Skim through a few of the critical articles on E.M. Forster (here). Choose the one you find most interesting, and try to read as much of it as you can. If you are not satisfied with any of the articles on this blog, you can find another one on A Room with a View using the MLA Database. You may want to take notes as you read the article for future reference, but you do not need to submit your notes. In the comment section, please provide two quotations from the article you have read through (citing the correct page numbers using parenthicals). The first quotation should be what you regard as the thesis or primary argument of the article. The second quotation can be any passage that you find especially useful or provocative. For this assignment, you are simply reading the article and providing two quotations. You do no need to comment on the quotations.
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George H. Thomson, The Italian romances.
1. ” We may take a Room with a view as out first text for a study of how Forster’s personality is conveyed to the reader and how that personality controls the reader’s response to the fiction.” (27)
2. ” Each of these principals of narration is qualified by the intervention of the narrator. One, description and intervention of the narrator. Two, the perspective offered by the inner life of a character very often changes of that of Forster.” (31)
(Linda Linares)
Jeffrey Heath – Kissing and Telling
1). “The reply might be that Forster’s novel is “about” such matters as love, art, self-realization, Edwardian manners, feminism, values and their revision, exposure and concealment, completion and interruption, daily life and celestial life, the subconscious mind, language, myth-and so on.” (pg.393; line 3-7)
2). “During the first half of Forster’s novel Lucy’s “development” takes her intermittently out of her frame and back in as she vacillates between a dull and selfish indifference to others and a state of immediacy and vitality…” (pg.401 ; line 6-9)
Victims of Convention-Jean E. Kennard
1) “The question is even more significant when one asks it about female writers who make the maturing of a woman their central subject and who can properly be expected to reveal more understanding than male novelists about the nature of women.”(pg.23)
2) It concerns the maturing of Lucy Honeychurch who has to learn to reject the false values of gentility, good manners, “niceness” and tact with which she has been brought up. This false world values paintings in so far as they are created by well-known names, women in so far as they are lady-like.”(pg.25)
Victims of Convention by Jean E. Kennard
1. “That the novelists have been lying to us, have chosen social convention over truth and have married the idealistic heroine to the hero, knowing she will not find fulfillment in the marriage.” (23)
2. “The problem with the convention lies primarily in the fact that since in
order to reach maturity the heroine must accept certain values and since the
repository of these values is the “right” suitor, at the end of the novel the
heroine inevitably appears to have subordinated her own personality to that
of the hero.” (24)
Melissa Ortiz
Kissing and Telling: Turning Around in A Room with A View.
1. “The reply might be that Forster’s novel is “about” such matters as love, art, self-realization, Edwardian manners, feminism, values and their revision, exposure and concealment, completion and interruption, daily life and celestial life, the subconscious mind, language, myth-and so on” (pg.393).
2. “Unlike the Lucy Honeychurch of the early chapters of A Room, Forster values direct experience-often profoundly human experience on a grand scale-over limited and edited accounts of it” (pg.394).
Lionel Trilling, “A Room with a View”
1.“Comedy, we are often told, depends on incongruity. We are less often told that tragedy has the dame dependence. The incongruity is between the real and the unreal; both comedy and tragedy required blind characters. “ (p. 97)
2.“For the fact is that in Forster there is a deep and important irresolution over the question of whether the world is one of good and evil, sheep and goats, or one of good-and-evil, of sheep who are somehow goats and goats who are somehow sheep.” (P. 111)
Victims of Convention by Jean E. Kennard
“Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte are not lying to us, then, to satisfy
social convention but are themselves tied to an artistic convention which to some extent still traps the twentieth-century novelist” (pg. 24)
“The “wrong” suitor represents the qualities which the heroine must reject; the “right” suitor those which, in Jane Austen’s view, make for a good life” (pg. 24)
“At the very end of the book darkness and evil are introduced, and for the first time we see that we have, after all, been dealing with matters of great consequence and reality. The effect of the contrast, of the sudden introduction of evil into what has seemed an almost trivial world, is remarkable — almost too remarkable: we feel that a novel should not acquire its stature from a single effect.” (p. 99-100)
“Cecil despises women who talk about cookery and he has a quick eye for interior decoration; he is the cultured man in this story and although he is not cruel, like Rickie Elliot’s father, his culture makes him peevish and superior. Culture for him is a way of hiding his embarrassment before life.” (p. 104)
Trilling, Lionel. “6. A Room with a View.” E.M. Forster, New Direction Books.
Victims of Convention by Jean E. Kennard
“I suggest that what happens in these novels is that the convention within which the writer is working tends to force the material into a form which denies much of what she has revealed about her character” (Kennard 23).
“Lucy has not become a new person, certainly not her own person. She has adopted George’s values and this is symbolized by her marriage to him, the “right” suitor. But there is a paradox here. To become mature is to become oneself, but Lucy has not become herself; she has become George. Forster’s convention is in conflict with his material; the right ending aesthetically is the wrong ending thematically” (Kennard 26).
Victims of Convention
Author(s): Jean E. Kennard
“The conflict between […] convention and the reality of women’s experience
becomes clearer in later novels where the situation of women in society becomes a central issue for discussion. A good illustration of this conflict is E. M Forster’s novel A Room with a View (1908). It concerns the maturing of Lucy Honeychurch who has to learn to reject the false values of gentility, good manners, “niceness” and tact with which she has been brought up.” (24-25)
“The problem lies with the working out of Lucy’s maturing in terms of
the convention of the two suitors. The medieval values are incorporated in
Cecil Vyse, the “wrong” suitor, who is incapable of direct experience, full of
second-hand opinions, ” ‘the type’ “, as George Emerson explains to Lucy,
“‘who’s kept Europe back for a thousand years. Every moment of his life he’s
forming you, telling you what’s charming or amusing or ladylike, telling you
what a man thinks womanly; and you, you of all women, listen to his voice
instead of your own.’ “6 Forster’s values are, as this speech suggests, embodied
in the “right” suitor, George Emerson, who is straight-forward, lives by his
own view of the world and enjoys immediate experience, […] George […] has the right attitude to women, fights against his own drive to govern Lucy and explains to her that ” ‘This desire to govern a woman . . it lies very deep, and men and women must fight it together.'” (25)
George H. Thomson, The Italian romances.
1. “When she deceives herself the darkness comes on. She is not changing so much as moving toward nothingness.” (33)
2. “Having got over this error in judgment by seeing the two men together, she is still deluded enough to think she must uphold her reputation and must refuse to admit her love.” (36)
Jean E. Kennard, ” Victims of Conviction”
1. The novelist of the 20th century failed to give women their own room, as Lucy failed to find her own self by giving in to George’s self align idealogy of a great woman. The novelist both men and women tried to convey their own theory based on their own experiences not realizing the loop of medieval conviction they are trap in. As they debate what’s right and wrong as the suitors in their life, they failed to realize that is always the point of view of the majority that usually prevail.
2. What is wrong and what is right? Some might say that it all depends on oneself point of view, or like Mr. Foster’s book title sucjest ” a room with a view”. What I might find appropriate and enjoyable might be utterly controversial to someone else. So, We will keep on guessing or agree to disagree.
Kissing and Telling- Jeffrey Heath
1. “: “What does it mean?” (43). The reply might be that Forster’s
novel is “about” such matters as love, art, self-realization, Edwardian
manners, feminism, values and their revision, exposure and conceal-
ment, completion and interruption, daily life and celestial life, the
subconscious mind, language, myth-and so on.” (393)
2. “As Forster’s narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that there must be
something wrong with “development” in a code of behavior which can
mistake delicacy for beauty while treating frank talk about baths and
stomachs as indecent, and kisses as insults. An outlook that is “ashamed
that the same laws work eternally” through both nature and man and
repudiates masterpieces as “pities” if they have nudes in them is surely
incomplete, or even inverted.” (397)
Victims of Convention
1. “She leaves us with one alternative; that the novelists have been
lying to us, have chosen social convention over truth and have married the
idealistic heroine to the hero, knowing she will not find fulfillment in the
marriage.”
2. “Lucy has not become a new person,
certainly not her own person. She has adopted George’s values and this is
symbolized by her marriage to him, the “right” suitor. But there is a paradox
here. To become mature is to become oneself, but Lucy has not become
herself; she has become George. Forster’s convention is in conflict with his
material; the right ending aesthetically is the wrong ending thematically.”
Victims of Convention
Author: Jean E. Kennard
“Obviously Doris Lessing does not believe that woman has changed her fundamental nature. She leaves us with one alternative; that the novelists have been lying to us, have chosen social convention over truth and have married the idealistic heroine to the hero, knowing she will not find fulfillment in the marriage.” (pg. 23)
“To be one’s self, to experience life directly, to form one’s own opinions rather than adopt those of others are, then, the new values Lucy must learn. They are part of a world, old Mr. Emerson explains, in which the sexes will be equal, men and women comrades. Forster’s understanding of what the modern woman wants seems to be sound enough.” (pg. 25)
“Comedy, we are often told, depends on incongruity. We are less often told that tragedy has the same dependence. The incongruity is between the real and the unreal… This confusion of the real and the unreal… is… the theme of A Room With A View” (Pg. 2-3)
“The feeling against religion in this novel is naive and direct and makes a small sub-plot.” (Pg. 9)
Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forester, New York Directions, 1943.
Victims of Convention by Jean E. Kennard
Thesis:
• “If we stop to think, we are probably not convinced that these marriages tell the truth about the nature of woman, but we are, I think, aesthetically convinced by a convention concerning marriage in the novel which prevents our stopping to think” (24)
Second quote
• “The question is even more significant when one asks it about female writers who make the maturing of a woman their central subject and who can properly be expected to reveal more understanding than male novelists about the nature of women” (23)