Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia

Abstract

Midway through E. M. Forster's Howards End, the newly married Margaret Schlegel Wilcox returns to the titular country house to find it the recipient of an unexpected makeover. Closed since the death of the first Mrs. Wilcox and for months used as a warehouse for the Schlegels' possessions, the house has been unpacked and reconstituted by the housekeeper, Miss Avery, who creates a new interior built from moments of Margaret's own history. As Margaret moves through the house in surprise, she takes a virtual tour of her past: her umbrellastand greets her in the entrance way, the infamous sword of her father hangs on the wall, Tibby's books make up the library, her mother's chiffonier stands in the dining room, and everywhere, many an old god peeped from a new niche (194). The carefully placed goods even link events from the more distant past with recent ones; Tibby's old bassinet is, significantly, in the room where Helen stayed during her brief liaison with Paul Wilcox. A newly created space, Howards End is nevertheless temporally dense, showcasing not discrete moments, or even the passage of time from past to present, but suggesting rather a more free-flowing exchange among various times, uniting people, objects, and the house in a connective temporal web. This seemingly minor scene collapses into one narrative moment Forster's intriguing and overlooked deployment of time in Howards End, a deployment in which temporal and personal history become written on the Schlegels' possessions, and by extension and by combination, upon Howards End itself. In presenting this revised interior, Forster creates a powerful model for controlling time, one that brings different times and their places-as represented by objects and by architecture-into a new moment where they might be viewed or experienced simultaneously. This manipulation of time is essential to understanding an important moment in the transition to modernism. Stranded between an outmoded past and a rapidly modernizing future, Forster reconstitutes temporal relations not quite to fragment them, but to take time's fragments and weave them together to provide a continuous connection to a modified past, a connection that would potentially satisfy both modern imperatives and nostalgic desire. This time-play not only anticipates the modernist novel and the modern cinema-both poised in 1910 to alter time, to stretch out days and to collapse months-but also participates in an emerging way to traffic in nostalgic desire. Intriguingly, the makeover of Howards End deploys a similar strategy to the one that would be used by architects and merchants to market the past: inscribe temporality on material objects and interior space and turn time into a saleable item, a maneuver that reaches across disciplines and can be seen as the hallmark of a society in transition from the old to the new. The surprising homecoming of the