E.M. Forster's "Howards End": Fiction as History

by Peter Widdowson, E.M. Forster (Subject)

Howards End, published in 1910, is deeply revealing of social and cultural processes which were intensified and transformed by the First World War. Forster's theme is the threat to liberal values from the hostile tendencies of modern life. Against the brutalising insensibility of urban and industrial England he opposed traditional rural England embodied in Howards End.Peter Widdowson consider the ambiguities and inconsistencies of Forster's vision which paradoxically contribute to the novel's success as a work of art. He shows how the form and structure of the novel - superficially a novel in the 19th century realist tradition - enact the insecurities and ambivalence of liberal ideology. He concludes that Howards End is not simply Forster's conscious account of the war between liberal-humanist culture and the new brutalism but also a part of that war.

Genres: Nonfiction

124 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Widdowson finds a tension in Howards End between Forster's attempt at realism, and his wish to propagate a vision, "for which he needs myth, pattern, symbolism." Forster needs "all the paraphernalia of realism, since the danger of plain fable, because of its manifest artificiality, is the option it grants the reader simply to disregard its 'moral'." He is unable to successfully synthesize realism with vision. And, the plotting is mechanistic.