Howards End

I finished this novel the other day, and near the quite surprising end, I found myself actually crying. It's a wonderful book -- insightful, beautifully written, interesting, and may very well be a contender for best novel by E. M. Forester, although I haven't reread A Passage to India in quite some time, so it remains to be seen.

Mrs. Wilcox must be the most important character in the novel. She is manipulative, frightening, and embodies an interpretation of the woman's movement in the sense that she is felt more than she is seen, and that her most powerful act in the novel is something she writes. Margaret and Helen do not write, they simply discuss writing, and mostly men's writing. But Mrs. Wilcox is a writer. She goes out with Margaret for stationary, and her note concerning her plans for Howard's End is the most provocative bit of information in the plot, pulling up truths hidden deep within the superficial goings on of the Wilcox family. I don't know if I like Mrs. Wilcox or not -- but her influence on the novel is transcendent, and cannot be denied.

Her involvement with the plot reminds me a little of the women of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: influencing their husbands, weaving the future of men from small offices of the African Trading Company, and pushing and pulling men out of and into various destinies. Mrs. Wilcox doesn't so much as demand, as she suggests -- but her presence commands, and like many great leaders who become even more persuasive in myth than in life, she appears to control matters when she isn't present.

The forward says Only connect..., which is of great importance to Margaret, who feels Mr. Wilcox's tragic flaw is his inability to connect. But what is this connection she so craves and desires for herself and for others? I want to imagine it as the moments where we break the Subject/Object hierarchy and simply exist together. Yet, I'm not sure much of this connecting occurs in the novel. If it does, it is between Margaret and Helen. I'm almost sure that this book is about sisterhood as much as it is about homes, land, economy, love, family, and nature. I don't know if there is another relationship where the kind of connection described as preferred occurs. It may occur between Helen and Mr. Bast -- but so much social consequence occurred to put them together and break them apart, I feel that option is troubled.

There is so much more in this book -- so much about land ownership, possession, class (of course), women, men, outcasts (Tibby), sons, parenting, fathers, mothers, siblings, friends. It's quite a package. I think the narrator quite unreliable, but who knows.

I think I will read it again, maybe not soon, but certainly. It seems that Forester owes a great deal to Austen, Dickens, Bronte, and probably the whole Victorian era. Its definitely Modernist -- there are passages that seem to be written in stream of consciousness.

I'm getting the film from Netflix in a few days. Can't wait to see Emma Thompson. She just simply is Margaret.