[241] Maurice – E.M. Forster

Read my first review from almost three years ago.

Maurice looked at him with tenderness. He was studying him, as in the earliest days of their acquaintance. Only then it was to find out what he was like, now what had gone wrong with him. Something was wrong.” [114]

Written in 1914, E.M. Forster was ahead of his time when it comes to social acceptance toward homosexuality. In Maurice Christopher Hall, one finds an unfairly generous share of virtues: privileged for success, Cambridge education, handsomeness, and business success. But deep in his heart is a misery because the only sex that attracts him is his own: he loves men and always had loved them. He renounces his faith, frees from claws of religion, and rebels against being his father’s double, refuses to uphold the tradition of upper-class propriety. He’s completely sold out for Clive Durham, who believes in platonic restraint and induces Maurice to acquiesce, for Maurice is humble and inexperienced at that stage.

I have become normal—like other men, I don’t know how, any more than I know how I was born. It is outside reason, it is against my wish. [126]

Maurice and Clive are both outlaws. Whereas Maurice does not cease to love, Clive chooses to assimilate to the social norms, and that is, heterosexuality. After what seems to be (Forster makes it seem to be) some kind of “hellenic” temperament that flings him into Maurice’s affectionate arms, Clive quickly turns to women and sends Maurice back to the prison of loneliness. Even though their actions demonstrate a difference in courage, what Forster wants to emphasize is one’s will to suffer. It touches me immensely that Maurice pours into his love dignity as well as the richness of his being—he never stops loving even when his heart is broken. Clive, on the other hand, has avoided suffering by adopting the easy way. Although it’s indisputable that he intends no evil toward Maurice, Clive slowly deteriorates through his political pretensions and self-deceit.

Not to crush it down, not vainly to wish that it was something else, but to cultivate it in such ways as will not vex either God or Man. [70]

The love of women would rise as certainly as the sun, scorching up immaturity and ushering the full human day . . . some goddess of the new universe that had opened to him in London, someone utterly unlike Maurice Hall. [130]

So Maurice’s fall actually acclerates his descent to the pit bottom, but suffering has only prepared him and toughened him for what is in store, true love. I’m not sure if the relationship woe makes Maurice more courageous, it certainly makes him stronger. Unlike Clive, Maurice is more inclined to accept human nature as his suffering and pain have shown him a niche behind the world’s judgment. When he relapses with Clive’s gamekeeper at the house, he has taken a risk and they have loved. The exchange between Maurice and Alec are suggestive but affirmative. That they have both taken a risk to love has put them in a test of which the outcome bodes auspice. In Maurice, E.M. Forster has deftly delved, ahead of his time, in the issues of homosexual love, openness, class, and self-deceit. It’s a poignant and yet redeeming story of one’s journey to find love, through suffering, doubt, and conviction.

Did you ever dream you’d a friend, Alec? . . . Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep. [197]

255 pp. [Read/Skim/Toss]