The Monumental Failure of Howards End

Abstract

E. M. Forster opens his 1910 Howards End with letters, remarking One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister (5). The initial resignation to epistolary form (which persists for only two relatively short letters) quickly foregrounds Howards End's uncertain position on continuum of novel's generic evolution. Neither experimental nor rigorously realist, Howards End seems to reside in indeterminate space between and Victorian novel--indeed, Fredric Jameson calls Forster at best a closet modernist (159). Nevertheless, Forster's work has often been read by critics as demanding inclusion in canon. (1) Howards End, I contend, practices a limited modernism that is rooted in very gap between its traditional form and its modern content that renders it so difficult to characterize. The novel's symbolic economy is mobilized around discord between realist, Victorian form of Howards End and its modernist, Edwardian content. The and its titular house, Howards End, overlap within same signifier, Howards End. The letters that open bear a metonymic relationship with house (and thus novel) in that this correspondence itself is about architecture. This interchangeability and variation between architecture and space represents, as I will show, novel's central formal configuration. Helen responds to her sister, an absent interlocutor, by launching into a lengthy description of architectural and spatial make-up of eponymous house: From hall you go right or left into a dining-room or drawing-room ... there's a very big wych-elm--to left as you look up--leaning a little over house, and standing on boundary between garden and meadow (5). Forster describes house and its environs in terms of how both determine motions of daily life and define space; instead of being confirmed, however, this correlation between spatial categories and social life they are meant to impose is compromised and ultimately undermined as progresses. Howards End is often understood as a that is primarily concerned with place by virtue of its title alone; title also marks English home as novel's definitive 'place.' Critics have often taken lead from title: while as Jon Hegglund claims, [e]ven most casual reader of Howards End cannot fail to notice centrality of houses in novel (401), rigorous readers have also focused on symbolic centrality of house. (2) Beyond walls of house, Jason Finch has identified persistent attention that critics have paid to the spirit of a place, genius loci in Forster's work, which absorbs house itself into a broader, though still localized, consideration of place and being (2). Howards End has also been included in notable assessments of significance of colonial in modernism; Jed Esty best sums up this approach in claiming that, for Forster, metropolitan perception subsumes lost value of territorial coherence while registering epistemological privilege associated with modernity's borderless (28). In this line of argument--which originates with Fredric Jameson--the unrepresentable but economically necessary colonial spaces can only be articulated in a discourse that opposes 'lost' totality of premodern with chaotic totality of metropolis. In this essay, I reconcile readings of that focus on home itself with those that center around colonial and domestic/metropolitan divide. As I will show, Howards End tries and fails to serve as 'monumental' English space that Forster sets it up to be, partially due to its status as a pastiche that attempts to pass as an 'authentic' English home. Furthermore, in contrast with house, colonial space in can only haunt margins of text, and while definitively different from monumental architecture of home, it is absent in a way that emphasizes novel's incomplete spatial representation of English nation. …