Marriage and Personal Relations in Forster’s Fiction

Abstract

By common consent E. M. Forster is a master of domestic comedy. His self-confessed model was Jane Austen. ‘I was more ambitious than she was’, he declared in an oft-quoted passage, ‘and tried to hitch it on to other things’,¹ to social criticism, symbolism and prophecy, in fact. Intimate as the rapport with Jane Austen proved, the adoption of domestic comedy as a main fictional mode involved commitment to an institution in which he had little faith: marriage. His own belief was in personal relations. Although logically there was no reason why ideals of personal relations should be embodied in matrimony, biographically there were. Male friendship, not marriage, lay at the centre of his world-view. Thus we have in Forster an interesting case of the creative tension between a personal ideology only belatedly raised to full consciousness and an alien social ideology enshrined in a literary form to which he was strongly attracted on stylistic grounds. Fortunately the traditional form proved sufficiently malleable for him to discover a personal voice and vision within it. This paper seeks to place the process of discovery in broad historical perspective and to examine the positive and negative effects of the tension between literary tradition and personal vision, between individual and social ideology.