement of his father in all ways is a problem unique to his family dynamic and the characters of his mother and sisters. But his desires and feelings of alienation seem general, his fear of social rebuff seems general, roving, imprecise. His initial self-loathing does not seem to be informed, it is confused, misguided, it is not quite a religious affectation nor a societal concern, but a sort of fear of self. This first apprehension to the idea of his love for Clive is believable, sympathetic, sincere. But this phase lacks resolution - Clive goes away and comes back changed, whether sincerely or insincerely as a matter of course. Maurice pines for him, hates him, resents him, but ultimately his feelings for him are essentially the same at the heart of the matter, a sort of kinship. But a lost fellowship. Maurice's drive is not for love but rather for companionship. This is by no means particular to the homosexual struggle, but poignant nonetheless. Where the story begins to falter is the introduction of Scudder. The reader must suspend his disbelief and take that love-in-a-glance kind of love for granted. The character of Scudder is scarcely fleshed out, and the reasons for Maurice's attraction seem to be vague at best. The issue of gay-love becomes highly generalized. We have Maurice, who although fully fleshed out in character, his motives with Scudder seem to me to be missing. Scudder on the other hand is almost a stock character, poorly characterized, maybe some form of Forster's ideal, which he imbues into Maurice's affections. Whether their attraction is mutual loneliness or true love is left unclear, there is little or no rhetoric of love, there are few bases for attraction beyond the physical. Yet we are left to believe in their mutual happiness, their rebirth and acceptance of each other: washed clean of their sins and histories, their prejudices and prides.
While we are meant to believe that Maurice and Scudder have found in each other a lasting love and companionship, happiness, it is rather the passions between Maurice and Clive which endure in the reader after completing the novel. It seems at one and the same time that the story of Maurice is both too long and too short. Too long to be the story of Maurice and Clive, too short to be the story of Maurice and Scudder. And so I am doubly dissatisfied. That said it is a wonderful novel: where it shines it truly is a wonder of literary craft, but where the brush is dropped there are prominent smears which disfigure the art.
(less)
Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.This is true for me as well. While of course I was cheering for the titular hero through the course of his internal and external struggle for identity, I can't help but feel, after finishing the book "well, that was very nice, but life is not like that!" Endings are very particular thing, there is no sense of an ending in a novel, that is excepting for death. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lolita, etc. are all very satisfying in their fatal finales. It is the sad ending, the nadir and despair which is reached as the hero comes to the final fall, that is what satisfies a reader. It is the bottom which gives us the sense of completion, and not the peak. We are never finished with a full glass, only an empty one. The ending for Maurice is a happy one, and deliberately so, as was the intention of Forster, but I am not sure it is the right one. The whole story of Scudder to me seems a bit forced, a bit sudden, and a bit melodramatic; the reason to love this book is rather for the first half with the slow but genuine kinship between Maurice and Clive.
This is, of course, a "gay novel" - perhaps the early prototype of the pandering, panegyric course which that genre has taken: the road from internal struggle to external/societal struggle, to personal acceptance and then to the (not reached in Maurice) ultimate acceptance and embrace from the society or community at large. To be sure it is an interesting story, but with inevitable issue of being pigeonholed by its very protagonist's proclivities. I have been thinking very much about the statement that "gay novels don't sell" - and I would largely agree with this sentiment. For the same reason gay movies don't sell, etc. Of course there is the significance of numbers: homosexuals (apparently) constitute only ten-percent of the population at large, a small market. But if you consider the proliferation of successful black-novels, for example, certainly there success rides not on their portrayed demographic, but rather the entire market. I'm sure very few of the devout readership of the Harry Potter series are wizards or other magically inclined persons, but they buy and read them nonetheless. How important is it to share the characteristics of the protagonist or narrator? I enjoy Lolita although I am not a pedophile and if anything have an aversion to children (messy and whiny cretins that they are), I can read Jane Eyre and enjoy it despite my lack of female accouterments. There are bestsellers about blind kids and autistic kids and black folks and Asian-Americans and all sorts of minority demographics which the overall market for literature devour, with that "minority voice" being consider a testament to the literary value of the work. So why isn't it the same for queer literature? I confess that even I am not frequently moved by it, unremoved as I am, unless it is an otherwise moving narrative, such as Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.
Homosexuality is a unique struggle, I think, and should make for compelling literature, but yet it is hard to portray. Unlike race, gender, ethnicity, it is a very internalized characteristic, which can't be seen with the eyes at all (without a high percent of false-positives, anyway!). It is a matter of the heart, a matter of desire. A novel can be written with a black protagonist and they can desire anything: success, love, freedom, etc. - anything. But for a novel to be a gay novel that particular sexual desire is prone to the foreground, as in the present novel, as in Giovanni's Room et cetera. Perhaps the best portrayal of homosexuality is The Great Gatsby, wherein I would contend that Nick Carraway is gay - something alluded to indirectly if not obtusely throughout the novel, but far from canonically agreed upon. But even Fitzgerald's ambiguous narrator fails to address the particular queer experience, and as such appeals to a wider audience. Is it that the queer experience is too different, or is it that it is not different enough? Perhaps it has the sense of being self-indulgent? I am not sure. How can anyone be sure how their plight relates to anyone else's? Perhaps literature helps, but certainly no one's struggle, real or fictional, is exactly the same.
And maybe it is for that reason that queer novels fail, as they do? I don't feel that Fitzgerald (or Melville, or Twain, or Lee, or whomever wrote what is considered the top contender) meant to write the "Great American Novel" when he wrote The Great Gatsby (or Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, etc.) - he wrote the story of Jay Gatsby, of Nick Carraway et al. That book, which is a compressed carbuncle of the human condition of one man, is one which appeals to many individuals, Americans etc., because we can see in another's struggle a glimmer of our own individual struggle. Same in Jane Eyre, we see not an orphan struggling a very specific struggle, but rather an individual struggling against the every extrapolating problem of life. I think it is perhaps the problem of the "Gay novel" that it tries to extrapolate itself, it is not internalized and it is not specific, it aims from the starting point to be universal to a small subsection of the population. It tries to generalize the struggle of gay men (or women, which is not the case in Maurice), and so loses its individual power. Search for identity, for love, for acceptance, etc. are all universal struggles, even for the most "normal" of individuals. While the goal of literature may be to make the particular universal, it is only implicitly done. It is impossible to make the universal particular.
The plight of Maurice is both particular and generalized, and so maybe it is a half-failure or a half-victory. Maurice's struggles are particular to him: the dynamic between he and Clive in particular is very much the friction between two individuals, the family pressure for Maurice to become the glittering replacement of his father in all ways is a problem unique to his family dynamic and the characters of his mother and sisters. But his desires and feelings of alienation seem general, his fear of social rebuff seems general, roving, imprecise. His initial self-loathing does not seem to be informed, it is confused, misguided, it is not quite a religious affectation nor a societal concern, but a sort of fear of self. This first apprehension to the idea of his love for Clive is believable, sympathetic, sincere. But this phase lacks resolution - Clive goes away and comes back changed, whether sincerely or insincerely as a matter of course. Maurice pines for him, hates him, resents him, but ultimately his feelings for him are essentially the same at the heart of the matter, a sort of kinship. But a lost fellowship. Maurice's drive is not for love but rather for companionship. This is by no means particular to the homosexual struggle, but poignant nonetheless. Where the story begins to falter is the introduction of Scudder. The reader must suspend his disbelief and take that love-in-a-glance kind of love for granted. The character of Scudder is scarcely fleshed out, and the reasons for Maurice's attraction seem to be vague at best. The issue of gay-love becomes highly generalized. We have Maurice, who although fully fleshed out in character, his motives with Scudder seem to me to be missing. Scudder on the other hand is almost a stock character, poorly characterized, maybe some form of Forster's ideal, which he imbues into Maurice's affections. Whether their attraction is mutual loneliness or true love is left unclear, there is little or no rhetoric of love, there are few bases for attraction beyond the physical. Yet we are left to believe in their mutual happiness, their rebirth and acceptance of each other: washed clean of their sins and histories, their prejudices and prides.
His ideal of marriage was temperate and graceful, like all his ideals, and he found a fit helpmate in Anne, who had refinement herself, and admired it in others. They loved each other tenderly. Beautiful conventions received them — while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.Perhaps this is ultimately the point which Forster wants to make? Is Maurice's 'arms full of air' any worse than the marriage of convention and convenience achieved by Anna and Clive? Is it better? While Maurice is borne away on a seemingly generalized happy ending devoid of individual passions, Clive enjoys (or suffers) the same general fate. Is Maurice happy at the book's resolution-- truly happy? Or satisfied? And what of Clive? Have Clive's passions truly inverted during his trip to the Mediterranean?
While we are meant to believe that Maurice and Scudder have found in each other a lasting love and companionship, happiness, it is rather the passions between Maurice and Clive which endure in the reader after completing the novel. It seems at one and the same time that the story of Maurice is both too long and too short. Too long to be the story of Maurice and Clive, too short to be the story of Maurice and Scudder. And so I am doubly dissatisfied. That said it is a wonderful novel: where it shines it truly is a wonder of literary craft, but where the brush is dropped there are prominent smears which disfigure the art.
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May 06, 2021The Artisan Geek added it
6/5/21
Read this together with my classics book club on Patreon :).
Read this together with my classics book club on Patreon :).
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Maurice Paperback – 30 September 2005
by E.M. Forster (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars 824 ratings
Edition: 1st
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First time in Black Classics for Forster's autobiographical novel of homosexual love.
Maurice Hall is a young man who grows up confident in his privileged status and well aware of his role in society. Modest and generally conformist, he nevertheless finds himself increasingly attracted to his own sex. Through Clive, whom he encounters at Cambridge, and through Alec, the gamekeeper on Clive's country estate, Maurice gradually experiences a profound emotional and sexual awakening. A tale of passion, bravery and defiance, this intensely personal novel was completed in 1914 but remained unpublished until after Forster's death in 1970. Compellingly honest and beautifully written, it offers a powerful condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society, and is at once a moving love story and an intimate tale of one man's erotic and political self-discovery.
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Top reviews from Australia
Ankh
3.0 out of 5 stars Read it for English
Reviewed in Australia on 8 February 2021
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I really enjoyed reading this as an English literature. Beautifully written. But the context of it was rather shallow. Can't blame the author though, considering the circumstances under which he wrote it.
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Lynne Kelly
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved every perfectly constructed word
Reviewed in Australia on 2 June 2016
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Maurice is a book written by a master of the English language. The story is both compelling and profound. It gives insight into the confused thinking of a conservative of the upper classes who tries to deny his homosexuality. But, for me, the pure pleasure of the book was the stunning use of language. I read Maurice many years ago, but did not fully appreciate the bliss of the writing.
Time to retread more of E M Forster.
2 people found this helpful
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Joe
5.0 out of 5 stars Ahead of its time!
Reviewed in Australia on 16 May 2014
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A great book for its time, Forster brings the character to life as deals with interesting subject matter about homosexulity and society - issues that the world still grapples with today.
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Keith M
5.0 out of 5 stars Ground-breaking And Highly Engaging
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 March 2021
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E M Forster’s novel about homosexual love is probably at least as notable for its chequered history as it is as a standalone piece of literature. Written in 1913-14 but not published for over half a century (in 1971), due to the prevailing social attitudes in the intervening period, it is a deeply felt piece of writing in which Forster’s eponymous protagonist, from his time as a schoolboy, then student at Cambridge through to his employment as a stockbroker, attempts to come to terms with his supposed 'unnatural’ tendencies, against a conservative backdrop of family, class and religion. Forster inhabits the mind and consciousness of Maurice in such a way as to make clear the personal and moving nature of the issues at stake here and the intensity of the sense of isolation and frustration felt by his protagonist is palpable. I found the novel to be relatively plot-light until its latter stages, as Maurice splits with his erstwhile companion Clive and is faced (in the manner of 'the done thing’) with the prospect of doctor visits in order to 'cure his affliction’ (via hypnosis!), before he meets the young game-keeper, Alec Scudder, and things liven up still further. It is also rather sad to note that Forster felt that his determination to give the novel a happy ending (and such a defiant one it is!) made it all the more unpublishable. Both as a tale of deeply felt human passion and as a milestone of gay fiction, Maurice comes highly recommended.
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Michael Oliver
5.0 out of 5 stars Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - this shows you how.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 15 August 2018
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I heard a discussion of this book on Radio three when first published, read it saw the film, was not until reading an article about James Ivory thought must read it again. When it came unwrapped opened it randomly at the beginning of the third chapter- and there it was that beautiful Forster writing spare and simultaneously rich - that reads without any effort from the reader. The subject matter is almost secondary to the experience of reading.Even so it is a gentle book that circumnavigates it's subject with sympathy and insight. a great book a great read.
12 people found this helpful
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LindaMM
5.0 out of 5 stars How not to avoid yourself
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 February 2019
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How can someone stop being gay? How does one night of fumbling, grateful sex be called love sufficient to abandon life in a new world for a shame shadowed life with a snob? And yet the bravery of writing, if not publishing a book in 1914 about a man stumbling against his unavoidable need for acceptance and love from a man makes Forster's book a tribute to his own needs. The book stopped abruptly. How I wished to know how the pair went on. An excellent book - Maurice had much to teach Ralph Lanyon and Elio Perleman's Oliver.
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Catman
5.0 out of 5 stars Good read with a hopeful ending
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 October 2018
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This is one of those books that I feel better for reading, not least because it has a hopeful ending. It’s bizarre that some of the reviews for this book are critical of the language used. The story was completed in 1914 and is grounded in that period, so of course the language is different to that used today. If you read this edition, be sure to read the story before the introduction, as it contains spoilers. The book tells the story of Maurice Hall, and his comfortable middle-class life, who meets and falls in love with Clive at Cambridge and later Clive’s game keeper, Alec, and is set against the prejudices and conventions of the time. I would thoroughly recommend this book.
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English Teacher
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Finest Examples of Gay Literature.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 November 2014
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In many ways, 'Maurice' is a tragic novel. It was the most personal of Forster's novels, published in the year after his death. It is also a gay fairy-tale, a story of love between two men of two classes on two different paths, overcoming the odds to be together. Forster wrote the novel at a time when homosexuality was not only illegal, but considered a form of insanity. Perhaps, he wanted to write a novel that reflected an idyllic world.
Quentin Crisp condemned the film version, precisely because it gave gay men what they wanted as opposed to what they should expect. Nevertheless, it is hard to condemn Mr. Forster's novel. 'Maurice' is beautifully written and a well-observed social drama, revealing details of gay life in Edwardian England. There are moments in the novel which might strike one as outlandish, but, because of the compassionate tone, one is inclined to forgive.
In summary, 'Maurice' is an entertaining, nourishing, and moving novel, and comes highly recommended.
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박정미
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모리스
헌책방에서 헐값에 굴러다니던 E.M.포스터의 <모리스>를 들고온 게 일년도 넘었구나.
깜박 잊었다가 책장에서 발견하고 읽기 시작했다. 한 번 읽고 또 한 번 읽고 어제는 영화까지 봤다.
인생도 이렇게 되감아 볼 수 있다면 놓치고 살아온 것들을 되찾을 수 있을까. 그런다고 더 현명해질지는 의문이지만.
모리스, 스무살 청춘의 캐임브릿지, 일차세계대전 직전 제국주의 꽃의 중심 런던, 그들만의 벨에포크.
영화는 모호함의 안개를 제멋대로 두르다가도 주인공 가슴속에 숨은 이야기를 명백하게 드러낼 수 있는 소설의 심리묘사를 훌륭하게 재현해냈다. 영리하게도 살짝 스토리를 비틀어서 영상으로 포착해낸 것이다.
그래도 도저히 포스터의 아름다운 문장들을 다 담아낼 수는 없었다. 그건 감독의 한계가 아니라 포스터의 천재성과 매체의 다른 특성 때문이리라.
모리스가 성과 사랑의 신비에 눈떠가는 과정을 사춘기가 막 시작할 무렵 퍼블릭스쿨부터 캐임브릿지, 그 이후의 몇 년간의 주식중개인으로서 사는 모습을 통해 보여주는 이 작품은 영국신사계급의 생활상과 내면을 기가 막히게 파고든다.
그들의 모럴은 계급의식의 단단한 지평 위에 세워져있고, 제국주의 교육의 일환으로 학창시절 내내 주입되는 그리스적 이상은 빅토리아조 숨막힐 듯 내리누르는 기독교교리와의 모순적 대립속에서 질식되어간다.
모리스는 캠브릿지에 만연한 동성애적 이상, <플라톤의 향연>으로 상징되는 선배와의 첫 사랑을 통해 자신의 성정체성을 깨닫게 된다.
첫 사랑이 상대의 변심으로 끝난 후에도 꾸준히 내적 부름에 응답하며 나아가 드디어는 견고한 계급의식까지 무너뜨리고 두번째의 현실적 사랑을 쟁취하게 된다.
그것은 계급적 인습과 관계망의 포획에서 벗어난 개별적이고 고유한 자아의 승리, 즉 자유를 향한 여정이다.
포스터는 서른 다섯살에 이 책을 다 써놓고도 아흔살 넘어 죽을 때까지 미발표원고로 남겨두었다.
당시의 사회분위기와 법적인 규율하에서 동성애를, 그것도 해피엔딩으로 끝나는 동성애이야기를 출판할 엄두조차 못냈다고 한다.
하지만 이 책을 읽은 내 느낌은 꼭 그것만은 아닐 듯싶다. 첫번째 사랑, 고도로 지적이고 감성이예민하게 벼려있어야 가능한 그리스적 동성애뿐만 아니라 육체로부터 비롯된 두번째 사랑도 지나치게 이상적이다.
그리고 그렇기 때문에 애닯고 가슴 아프고 대중의 눈을 피해 숨겨두고 싶은 작품이 아니었을까. 누구나 자신의 가장 아프고 아름다운 이상을 함부로 남앞에 드러내놓지 못하고 죽을 때까지 가슴 속에 간직하는 것처럼.
이 책은 동성애라는 소재를 썼지만 그 핍박받는 사랑의 형태를 통해 사랑보편에 대한 가장 심오한 이상을 제시해준다.
모리스의 간절한 존재의 외로움, 인생의 동반자를 찾고싶은 그리움. 그 ‘단 한사람’에 대한 충실성, 고통을 통한 내적자아의 성숙을 이렇게 내밀하면서도 풍성하게 묘사한 작품이 또 있을까, 싶다.
영화는 소설의 주인공 행로에 다른 설명, 다른 계기를 마련해주어 시각적 이해를 도모한다고 처음에 썼다. 영화와 소설의 마지막은 그 그리움과 회한을 기가막히게 다른 방식으로 일치하여 표현해낸 대표적 예이다.
“그것이 그의 마지막 말이었다. 왜냐하면 그때 이미 모리스는 그곳을 떠났기 때문이다. 그 뒤에 남은 흔적이라곤 조그맣게 쌓인 달맞이꽃의 꽃잎뿐이었다. 꽃잎들은 꺼져가는 모닥불처럼 땅 위에서 애처로운 빛을 뿜고 있었다. 클라이브는 죽을 때까지도 모리스가 정확히 언제 떠났는지 알지 못했고, 노년에 이르러서는 그런 순간이 있었는지도 확신하지 못했다. 블루 룸은 희미한 빛을 발하고, 고사리 풀숲은 물결쳤다.
영원한 캐임브릿지 어딘가에서 친구는 온 몸에 햇살을 입고 그에게 손짓하며 5월 학기의 소리와 향기를 떨치기 시작했다.”
삶과 죽음 사이, 젊은시절의 생활과 노년의 깨달음 사이 메꿀 수 없는 간격이 발밑에 펼쳐진다.몇 번을 다시 읽어도 몇 번을 돌려봐도 아련하게 향기로운 문장이고 영상이미지이다.
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포스터가 캐릭터를 정말 입체적으로 섬세하게 그려냈습니다.
클라이브의 영민함과 풍부한 지성 뒤에 약삭빠름과 허약한 내면을, 모리스의 우둔함 뒤에 스포츠맨쉽과 꾸준히 나아가는(이 '나아가는'이라는 표현이 책에 자주 등장하는데 원문이 혹 progressing 아닐까, 싶습니다.)견실함이 따라 붙습니다.
그리고 그는 사랑을 위해 계급의 경계를 넘어가는 인물로 묘사됩니다. 사실 그는 계급적우월의식이 팽배한 속물로부터 출발해서 그 경계를 넘게 되는 것이지요.
제가 두번째 사랑에서 너무 이상주의적이라고 생각하는 지점이 바로 이 지점입니다. 계급을 초월하는 사랑은 계급을 무너뜨리는 사랑으로 미화되는 것이죠.
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Maurice Character Analysis
MAURICE HALL
Maurice Hall is the novel’s protagonist, and the character whose perspective dominates the narrative. As Forster himself notes, Maurice largely represents the average or even ideal turn-of-the-century Englishman; he is “handsome, healthy, bodily attractive, mentally torpid, not a bad business man and rather a snob” (250). His background is likewise unremarkable; his family is suburban and comfortably middle-class, and though they can afford to provide a “gentleman’s” education for Maurice, they don’t expect him to aspire to anything above his father’s job as a stockbroker (an upper-class man would traditionally enter a more pedigreed field like the law, the Church, or the military).
The only thing that distinguishes Maurice from any other Englishman is his sexual orientation; Maurice is gay at a time when being gay wasn’t simply taboo but actually illegal (at least in England). Maurice is characteristically slow to realize his feelings, only becoming fully aware of them after a Cambridge classmate—Clive Durham—admits his own love for him. The rest of the novel details Maurice’s efforts to accept his orientation, and to build a meaningful life for himself. Unlike the more intellectual Clive, Maurice approaches these problems from a practical rather than philosophical angle, and is therefore less inclined to question his feelings provided he can avoid both isolation and imprisonment.
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