Published in 1908, EM Forster’s A Room With a View tells the story of a young upper middle class woman, Lucy Honeychurch, who is touring Italy with her older cousin, Charlotte Bartlett. At a Florentine pension patronised by English tourists, Lucy meets the free-spirited George Emerson. Despite being attracted to George, once she’s back in her Surrey home Lucy represses her true feelings and instead becomes engaged to the wealthy, respectable Cecil Vyse. However, when George unexpectedly reappears in her life, Lucy must decide between him and Cecil.

The plot is, at first glance, a simple love triangle, but on re-reading the novel I was struck by just how much of it is built around disruption and conformity. And this is what I want to briefly focus on in this post.

Amongst the middle class guests at the Pensione Bertolini in Florence, George Emerson and his ageing father are a disruptive element. And it is a disruption that is built on social class, political belief as well as religious practice. Unlike their fellow guests at the Florentine pension, the Emersons are from the lower classes and are either agnostics or atheists (it is not clear which). Mr Emerson is referred to as the ‘son of a labourer’ who worked as a ‘mechanic of some sort himself when he was young’ before becoming a journalist for the Socialistic Press. He then ‘made an advantageous marriage’ but after turning his back on the Christian faith and refusing to have George baptised they ‘had broken away’ from his wife’s parents and, it is assumed, their wealth. The Emersons lived, it is implied, a fairly humble life and when we first meet George he is working as a ‘clerk in the General Manager’s office at one of the big railways’. A solidly lower middle class clerical occupation.

In the world of the novel, the Emersons are therefore disruptive outsiders but they are at the same time also drawn towards the bourgeoisie and seek to live within an upper middle class milieu. Father and son, for example, holiday in Florence and stay at a pension amongst upper middle class English tourists; on their return to England George moves his father into a small cottage which is nearby the Honeychurchs’ home and which George visits on weekends. So despite being lower middle class socialists, the Emersons are attracted towards the haute bourgeois lifestyle. Intellectually enlightened, the socialist leanings and secularity of father and son live safely within a conformist upper middle class framework which they don’t seek to break through from. They therefore represent what Hungarian Communist activist and politician, Bela Kun, referred to in 1918 as propagating a form of socialism that was ‘adulterated’ by the lower middle classes. According to Kun, this form of socialism was criticised by Karl Marx as one in which the ‘toiling [lower middle class] intelligentsia’ were ultimately ‘lackeys to the capitalist class’.[1] This was socialism that had no interest in revolution and overthrowing the capitalism. Instead it sought to accommodate socialism within the bourgeois capitalist state.

This cosseting of revolutionary or radical thought and feeling within bourgeois environs is evident throughout A Room With a View. At one point in the novel, for example, the clergyman Mr Beebe reflects on the occasion when Lucy memorably played Beethoven’s Opus 111 to a lower class audience in Tunbridge Wells: the music of the disruptive, revolutionary Beethoven (a musician who believed in the ideals of the French Revolution) is therefore played by a young upper middle class woman to a proletarian audience within safe bourgeois surroundings.

We even see this friction between disruptive political commitment and middle class sensibility in minor characters such as Sir Harry Otway, The knighted Otway is described by Lucy at one point as a ‘Radical if ever there was’ and he would therefore presumably believe in the radical reform of the electoral system to widen the franchise so that the lower classes could vote. Yet faced with the prospect of lower middle class bank clerks living in his semi-detached suburban cottages in Summer Street, Sir Harry is horrified and exclaims to Cecil, ‘That is exactly what I fear, Mr Vyse. It will attract the wrong type of people. The train service has improved – a fatal improvement, to my mind’. So a Radical in thought turns out not to be a Radical in deed and Forster pokes fun at Otway’s hypocrisy.

I think this friction between disruptive thought (whether it be thinking that is socialist, revolutionary or Radical in origin) and a gentrified upper middle class lifestyle reflects a similar friction within Forster’s own life. Forster’s sexuality as well as his socialist beliefs rubbed up uncomfortably against his privileged, wealthy upper middle class life in early twentieth century Britain. It is something which critic Jason Finch has recently highlighted with his claim that Forster was ‘torn between the commitment that led him to write for a socialist newspaper and the desire to cling onto gentry status in an English county setting.’[2]

So A Room With a View is therefore a space where Forster grapples with the dilemmas in his own life and seeks to try and reconcile them. Forster the gay, socialist outsider (‘the view’) attempts to accommodate his other, more conformist, side within the pages of his novel: Forster the privileged haute bourgeois (‘the room’). The novel is therefore so much more than a love triangle taking place within the idyllic surrounds of Florence and a leafy Surrey suburb.

 

 

[1] Bela Kun, ‘Marx and the Middle Classes’ (1918). Marxists Internet Archive. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kun-bela/1918/05/04.htm

[2] Jason Finch, ‘Surrey in A Room with a View: A Candidate for Scholarly Mediation’, Available at: https://gupea.ub.gu.se/bitstream/2077/8498/3/Surrey.pdf