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Will Banks
Admin
January 27, 2017 9:34 am

I’m intrigued that students have avoided talking about class, which remains one of those questions that Americans are as “disinclined” to talk about as the English are to “human nature” … 🙂

I’m not sure if this comes through as clearly in the novel — my mind is not yet firing on all cylinders this morning and I didn’t mark it in the text — but in the film version of Maurice, which you simply must see, if you haven’t — a wonderful young Hugh Grant as Clive! — we get a look in one night at Clive’s house as everyone has finished dinner and is standing around in their fancy dress. It’s raining and suddenly multiple holes in the roof let rain in and they have to shift the piano and put out buckets to catch it. Memory suggests there are a few similar moments in the novel when it becomes clear that the class that Clive represents — and the huge but expensive and now crumbling estates of the 19th century — no longer make sense in England. Like those estates and houses, it’s always seemed to me that Forster sees the landed gentry and the heteronormative culture that flourishes there as falling as well. It’s no surprise that the Clive stays locked away in his closet, of sorts, while the new middle class (Maurice) and the working class (Scudder) may have a future together …

Stephen Poole
January 27, 2017 11:38 am
Reply to  Will Banks

Similar issues come up in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), which also centers on the evolving relationship of two male friends who become sexually involved at university: the aristocratic Sebastian Flyte and the middle class Charles Ryder. Whereas in Maurice, the aristocratic character eventually leads a conventional life of marriage and heterosexuality and the middle class character gets expelled and leads a gay life, in Brideshead Revisited the opposite occurs. The middle class character (Charles) eventually leads a life of marriage and heterosexuality and the aristocrat (Sebastian) gets expelled and leads a gay life. In both novels, the gay character ends up with a partner from the working class. In Brideshead Revisited, this is presented as a sign of how far Sebastian has sunk in the world. (His companion is a sleazy, drug-addled opportunist.) Here we see an example of the declining English aristocracy that Dr. Banks mentions.

I think a theme that is emerging in this course is the greater possibility for democracy in gay relationships, where class lines can be crossed more successfully (or at least more acceptably) than they can in the straight world. We saw this last week, when Stephen took up with an uneducated girl (Mary).

Jen Denis-Hill
January 27, 2017 12:58 pm
Reply to  Stephen Poole

Stephen-
Very interesting point re: class lines being crossed more successfully in the gay world. Do you think other lines are more successfully crossed as well? Race? Religion? Level of education? In some ways I want to think this is true–if one has already had the courage to live one’s truth as a gay person, it seems to stand that other barriers would also be more easily overcome. However, there does seem to be a huge divide in the gay world surrounding race and class. I think about the Showtime series The L Word and how many lesbians were frustrated with the series since most of the women represented on the show were affluent (and white). There does seem to be a big divide in class in the lesbian world.

Stephen Poole
January 27, 2017 2:06 pm
Reply to  Jen Denis-Hill

Hi Jen,

The theme is presented in these novels but I don’t know that I buy into it myself. I don’t find it very plausible that a relationship where there are significant inequalities, such as the one between Maurice and Alec or even between Stephen and Mary, could stand much of a chance. Stephen treats Mary variously like a child (Hall 331) and like a pet (340). The Stephen-Mary dynamic parallels the one between Mary and her dog (David).

There is also a difference, as we’ll see in later texts, between crossing the lines (of class or race or whatever) over the long haul of a long-term relationship and crossing them temporarily (as in a one-night stand or a short-term relationship). Certainly the possibility of the latter is plausible to me.

Maurice and Alec go from blackmail to happily-ever-after in a few pages. I don’t buy it. By comparison, it’s much more believable that they would run into Mr. Ducie or that the London jeweler would recognize Stephen’s resemblance to her father.

Will Banks
Admin
January 30, 2017 4:42 pm
Reply to  Stephen Poole

Love the connection you make to Brideshead … I almost had that in our reading, but alas, world enough and time … The parallels are quite clear, and then also Downton … I keep thinking one of my London study abroad courses will soon be “Literature Between the Was” so I can do both, and Dowton and a bunch of Rattigan plays … 🙂

Stephen Poole
January 29, 2017 12:36 pm
Reply to  Tiffany Price

Hi Tiffany,

I like the connection you make with Downton Abbey. I would add that the series and Forster’s novel present idealized cross-class romances (Lady Sybil/Branson and Maurice/Alec). We see only the honeymoon period. In neither case do we get to see whether these couples would have overcome their class differences and had lasting success together.

P.S. You get my vote for provocative statement of the week: “race/ethnicity is not an issue or an area of divide in Canada”.

Brandon Hardy
January 27, 2017 2:08 pm

I think in part these characters’ respective classes have varied risks attached to them. For example, Clive is, as you put it, master of the house with enormous social and familiar responsibilities that impact the way he performs his own sexuality. At the other extreme, Scudder is a servant and of lesser means, which may suggest why he reacts so impulsively and daringly even after one encounter with Maurice. Maurice himself is somewhere in the middle, but he doesn’t seem to have much to lose, even contemplating suicide at one point. He trudges on despite his struggle to integrate into a “normal” society and grow into an affection for women. The class to which he belongs, at least in my view, doesn’t seem to affect his behavior in the same ways as Scudder and Clive.

Jayde Rice
January 27, 2017 4:14 pm

Because I was so concerned with getting a head-start on Giovanni, I still haven’t finished this book, so I find it difficult to speak of Scudder with any certainty. I read the synopsis of the book, and I do like the idea what Maurice only refers to him as Scudder for much of the book, and referring to him as Alec for the first time was apparently an important moment.

But all I can really speak on is Maurice, and the moment that stood out to me, most of all, regarding his class and his idea of himself as a man. It was when he was speaking to an elder about his mother. He had refused to stop when a school official had asked him to and then afterward refused to apologize; this led to an argument with his mother, which in turn, led to him being chastised by a friend of the family’s.

But the way the chastising happened was very telling. The man didn’t simply lay into him. Instead, he was very sarcastic and talked about how a man like Maurice didn’t need to apologize to his mother or act civilly. No. That was how a county gentleman would act, which Maurice clearly was not. And so it was not love for his mother that he changed his attitude, or even love for Clive or money, or fear, or anything else of the sort. It was vanity, because he saw and wanted to see himself as better, higher, and more gentlemanly, and the insinuation that he was not stung him.

Jayde Rice
January 28, 2017 2:45 pm
Reply to  Tiffany Price

I don’t know if he wished he were born into a different life, but I did get the feeling (and have a vague memory of a character or the narrator saying) that he dreamed of some sort of upward mobility. He would rather have had Clive’s life, standing, and station, and he (and his class) were perceived as wanting to break free from their station and become like their “betters.” And I believe that conversation with Dr. Barry is strong evidence that Maurice really did feel that way.

Victoria Allen
January 29, 2017 1:02 am

I found the issue of class to be one of the more interesting points of the novel. The classist system really drives the need for conformity. While Clive may be deemed of the higher class among the three central characters of same-sex relationships in the novel, Clive also seems to be the character with, by the end, more deficiencies. His family estate is in disrepair and deterioration, and Clive had to fight to gain election in his father’s stead, noting that the people had grown “weary of us leisured classes coasting round in motor-cars and asking for something to do” (Forster 103). The deterioration of the importance of Clive’s social stature also can be argued to be reflective of the deterioration of his own moral compass. The fact that Clive “changed” is called into question. Was he really that immature and sheltered from women in his schooling to deem a change? Or is he trying to conform and use women as a way of advancing his social status? This is much removed from his arguing the classic theorists as an undergraduate. Maurice, in the suburban middle class, also suffers character flaws. While he fights the need to conform (he is certainly a masculine “man’s man,” taking the role of man-of-the-house to his mother and sisters) and struggles with his attraction to the same-sex, even trying to “cure” himself by visiting Dr. Barry and the hypnotist, he seems to hate the idea of “mixing” with a lower social class even more. This idea seems to truly disgust him—his resolution to his “love” for Alec is to turn away from his own social class and adult responsibilities to “disappear” with the lowly laborer. What good is it to stay in England? He just disappears, never to be heard from again. This does… Read more »