Germany and Germanic Mythology in Howards End

Abstract

subjects and settings of his novels are often non-English. The most obvious instance is, of course, A Passage to India, but both Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View take place partly outside of England and, like A Passage to India, are concerned with the impact of another culture on values, conventions, self-conceptions, and self-deceptions. Of his completed novels, only two-The Longest Journey and Maiurice-are in a narrowly defined sense, and the latter deals with an England whose existence, at the time Forster wrote the novel, was not openly acknowledged. There are, then, the novels, the novel, the English novels-and there is Howards End, which, in Forster's novelistic canon and from this nationalistic point of view, is unique. With relatively minor exceptions it is set almost entirely in England, but its subject and cast of characters are not entirely English. Like the Indian and Italian novels it deals, among other things, with the confrontation of two mutually and paradoxically sympathetic and antithetical cultures, those of England and Germany. Like the novels, it deals with that confrontation in a milieu that is almost wholly English. If, therefore, it would not be quite proper to call Howards End Forster's novel, neither would it be quite improper to do so. Three of the chief characters -and the two protagonists, Helen and Margaret Schlegel-are halfGerman, bear an obviously German name, are extremely conscious of their German ancestry and heritage, and are frequently associated with visits to and from Germany and their German relatives. Undoubtedly part of the reason for these German elements in Ho?w-