Cliveās character seems to focus more on the actual feeling of love. He likes the companionship of a man and craves to be with a man in a sexual manner. However, he finds himself stuck between social norms, his religious beliefs and his hearts desires. The way he approaches love is much different that both Maurice and Scudder. Clive is much more careful than the others. He only confesses his love after Maurice reads Symposium. Once he realizes that Maurice sees nothing wrong with the written piece he feels safe in trusting Maurice and expressing his true feelings. However, the way Maurice reacted is what surprised me most. The reader could tell how Maurice felt about Clive so for him to turn him down was somewhat of a shock. I think Clive revealing his feelings for Maurice, in turn made Maurice finally have to confront himself about what he really feels. Also, Cliveās focus on emotions and feelings were what was important to him. The long conversations late at night and the cuddling him and Maurice did was truly enough for him, until he realizes that it would be much easier to pretend, be with a woman and conform to what society thought he should be. Maurice and Scudderās approach to love is extremely similar. Scudder in many ways remind me of Maurice when he first began dealing with Clive and his homosexual feelings. Maurice wanted Clive so bad that he was willing to remain chaste if that meant getting to be with him. Maurice sacrificed what he wanted many of times for Clive, only to be broken up with through a letter. The way Maurice sacrificed for Clive is the same way Scudder scarified for Maurice. He gives up his good job in Argentina to stay in England with… Read more »
Yes, I saw this love triangle as Forster’s way of saying, in all its forms, love is good. Maurice was the pivot point from a spiritual, ethereal connection with Clive to the primal, physical worldly collision with Shudder. Do you think, according to Forster’s description, that either love was more or less real? Can there truly be the most intimate of connections without physical consummation? Can immediate physical consummation be just as real?
According to the Platonic philosophy of Ideal Forms, (and my interpretation of it), every person strives to be “good”. Depending on their own definition of “good”, they live their lives a certain way. Clive obviously saw homosexual sex as bad so he did not engage in it. Do you think Clive ever fully understood what it was for him to be truly happy in his “false” lifestyle? Or do you think Clive was perfectly content in his choices because he was doing what he saw as being “good”?
Stephanie and Tiffany- To answer one of the questions you posed, Stephanie, I do not believe that either love was more or less real, just simply different. I think Forster wanted to depict the struggle of being a gay man in this time period (the novel has been transcendent, so I still think this applies modern-day). Ultimately I think Maurice learns lessons from each of these loves, whether they end well or poorly. Intimate connection can be achieved without physical consummation, in my opinion. I think the connection between two people without the physical consummation can be more powerful than immediate consummation, because it allows understanding between individuals. Maurice was very much in love with Clive, even though Clive was not sexually active with him. Do you think Clive truly felt this love back to Maurice? I believe that Maurice truly loved Clive despite not having a physical relationship, but do you think the relationship was as fulfilled on Cliveās side? Do you think Clive needed physical intimacy in order to feel love? I donāt think Clive ever reached a level of happiness. Maybe on a superficial level, he achieved some sort of satisfaction because he was perceived as doing what was right. On a deeper, more personal level though, he never found his true identity and his truest self. Peter Fulham wrote a piece for The New Yorker that I came across about, among other things, the ending of Maurice (the 1960 afterward). (Iāve attached the link to this article below.) In the article, thereās a quote from Forster when he says, āI dedicated it āTo a Happier Yearā and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote.ā I think ultimately Maurice found the most real happiness with Alec (in the 1960 ending) and was able to live a life… Read more »
I don’t know if this is helpful, but as I was re-reading this time, it really struck me that early section where Maurice first meets Risley, the Oscar-Wilde-styled character who’s flamboyant and camp. Maurice is drawn to him immediately and isn’t quite sure why, but then the second that Clive shows up, Maurice starts to “get it” … he’s drawn to men, all sorts of men — he finds men attractive and he’s drawn to them. We don’t see that with Clive: Does he ever show any interest in any one else? (I don’t remember the the does, but correct me if I’m wrong.) It seems that Forster recognizes that human sexuality is complex — much more so than society at large was willing to do at the time … “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature,” he writes. In some ways, I find Clive the more interesting character because he’s harder to peg as “gay” than Maurice. He might be; he might be bi-; he might just feel a special bond with Maurice.
After reading this response, I’m not sure what category Clive would fall into because you are right, the only other people we see him being attracted to is women; the nurse, Maurice’s sister and Anne. Maybe you’re right, maybe there was just a special connection between him and Maurice.
Hi Dr. Banks and classmates, I think this issue of pegging will probably hover around every text we read this semester. It came up last week with Mary (and possibly to some extent with Angela Crossby) and now we see it with Clive. What the issue amounts to is: how we peg a character affects our interpretation of the text. If we regard Mary as bisexual, going off with Martin appears in a certain light; if we regard her as gay, it appears in another. Likewise with Clive. Is he heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual? Is he one of these and then another? Behind these questions are a few others: Is it a good idea for readers to peg? Is it even possible? Or is it unavoidable? I go back and forth with these questions. Forster likes to play with ambiguity. I am thinking particularly of the āmuddleā at the heart of A Passage to India. His books willfully resist the readerās natural urge to peg. (Iām curious where this urge comes from. Is it just human natureās wish to make sense of the world by putting things in tidy categories? Or is there a witch-hunting instinct behind it? āHa! Look! A Homosexual!ā) One last point: there was (and still is?) a tradition in British public schools (what we would call private schools) of sexual relationships among boys. For students in a remote, all-boys school, really the only potential sex partners were other boys. (Relationships of this kind I gather also existed at university, which in the time Maurice is set excluded women.) But in later life, these boys would think of themselves as exclusively heterosexual (though certainly some of those boys, like Maurice, later think of themselves as exclusively gay). One reading is that Clive is one of these boys. Another,… Read more »
I think you are right Stephen. “Pegging” as you call it, (great word for it btw), does seem like a good way to describe our way of putting things into our own perspective. I really do wish someone would just come out and tell us what happened to Clive to cause such a dramatic shift. If he truly loved Maurice as he professed, why would he break things off in such a way? Self preservation? Was someone blackmailing Clive? Did he see a relationship go badly in Greece? I think learning his motivation would help us all peg Clive a little more accurately.
(I hope my sarcasm is not too subtle.) Not knowing what caused the riff makes for a richer analysis, no?
I believe readers want to “peg” characters for the reason that we all seek out labels for people: most people in our society don’t do well without them. We want to know that this person is a Republican and that one a Democrat, that he is gay and she is straight, that this person is Protestant and that one Catholic. It’s what we do. And we don’t do well with gray areas; I think that’s why bisexual people often feel so isolated. I think, as readers, this can be both a positive and negative thing. We are all (including literary characters) more than just an individual label. To put someone in a box and refuse to see the other parts that make him/her up is to deny a huge part of that individual’s existence. However, I do think finding characters a reader identifies with and who have been through similar life experiences can be a positive and even life-changing encounter. For example, throughout reading the Harry Potter series, I was always trying to “peg” Dumbledore as gay. When J.K. Rowling “outed” him after the last book was published, I felt a sense of belonging to the books that I hadn’t felt previously. Think of all the young readers who read those books now who are either a) gay and can find a character who is gay and incredibly respected or b)are straight and can read about a character who is gay and incredibly respected. Both are powerful experiences.
After reading a bit into the novel I began to question if Clive really loved Maurice or was he just the first man that Clive felt comfortable enough to open up to. I asked myself how could someone go from one extreme to another? How could Clive be madly in love with Maurice, then break up with him while heās out of the country AND by letter. Then, I had to remember the time in which their relationship takes place. The two of them could have easily been thrown in jail for their secret relationship and I can imagine that it was stressful for the both of them. Itās sad to say that Clive was the weak one, unable to deal with the pressures of society which meant he had to choose between Maurice and being ānormalā.
I had never thought of the fulfilment of the relationship from Cliveās point of view until you posed the question. I honestly donāt think the lack of intimacy much bothered Clive because even when he gets with Ann, he is contented that she does not require much of him in the bedroom. Or maybe this was because he was not sexually attracted to women? I think this answers the other part of your question, Clive in my opinion does not need physical intimacy in order to feel love. From the beginning of the novel it seems as if intimacy and compassion is what Clive wants most.
Iām not sure rather Forster was insinuating that the love between Maurice and Scudder was more ārealā than the love he had with Clive, like Emily states, itās just different. The relationship that Maurice has with Clive seems to be in the favor of Clive. Clive setās the rules and Maurice plays by them. Also, though their relationship lacked the physical component, the two were still very much in love with each other. I think Maurice was fooling himself into believing that a relationship with consummation was fine with him. Iām sure that he would have convinced himself that drinking poison was okay if that meant he got to be with Clive. However, his impulsiveness to consummate the relationship with Scudder is what leads me to believe that he was truly longing for that type of intimate relationship with a man.
This conversation veered a bit, though in wonderfully useful ways, As I’m thinking on it now, I’m remembering Jagose’s recognition that sexual behavior and sexual identity are different, and have been historically. At this point, the two are perhaps the closest they’ve ever been aligned. That said, for me, the question about “pegging” people or deciding what is “real” love/sex/identity is less important than asking more humanist questions. After all, novels do not provide scientific answers, even when they play at science. Central to Maurice is the perhaps most famous quote from the book: “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature” (211). The novel seems to suggest that love, sex, affection are complex and occur in very different ways: there is no simple equation of one-man-one-woman or one-man-one-man. What makes England — and us today — so “disinclined” to accept that sort of diversity and complexity? Why do we need people be either straight or gay/lesbian?
I think this aversion to diversity and complexity stems from fear. So many people today are unaccepting of beliefs, complexities, and differences because they do not understand themā¦nor do they take them time to try to understand. I think the power of the perceptions of others is really tied-in to this idea. Although someone may not know about another belief, they choose to believe what they are told by others about it, rather than experiencing it for themselves. They let how others see them become more important than believing in what is right.
I think this notion even extends to Clive. Clive was fearful and unaccepting of his past with Maurice, mostly because society told him it wasnāt right. At one point in the novel when Maurice tells Clive that he has met a woman, Forster writes, āHe was pleased partly for Maurice, but also because it rounded out his own positionā (161). Clive was still, through it all, worried about himself rather than his struggling friend. Clive needed to be straight and ONLY straight because he didnāt understand this idea that he could have feelings that were more complex than that.
I think someone touched on this in the discussion on Well of Loneliness, but we have an obsession with labeling. Whether we’re talking about sexuality or psychology or politics or medicine, there is a label for nearly everything. When people don’t fit neatly into a clearly defined box, it puts the establishment in a tizzy. However, as Jagose notes as part of the theory book, most people are somewhere on spectrum when it comes to gender and sexuality. There seems to be a need from society to place things either in black and white, but so many things about human nature fit somewhere in gray area. (Maurice, for instance, was, by appearances, seemed to be a straight man–he was handsome, athletic, and physical. However, he enjoyed nursing Clive, typically a woman’s role.) This flexibility of human nature–the inability to truly define someone–also makes people uneasy.
I think I need to adjust how I approach the conversation. What I was trying to get to with the “real” love question was how Clive, Maurice and Shudder live their real lives versus the ones they have based on love. These three lived their lives much in the way the Greeks did with their own private versus public template. In public, there is a very static and as Victoria put it “black and white” version of what is acceptable and what is not. Does the fact that these “love” relationships occur in private, physically and non physically, make them any less real? Does the physical act help or hinder the decision making?
All three of these men were well aware of what the consequences were if their private affairs were made public. (Let me stop using the word real.) Do you think if all three relationships were completely publicly accepted would Clive consummate his relationship with Maurice? Would Shudder have been so bold in his attempts at getting Maurice’s attention? Would the passion, feelings, excitement be diminished or heightened if the world that these three lived in saw their relationships as “authentic”? Basically, if the stigma was gone, would these three behave the same? How much do we (all humans) live our lives in fear of (insert personal fear here)? And how does that affect (if at all) our own authenticity?
I really like those questions, Stephanie — I think I better understand what you mean by “real” now … this novel plays very much with that big question of public v. private, an issue that remains central to queer lives in the 21st century. At the time of the novel, all sexuality was seen as “private” so the gay characters have to follow the same patterns, but the social spaces that allow for non-sexual connectivity were not there for same-sex relationships. I wonder if Clive would have gone through with the relationship after school … Part of me thinks he would, that he’s still that ‘coward’ who hides the truth from his wife. He may have been more bold if it had not meant losing his livelihood and his family estates …
What is interesting about the way Forster represents his gay characters is how he doesn’t really sexualize them. For example, their more romantic behaviors are tastefully written (coming through a window at night and giving a kiss or affectionately stroking one’s hair): the full extent of their physical intimacy remains closeted, while their passions for one another are revealed internally either through the narrator or the character’s thoughts. Perhaps this a conscious move on Forster’s part to make same-sex relationships more palatable for a general audience, but he shines in his ability to universalize notions of love — it manifests for same-sex couples very much the same way it does for those of opposite sexes. Yet, at the same time, same-sex relations carry the stigma of being unspeakable, the acts that go along with them; however — and I can’t remember if it is Maurice or Clive that reflects on this — sex itself is unspeakable, regardless of the couple’s genders. Anne, for example, is not even educated about sex when entering a relationship with Clive, and Maurice gets a crash course from Mr. Ducie at the beginning of the novel (which even that imparting of knowledge is interesting, as Mr. Ducie assumes a fatherly role and feels compelled to educate the young man). In short, sex is somewhat divorced from love in this novel, and love, in the purest sense, is what Maurice, Clive, and Scudder share, which becomes the most human and — as you put it, Tiffany –transcendent quality that brings these couplings together.
I found the connection between Maurice and Clive in part one and two of the novel to be presented in a very pure manner, as there was a chaste connection between the two that seemed to enhance their emotional connection further. After coming on and reading some of my peers comments, I was reminded that Clive’s believing in part one that his feelings were ok so long as he did not act on it. I am reconsidering now my stance on their relationship, and beginning to see Clive as more selfish than I originally did. Of course, his selfishness is shown through the letter and his decision to secure him becoming an heir, but I originally felt the relationship was pure and honest. Now, I am beginning to see Clive as taking Maurice for a bit of a roller coaster of emotions, while denying him the physicality of the relationship because of what he believed to be ok for himself in his definition of what may be normal or not.
Cliveās character seems to focus more on the actual feeling of love. He likes the companionship of a man and craves to be with a man in a sexual manner. However, he finds himself stuck between social norms, his religious beliefs and his hearts desires. The way he approaches love is much different that both Maurice and Scudder. Clive is much more careful than the others. He only confesses his love after Maurice reads Symposium. Once he realizes that Maurice sees nothing wrong with the written piece he feels safe in trusting Maurice and expressing his true feelings. However, the way Maurice reacted is what surprised me most. The reader could tell how Maurice felt about Clive so for him to turn him down was somewhat of a shock. I think Clive revealing his feelings for Maurice, in turn made Maurice finally have to confront himself about what he really feels. Also, Cliveās focus on emotions and feelings were what was important to him. The long conversations late at night and the cuddling him and Maurice did was truly enough for him, until he realizes that it would be much easier to pretend, be with a woman and conform to what society thought he should be. Maurice and Scudderās approach to love is extremely similar. Scudder in many ways remind me of Maurice when he first began dealing with Clive and his homosexual feelings. Maurice wanted Clive so bad that he was willing to remain chaste if that meant getting to be with him. Maurice sacrificed what he wanted many of times for Clive, only to be broken up with through a letter. The way Maurice sacrificed for Clive is the same way Scudder scarified for Maurice. He gives up his good job in Argentina to stay in England with… Read more »
Hi Tiffany,
Yes, I saw this love triangle as Forster’s way of saying, in all its forms, love is good. Maurice was the pivot point from a spiritual, ethereal connection with Clive to the primal, physical worldly collision with Shudder. Do you think, according to Forster’s description, that either love was more or less real? Can there truly be the most intimate of connections without physical consummation? Can immediate physical consummation be just as real?
According to the Platonic philosophy of Ideal Forms, (and my interpretation of it), every person strives to be “good”. Depending on their own definition of “good”, they live their lives a certain way. Clive obviously saw homosexual sex as bad so he did not engage in it. Do you think Clive ever fully understood what it was for him to be truly happy in his “false” lifestyle? Or do you think Clive was perfectly content in his choices because he was doing what he saw as being “good”?
Stephanie and Tiffany- To answer one of the questions you posed, Stephanie, I do not believe that either love was more or less real, just simply different. I think Forster wanted to depict the struggle of being a gay man in this time period (the novel has been transcendent, so I still think this applies modern-day). Ultimately I think Maurice learns lessons from each of these loves, whether they end well or poorly. Intimate connection can be achieved without physical consummation, in my opinion. I think the connection between two people without the physical consummation can be more powerful than immediate consummation, because it allows understanding between individuals. Maurice was very much in love with Clive, even though Clive was not sexually active with him. Do you think Clive truly felt this love back to Maurice? I believe that Maurice truly loved Clive despite not having a physical relationship, but do you think the relationship was as fulfilled on Cliveās side? Do you think Clive needed physical intimacy in order to feel love? I donāt think Clive ever reached a level of happiness. Maybe on a superficial level, he achieved some sort of satisfaction because he was perceived as doing what was right. On a deeper, more personal level though, he never found his true identity and his truest self. Peter Fulham wrote a piece for The New Yorker that I came across about, among other things, the ending of Maurice (the 1960 afterward). (Iāve attached the link to this article below.) In the article, thereās a quote from Forster when he says, āI dedicated it āTo a Happier Yearā and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote.ā I think ultimately Maurice found the most real happiness with Alec (in the 1960 ending) and was able to live a life… Read more »
I don’t know if this is helpful, but as I was re-reading this time, it really struck me that early section where Maurice first meets Risley, the Oscar-Wilde-styled character who’s flamboyant and camp. Maurice is drawn to him immediately and isn’t quite sure why, but then the second that Clive shows up, Maurice starts to “get it” … he’s drawn to men, all sorts of men — he finds men attractive and he’s drawn to them. We don’t see that with Clive: Does he ever show any interest in any one else? (I don’t remember the the does, but correct me if I’m wrong.) It seems that Forster recognizes that human sexuality is complex — much more so than society at large was willing to do at the time … “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature,” he writes. In some ways, I find Clive the more interesting character because he’s harder to peg as “gay” than Maurice. He might be; he might be bi-; he might just feel a special bond with Maurice.
Dr. Banks,
After reading this response, I’m not sure what category Clive would fall into because you are right, the only other people we see him being attracted to is women; the nurse, Maurice’s sister and Anne. Maybe you’re right, maybe there was just a special connection between him and Maurice.
Hi Dr. Banks and classmates, I think this issue of pegging will probably hover around every text we read this semester. It came up last week with Mary (and possibly to some extent with Angela Crossby) and now we see it with Clive. What the issue amounts to is: how we peg a character affects our interpretation of the text. If we regard Mary as bisexual, going off with Martin appears in a certain light; if we regard her as gay, it appears in another. Likewise with Clive. Is he heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual? Is he one of these and then another? Behind these questions are a few others: Is it a good idea for readers to peg? Is it even possible? Or is it unavoidable? I go back and forth with these questions. Forster likes to play with ambiguity. I am thinking particularly of the āmuddleā at the heart of A Passage to India. His books willfully resist the readerās natural urge to peg. (Iām curious where this urge comes from. Is it just human natureās wish to make sense of the world by putting things in tidy categories? Or is there a witch-hunting instinct behind it? āHa! Look! A Homosexual!ā) One last point: there was (and still is?) a tradition in British public schools (what we would call private schools) of sexual relationships among boys. For students in a remote, all-boys school, really the only potential sex partners were other boys. (Relationships of this kind I gather also existed at university, which in the time Maurice is set excluded women.) But in later life, these boys would think of themselves as exclusively heterosexual (though certainly some of those boys, like Maurice, later think of themselves as exclusively gay). One reading is that Clive is one of these boys. Another,… Read more »
I think you are right Stephen. “Pegging” as you call it, (great word for it btw), does seem like a good way to describe our way of putting things into our own perspective. I really do wish someone would just come out and tell us what happened to Clive to cause such a dramatic shift. If he truly loved Maurice as he professed, why would he break things off in such a way? Self preservation? Was someone blackmailing Clive? Did he see a relationship go badly in Greece? I think learning his motivation would help us all peg Clive a little more accurately.
(I hope my sarcasm is not too subtle.) Not knowing what caused the riff makes for a richer analysis, no?
I believe readers want to “peg” characters for the reason that we all seek out labels for people: most people in our society don’t do well without them. We want to know that this person is a Republican and that one a Democrat, that he is gay and she is straight, that this person is Protestant and that one Catholic. It’s what we do. And we don’t do well with gray areas; I think that’s why bisexual people often feel so isolated. I think, as readers, this can be both a positive and negative thing. We are all (including literary characters) more than just an individual label. To put someone in a box and refuse to see the other parts that make him/her up is to deny a huge part of that individual’s existence. However, I do think finding characters a reader identifies with and who have been through similar life experiences can be a positive and even life-changing encounter. For example, throughout reading the Harry Potter series, I was always trying to “peg” Dumbledore as gay. When J.K. Rowling “outed” him after the last book was published, I felt a sense of belonging to the books that I hadn’t felt previously. Think of all the young readers who read those books now who are either a) gay and can find a character who is gay and incredibly respected or b)are straight and can read about a character who is gay and incredibly respected. Both are powerful experiences.
Emily,
After reading a bit into the novel I began to question if Clive really loved Maurice or was he just the first man that Clive felt comfortable enough to open up to. I asked myself how could someone go from one extreme to another? How could Clive be madly in love with Maurice, then break up with him while heās out of the country AND by letter. Then, I had to remember the time in which their relationship takes place. The two of them could have easily been thrown in jail for their secret relationship and I can imagine that it was stressful for the both of them. Itās sad to say that Clive was the weak one, unable to deal with the pressures of society which meant he had to choose between Maurice and being ānormalā.
I had never thought of the fulfilment of the relationship from Cliveās point of view until you posed the question. I honestly donāt think the lack of intimacy much bothered Clive because even when he gets with Ann, he is contented that she does not require much of him in the bedroom. Or maybe this was because he was not sexually attracted to women? I think this answers the other part of your question, Clive in my opinion does not need physical intimacy in order to feel love. From the beginning of the novel it seems as if intimacy and compassion is what Clive wants most.
Stephanie,
Iām not sure rather Forster was insinuating that the love between Maurice and Scudder was more ārealā than the love he had with Clive, like Emily states, itās just different. The relationship that Maurice has with Clive seems to be in the favor of Clive. Clive setās the rules and Maurice plays by them. Also, though their relationship lacked the physical component, the two were still very much in love with each other. I think Maurice was fooling himself into believing that a relationship with consummation was fine with him. Iām sure that he would have convinced himself that drinking poison was okay if that meant he got to be with Clive. However, his impulsiveness to consummate the relationship with Scudder is what leads me to believe that he was truly longing for that type of intimate relationship with a man.
This conversation veered a bit, though in wonderfully useful ways, As I’m thinking on it now, I’m remembering Jagose’s recognition that sexual behavior and sexual identity are different, and have been historically. At this point, the two are perhaps the closest they’ve ever been aligned. That said, for me, the question about “pegging” people or deciding what is “real” love/sex/identity is less important than asking more humanist questions. After all, novels do not provide scientific answers, even when they play at science. Central to Maurice is the perhaps most famous quote from the book: “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature” (211). The novel seems to suggest that love, sex, affection are complex and occur in very different ways: there is no simple equation of one-man-one-woman or one-man-one-man. What makes England — and us today — so “disinclined” to accept that sort of diversity and complexity? Why do we need people be either straight or gay/lesbian?
Dr. Banks-
I think this aversion to diversity and complexity stems from fear. So many people today are unaccepting of beliefs, complexities, and differences because they do not understand themā¦nor do they take them time to try to understand. I think the power of the perceptions of others is really tied-in to this idea. Although someone may not know about another belief, they choose to believe what they are told by others about it, rather than experiencing it for themselves. They let how others see them become more important than believing in what is right.
I think this notion even extends to Clive. Clive was fearful and unaccepting of his past with Maurice, mostly because society told him it wasnāt right. At one point in the novel when Maurice tells Clive that he has met a woman, Forster writes, āHe was pleased partly for Maurice, but also because it rounded out his own positionā (161). Clive was still, through it all, worried about himself rather than his struggling friend. Clive needed to be straight and ONLY straight because he didnāt understand this idea that he could have feelings that were more complex than that.
I think someone touched on this in the discussion on Well of Loneliness, but we have an obsession with labeling. Whether we’re talking about sexuality or psychology or politics or medicine, there is a label for nearly everything. When people don’t fit neatly into a clearly defined box, it puts the establishment in a tizzy. However, as Jagose notes as part of the theory book, most people are somewhere on spectrum when it comes to gender and sexuality. There seems to be a need from society to place things either in black and white, but so many things about human nature fit somewhere in gray area. (Maurice, for instance, was, by appearances, seemed to be a straight man–he was handsome, athletic, and physical. However, he enjoyed nursing Clive, typically a woman’s role.) This flexibility of human nature–the inability to truly define someone–also makes people uneasy.
Dr. Banks,
I think I need to adjust how I approach the conversation. What I was trying to get to with the “real” love question was how Clive, Maurice and Shudder live their real lives versus the ones they have based on love. These three lived their lives much in the way the Greeks did with their own private versus public template. In public, there is a very static and as Victoria put it “black and white” version of what is acceptable and what is not. Does the fact that these “love” relationships occur in private, physically and non physically, make them any less real? Does the physical act help or hinder the decision making?
All three of these men were well aware of what the consequences were if their private affairs were made public. (Let me stop using the word real.) Do you think if all three relationships were completely publicly accepted would Clive consummate his relationship with Maurice? Would Shudder have been so bold in his attempts at getting Maurice’s attention? Would the passion, feelings, excitement be diminished or heightened if the world that these three lived in saw their relationships as “authentic”? Basically, if the stigma was gone, would these three behave the same? How much do we (all humans) live our lives in fear of (insert personal fear here)? And how does that affect (if at all) our own authenticity?
I really like those questions, Stephanie — I think I better understand what you mean by “real” now … this novel plays very much with that big question of public v. private, an issue that remains central to queer lives in the 21st century. At the time of the novel, all sexuality was seen as “private” so the gay characters have to follow the same patterns, but the social spaces that allow for non-sexual connectivity were not there for same-sex relationships. I wonder if Clive would have gone through with the relationship after school … Part of me thinks he would, that he’s still that ‘coward’ who hides the truth from his wife. He may have been more bold if it had not meant losing his livelihood and his family estates …
What is interesting about the way Forster represents his gay characters is how he doesn’t really sexualize them. For example, their more romantic behaviors are tastefully written (coming through a window at night and giving a kiss or affectionately stroking one’s hair): the full extent of their physical intimacy remains closeted, while their passions for one another are revealed internally either through the narrator or the character’s thoughts. Perhaps this a conscious move on Forster’s part to make same-sex relationships more palatable for a general audience, but he shines in his ability to universalize notions of love — it manifests for same-sex couples very much the same way it does for those of opposite sexes. Yet, at the same time, same-sex relations carry the stigma of being unspeakable, the acts that go along with them; however — and I can’t remember if it is Maurice or Clive that reflects on this — sex itself is unspeakable, regardless of the couple’s genders. Anne, for example, is not even educated about sex when entering a relationship with Clive, and Maurice gets a crash course from Mr. Ducie at the beginning of the novel (which even that imparting of knowledge is interesting, as Mr. Ducie assumes a fatherly role and feels compelled to educate the young man). In short, sex is somewhat divorced from love in this novel, and love, in the purest sense, is what Maurice, Clive, and Scudder share, which becomes the most human and — as you put it, Tiffany –transcendent quality that brings these couplings together.
I found the connection between Maurice and Clive in part one and two of the novel to be presented in a very pure manner, as there was a chaste connection between the two that seemed to enhance their emotional connection further. After coming on and reading some of my peers comments, I was reminded that Clive’s believing in part one that his feelings were ok so long as he did not act on it. I am reconsidering now my stance on their relationship, and beginning to see Clive as more selfish than I originally did. Of course, his selfishness is shown through the letter and his decision to secure him becoming an heir, but I originally felt the relationship was pure and honest. Now, I am beginning to see Clive as taking Maurice for a bit of a roller coaster of emotions, while denying him the physicality of the relationship because of what he believed to be ok for himself in his definition of what may be normal or not.