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.
Since many of the critical articles feature plot spoilers, you may want to wait until you finish the novel to look through them. If you’d like, you can spend the time allotted for your independent assignment today, simply reading the novel. But you should plan to finish the assignment and post your two quotations from a critical article by Monday, July 18th at 9AM.
The article I picked was Victims of Convention by Jean E. Kennard.
“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.” (Kennard 24)
“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)
The article I picked was Kissing and Telling: Turning Round in A Room with a View by Jeffrey Heath
“This 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. These and other concerns point to an enticing variety of well-tried critical perspectives” (Heath 393)
“Lucy’s development pleases the repressed and repressive Charlotte: soon Lucy answers suitably, feels suitable emotions about the murder in the piazza, and doesn’t listen to “high topics unsuited for her ear” (54, 69, 86). She declines in a prim, Charlotte-like manner when the Emerson’s offer to show her around the church of Santa Croce, and she shuns George after their kiss amid the violets by running off to Rome.” (Heath 397)
The article I chose was “Victims of Convention” by Jean. E. Kennard.
“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.” (Kennard 25)
“Novelist are still defining women’s experiences in terms of relationship with men, are still using a convention which was made popular with Jane Austen. Yet women no longer define themselves in this way, even. if they once did; they are artists, lawyers, professors– people. it is time. novelist found a form in which a woman’s sexual life is related to her development as Stephen Daedalus’ is to his, Eugene Henderson’s to his, holden Caulfield’s to his — that is an important but certainly not total influence. A room with a view has to. give way to a room. of one’s. own.” (Kennard 27)
The article I chose was Trilling on Forster.
The quotation I feel best represents the thesis is “This confusion of the real with the unreal, which had touched Forster’s first novel and dominated his second, is also the theme of A Room WIth A View.” Page 98
The quote I find most useful is “”A Room With A View is about “crudeness” and “refinement.” Its theme is stated by the old socialist, Mr. Emerson: “Love is of the body—not the body, but of the body.” It deals with the physical reality upon which all the other realities rest. The blindness to this reality is the source of the comedy and the comedy is played out to the verge of tragedy.
Page 99
Victims of Convention:
Thesis: “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. In this sense perhaps the conclusions of Pride and Prejudice, of Emma, or of Middlemarch are lies.” (Kennard, 23)
Quote of Interest:
“‘There is something so vieux jeu . . . in leaving like Nora to live differently! Because we’re not such fools any longer. We don’t imagine that rushing off to earn one’s living as a typist is going to make any difference. One is bound to fall in love with the junior partner and the whole thing will begin all over again.’ ” (Kennard, 26)
The article I chose was Lionel Trilling on Forster.
“Both George and Lucy are young people imprisoned, Lucy by her respectability, George by a deep, neurotic fin de siècle pessimism. But the scene of the death on the Pizza has not been upon them. It begins, indeed, the destruction of their prisons. George has held Lucy in his arms and now want to live. Lucy’s dull property begins to give away before the possibility of the passion.” (Trilling,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, his culture makes him peevish and superior. Culture for him is a way of hiding his embarrassment before life. He is taken to call on Lucy’s old friends and, feeling the engaged man’s natural resentment, he behaves badly. Certainly, it had been a bore, “yet the smirking old women, however wrong individually were racially correct”” and Cecil should have had wit enough to see it.”’ (Trilling,104)
The article I chose for my response paper is “Victims of Convention” by Jean E. Kennard.
“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.” (p. 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.” (p. 25).
Victims of Convention Jane Kennard
” She adapted the formula of the female quixotic novel in
which a young girl learns to abandon a view of the world based on fantasy
and to adjust herself to reality ?( Kennard 23).
”The husband, however, now plays the role of the “wrong” suitor who represents
the world of mundane, bourgeois values; the lover – and there usually is one
is the “right” suitor who represents freedom and the chance of a richer
life” (Kennard 26).
The article I choose was Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater: Selfhood and the Common Life
“The sense of selfhood here is one of achievement or accomplishment, the result of “some effort, some call on her to be her self.” That Woolf chooses to punctuate “herself” with two words instead of the usual one suggests that the achievement of this “definite” quality of a self composed into one centre” is the result, not of a sure and natural process of development, but of a discipline and curtailment that makes the “parts” given to Clarissa in time past cohere and harmonize.” ( 68/Maria Dibattista )
“Without the mirror, Clarissa 15 “incompatible, » “different” from herself. With the mirror she gains in her reflection what she, does not possess organically a whole version of herself, although an identity, to be sure that is still “different” from itself because the price of its wholeness is its constitution as the image of another” (70/Perry Meisel )
Thesis: 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. But why would a novelist do this? (23)
Provocative passage: 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. The convention tends therefore to imply that the good man is
superior to the woman who can with some effort be taught that her ideals are
fantasies, that happiness lies in approximating the male reality and in denying
much of what has previously seemed to be herself (24)
The scholarly article I have chosen for my response paper is Jean E. Kennard “Victims of Convention”.
The quotation that I will be using for my thesis is:
“To be oneself, to experience life directly, to form one’s own opinion rather than adopt those of others are, then, the new values Lucy must learn,” (Kennard 25).
The quotation that I have found interest in is:
“This 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. These and other concerns point to an enticing variety of well-tried critical perspectives” (Heath 393)