From the Country House to the Painting: an “Aesthetic” Adaptation of Howards End in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Abstract

This article examines Zadie Smith’s third novel, On Beauty (2005), alongside E. M. Forster’s original, Howards End (1910). As Howards End did about a century ago, On Beauty eagerly explores how the appreciation for beauty can lead to the cultivation of morality. In our contemporary world, where the aesthetic has gone through such severe ideological deconstruction, how can Smith revive the problem of the aesthetic so fully? My argument explores this question by focusing on one significant departure that Smith has taken from Howards End: it is not a house (a three-dimensional space that Forster uses to provide physical as well as conceptual depth), but a painting (a two-dimensional item with a more purely aesthetic purpose), that is in need of a spiritual heir. With this change, Smith might signal that she accepts the view that we live in a depthless world, but nonetheless tries to capture some moral depth in it. Given the novel’s preoccupation with the act of seeing, Smith seems to invite us to acknowledge—though it may sound quite oxymoronic—how much depth is latent on the surface of the world, not behind it.