Eros and Community in the Fiction of William Morris

Abstract

BETWEEN THE EIGHT SHORT STORIES that William Morris wrote in 1856 and the series of book-length romances begun in 1886 and continued until his death stretches a thirty-year gap. The two groups of fiction exhibit both an idiosyncratic continuity in style and setting and a radical transformation in values and emotional atmosphere, so that to juxtapose them challenges us to measure the imaginative development of a lifetime. While Morris's return to a genre he had apparently experimented with and abandoned is intriguing, even more so is his continuing preoccupation with the problem of reconciling erotic love between individuals with the fellowship that unites them to the larger community. The early fiction demonstrates a Romantic conception of erotic love as timeless, transcendent, and essentially private, and expresses a tragic sense of its incompatibility with the material and social conditions of earthly life. But the seeds of change, already perceptible in the tensions within Morris's earliest work, were fostered by the marital, political, and aesthetic experiences of Morris's turbulent middle years. The last romances redefine eros itself as a marriage of natural passion and social commitment, both