Edward Carpenter, Forster and the Evolution of A Room with a View

Edward Carpenter, Forster and the Evolution of A Room with a View By Tony Brown University College of North Wales With the exception of A Passage to India, A Room with a View had, as Oliver Stallybrass has pointed out, the longest and most complicated gestation of any of E.M. Forster's novels.1 Conceived initially in 1902, the story of Lucy Honeychurch's emancipation went through two earlier versions and was put to one side while Forster wrote two other novels before a third version was finally completed and published as A Room with a View in October 1908. Oliver Stallybrass suggests that one difficulty confronting Forster was that in order to make his ironic treatment of English middle-class mores fully effective he needed "appropriate vehicles for his positive values."2 It is only in the published version that George Emerson and his father articulate an alternative vision of society, challenging above all, from beyond the pale of middle-class respectability, the conventions which governed the relations between the sexes in Edwardian society. The terms in which this alternative vision is expressed, and the nature of the Emersons' development from the earlier drafts, not only suggest Forster's familiarity with Edward Carpenter's Love's Coming-of-Age (1897), which was re-issued in 1906, but indicate that Carpenter's book made a significant contribution to Forster's re-drafting of the novel in 1907. It will, however, be necessary first of all to demonstrate that Forster was aware of Carpenter's early essays and his Whitmanesque poem Towards Democracy, and then show that, given Forster's awareness, in Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Longest Journey, of the constraints imposed on relations between men and women by contemporary social conventions, he would have been receptive in 1906 to the vision of social equality and greater sexual freedom to be found in Love's Coming-of-Age. However, while the final version of A Room with a View shows clear evidence of Forster's response to Carpenter's ideas, he is ultimately less optimistic than Carpenter about the possibility of contemporary "Civilisation," based on social and sexual inequality, evolving into a new democratic society based on comradely affection and sexual tolerance. The first extant reference by Forster to Carpenter is the appearance of "E. Carpenter" in a list of authors in the margin of Forster's diary in December 1907, a list which, as Robert K. Martin has argued,3 seems to represent an attempt to identify a homosexual literary tradition. However, it seems probable that Forster had by then already known Carpenter's writing for some time, particularly Towards Democracy* with its ecstatic vision of escape from the repressed life of Victorian gentility to the physical, emotional and sexual 279 Brown: Carpenter and Forster freedom of a life lived close to nature. This vision was expressed more discursively in the essays Carpenter published in the 1880s and collected in England's Ideal (1887) and Civilisation: its Cause and Cure (1889), works which Forster also seems to have read. All three books spring directly and urgently from the "social maladjustment"5 which was the result of Carpenter's homosexual temperament and his consequent anguished sense of emotional unfulfilment; they are in part an apologia for Carpenter's ultimate rejection of his privileged upper-middle-class life (the son of a barrister, he had become a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge) in favour of a life of rural simplicity on a smallholding near Sheffield. For Carpenter the life of the respectable middle-class drawing-room, "among people whose constipated manners and frozen speech are a continual denial of all natural affection,"6 had become unbearable. He urged others to do as he had, to reject a "Civilisation" which he saw in its material luxury and sexual inhibition as unwholesome and unhealthy and to get back in touch with what he saw as life's fundamental source: To feel downwards and downwards through this wretched maze of shams for the solid ground—to come close to the Earth itself and those that live in direct contact with it.7 The working classes, especially those who work in the...