Heroes and homosexuals: education and empire in E. M. Forster

Quentin Bailey

He had brought out the man in Alec, and now it was Alec's turn to bring out the hero in him.... They must live outside class, without relations or money; they must work and stick to each other till death. But England belonged to them.

-- Forster, Maurice 208-09

In October 1912, the successful, 33-year-old novelist E. M. Forster sailed from England in search of material for an Indian novel. Conventional wisdom has it that he was suffering something of an artistic crisis at the time: the success of Howards End in 1910 had placed tremendous pressures on the young writer, and 1911 had been a "terrible year on the whole" (Furbank 204) .To recover his creative impulses, according to this narrative of discovery, Forster traveled to India, taking extensive notes and writing frequently to friends and family about his trip. On his return to England, he wrote the first draft of an openly homosexual novel, Maurice, in a matter of weeks. Eleven years later, after a second trip to the subcontinent and a devastating war, Forster finally wrote his much acclaimed Indian novel in January 1924. It was published in a matter of months. Maurice, by contrast, remained hidden from all but Forster's closest friends until his death in 1970. It was published a year later to mixed reviews. Cri tical reception of the two novels has followed a similar trajectory: A Passage to India is taught in both canonical and postcolonial classrooms; Maurice remains primarily the province of queer studies. Panoramic studies surveying Forster's oeuvre build a narrative to the apex that is A Passage to India, relegating Maurice to the section on "Minor Fiction & Short Stories."

And yet, for all this difference in writing, publication, reception, and appropriation, the two novels are inextricably linked by the trips to In dia. This relationship, however, is hidden behind the fiction(s) of modernism. It is a textual relationship that cannot speak its name until the modernist aesthetics of alienation and exile begin to wane. But it is a relationship whose political power becomes apparent as we read backwards from A Passage to India to Maurice, examining the system of education in the imperial age that helped construct the possibilities for both these novels of unspeakable love. The textual space within which Maurice exists is revealed, in this reading, to be a result of the educational practices of a period that sought to align national interests with an upper-middle-class agenda. In its construction of the socially unspeakable, Maurice reveals the limits of representation that the Anglo-Saxon myth of Englishness, born of postmutiny imperialism, places on narrative modernist texts--lim its that also construct, in A Passage to India, the literally unspeakable (the "ou-bourn" of the caves). Finally, reading A Passage to India and Maurice together discloses the extent to which educational practice--which sought to control social and racial differences within a narrow conception of sexual identity--encouraged the development of an aesthetic we have come to know, broadly, as modernism.

In this essay, then, I first account for A Passage to India's canonization by comparing it to Heart of Darkness, and then situate these novels within certain historical and educational trends of the period. Understanding cultural productions in light of both literary and educational texts, we can grasp what Ronald Schleifer calls modernism's "apocalyptic sense of the new" (Modernism 68) in its relation to a specific racial, social, and sexual hierarchy. In Maurice, the discursive intersection of literature and education--which takes the form of a collision between canonically sanctioned meanings (of origins and influences) and alternative historical figurations (of empires and identities)--discloses the material limits of modernist representation.

Colonial texts, canonical acceptance

Maurice was written in 1913, falling neatly between what are arguably the two major works of colonial fiction in English: Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India. (1) Conrad's tale of Africa was published in 1899, Forster's account of India in 1924.A quarter of a century, several major wars, and the majority of the great works of the high-modernist period separate these two books. The historical and linguistic position of these two novels--which depict the experiences of the colonial master in foreign climes--opens up an important perspective on Maurice, a novel that appears to have only a coincidental, chronological relationship to the imperial project.

In their ambivalent attitude to the announced achievements of the imperial period, Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India permit interpretive readings that articulate a critique of colonial practice that details the "human cost" of economically exploitative power formations. As artifacts of the modernist period, these texts can thus be read to deploy a humanist critique of the imperial world order--a critique that opposes the narratives of social and racial progress that helped construct and justify the late nineteenth-century land rushes of the European powers and their upper-middle-class agents. It is also possible, after a rereading of Maurice, to detect in these two canonical novels a historical narrative of modernist canonicity, a narrative in which the traditionally modernist themes of exile and displacement are revealed to be sublimations of unanswerable questions about human agency in repressed communities. In this narrative, the rulers' anxieties in encountering subject people determine the modern ist themes of alienation and exile, and the mechanism that makes such a transfer possible is a notion of sexuality conceived of in terms of race and education.

Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India share a second striking similarity: both novels center on uninterpretable utterances, unspeakable words with the potential to wipe out history and tradition, class and money Kurtz's final gasping breath, in which Marlow catches the exclamation "the horror, the horror," becomes, a quarter of a century later, the enigmatic, resounding cry of the Marabar Caves: "ou-boum." Bette London notes of A Passage to India that "critics have generally acknowledged that the central event of Passage is a non-event--a 'story' that gives voice to the British fear of contagion ... [since] the claim echoes from a chamber where all voices sound the same" (86). This fear of infection--by native diseases or its mental counterpart, non-Western consciousnesses--determines, in other words, the limits of communication. This terror of contamination from outside will finally be mastered only by a process that posits fractures within the Western consciousness itself. To put it bluntly, cultural al ienation (conceived largely in terms of an "unspeakable" sexuality) constantly replaces the anxiety created by geographic displacement and its attendant politics of domestic brutality and imperial colonialism.

Neither Marlow's utterance nor the echo of the Marabar Caves provides the reader with an interpretive position from which to understand the attendant experience. Instead, both sounds force the reader away from the possibility of a real experience. (2) In Heart of Darkness the record of Kurtz's experience--"horror ... horror"--necessitates a lie to the Intended. Marlow, the proverbial straight talker, cannot report Kurtz's referentless words, preferring instead to pretend that Kurtz's last words were the name of his beloved. What horror? Whose horror? It is not even clear how to frame a question that might allow a coherent answer. As Schleifer notes in Rhetoric and Death, Kurtz's cry,

in its liquid aspirants, is indistinguishable from breath, indistinguishable from the noisy nonsense of stertorous breathing....That is, his "words" may not be enunciated words at all, but simply noise that Marlow hears--arbitrarily--as words. (192-93)

Unable to rephrase Kurtz's apparent report in a comprehensible fashion, Marlow lies, hoping to avoid completely the rupture that has occurred in the process of signification. In A Passage to India, a similarly uninterpretable utterance becomes the battleground for various power formations at the trial as the voices of Adela Quested and Dr. Aziz are appropriated by the established discourses of law, colonialism, and nationalism. If Heart of Darkness offers the lie as the only possible answer to an utterance that has no obvious referential base in experience, A Passage to India moves the debate beyond the realm of true-false dichotomies. Ou-boum is an utterance whose meaning can only be constructed by subsequent acts of appropriation.

And, of course, in a parallel that is in no way purely coincidental, canonization itself is always an act of appropriation. The ou-boum of A Passage to India is read to be the heart of the story as the novel becomes a canonical text: its acceptance within the canon is predicated on its deflection of specific historical injustices in favor of exemplary linguistic indeterminacy. Thus, even as it makes available a critique of the early twentieth-century liberal humanism, that informs the famous "only connect" injunction of Howards End, A Passage to India] constructs the modernist project as a linguistic and aesthetic mode of inquiry rather than as a historical and political choice. Utterances from "foreign" civilizations are frighteningly incomprehensible to imperial, upper-class Western ears, which choose, instead, to ponder the pervasiveness of linguistic indeterminacy. In this fictional world of literary modernism, there is little room for speech, and none for a new, groundbreaking speech that would allow Az iz and Fielding to "be friends now" (Passage 282). The unspeakable, it would seem, contaminates not only encounters involving both race and gender (as between Aziz and Adela in the Marabar Caves) but also the privileged relationship between two men (Aziz and Fielding).

The "history" of this inability--to hear foreign noises and to find a language for friendship--is a recurrent preoccupation in Forster's work and one that begins to reveal the self-perpetuating relationship between "colonial" violence and the "modernist" aesthetic that the chronology of Forster's published fiction hides so well. The received meanings of Maurice--written 10 years before A Passage to India but published some 45 years later--are constructed after the success of the canonical project, concealing the discourses that participated in Maurice's textual figuration, especially the connection between colonial violence and modernist aesthetic. This unspoken connection is pervasive in modernism. In an era obsessed with displacement and return, alienation and home, the colonies are all but nonexistent as substantial textual locations within literary modernism. Ironically, this pervasive omission is parodied in the Schlegel sisters in Howards End who "would at times dismiss the whole British Empire with a p uzzled, if reverent, sigh" (22). The sisters prefer, instead, to focus on "unrelated" issues like temperance, sexual equality, and artistic productions. It is to this apparent lack of any relationship between temperance, sexual equality, and artistic productions and issues of social and imperial control that I turn in the following sections. The cultural assumptions that permitted and encouraged such an unspeakable wall ("a puzzled, if reverent, sigh") between domestic issues and colonial experiences were forged in the new educational practices of the imperial period.

Global power, local practices

In 1913 (the year that Maurice was written), the British Empire encompassed approximately 20 percent of the world's land area and 25 percent of its population. The residents of Britain accounted for slightly less than 8 percent of the imperial population--some 30 million out of 400 million. Trade with extra-European territories accounted for 60 percent of British trade--"a proportion far greater than that of any other major industrializing power" (Cain 32). (3) Between 1853 and 1913, some 5 1/2 million UK citizens migrated to destinations within the empire--approximately 15 percent of the population of the period. Thus, although the number of civil servants from Britain was relatively small compared to other imperial powers, (4) it would be wrong to conclude that contact between the British and colonial people and settings was limited. In fact, contact was engendered not only by migration but also by scientists, lawyers, construction workers, and engineers who went abroad on a contract basis.

The empire was, of course, not solely an economic fact. To administer this enormous, far-flung empire, the British education system was required to produce, as Lord Curzon noted at the Imperial Press Conference meeting at Oxford in 1909, "governors and administrators and judges . . . teachers and preachers and lawyers" (qtd. in Said 213). Real changes in the colonial situation--eated by the decimation of the English aristocratic--litary class during the Crimean War (1853-56), the assumption by the crown of direct control of India in 1858, and the rapid expansion of British holdings in Africa from the mid-1800s--occurred simultaneously with developments in the field of education. Since it was partly in order to meet the growing need for bureaucrats that access to education was broadened through a series of Acts of Parliament and Royal Commissions, (5) a specific curriculum was established to ensure that these future rulers and clerks of the empire would be competent to the task. As the Earl of Meath asked rhet orically, "If the white men and women of the British Empire are idle, soft, selfish, hysterical and undisciplined, are they likely to rule well?" (qtd. in Castle 23).

To meet these educational needs, textbooks were produced which, as Kathryn Castle has argued, built on the exploits of British historical figures in order to secure a consensus about "the splendor of heroism, the worth of unselfishness and loyalty to an ideal, and the meaning of cruelty and cowardice" (22). Readings from the imperial past were chosen which "provided lessons on nationality" and demonstrated "what was best in Britain's national character" (24). Specifically, the British education system of the imperial age focused on producing a shared consensus about the values that were worth fighting for. This emphasis was apparent across the curriculum: from the 1890s "the Empire became a focus for teaching in geography, history, aspects of English (readers often included Imperial poetry and prose), and religious studies" (Mackenzie 221). Crucially, altruism and responsibility in the face of adversity were elevated to a supreme level, a tendency that reaches its apotheosis in Kipling's much-repeated poem "T he White Man's Burden": "Take up the White Man's burden, / And reap his old reward--/ The blame of those ye better /The hate of those ye guard" (479).

In classrooms, historical readers emphasized the supremacy of these standards of behavior and linked them to a rhetoric of racial superiority that was frequently couched in terms of a mythic Anglo-Saxon identity. To spell out exactly which values should be upheld and which deplored, countless textbooks and readers referred to native leaders as "'week', 'cruel', 'debauched', 'effeminate', 'despotic', 'stormy', 'treacherous', 'vicious' and 'monstrous"' (Castle 32), and contrasted them with colonial rulers who demonstrated true "British" character. (6) This practice, it should be emphasized, not only secured stable administrators for the colonies but also exerted a controlling influence over the newly educated masses. The education of potential colonial administrators thus served a dual purpose: the maintenance of the economic and social order at home and the training of imperial bureaucrats. John Cell notes this overlap: "the same class structure and educational system produced not only the Imperial governing e lite but bankers, church officials, government ministers, and civil servants in British domestic society" (233). Schoolchildren were trained in the discourse of empire so that, as colonial administrators, they could ensure the continued economic success of Britain; (7) those of their colleagues left behind in Britain would share their understanding of Anglo-Saxon norms and the need to deal fairly but firmly in the face of native intrigue.

Nor was knowledge about the empire and the proper way to act limited to classroom reading: popular boys' fiction of the period was full of tales of heroism on dark continents. These adventure stories played a prominent role in the life of many schoolboys, as Martin Green has detailed: "Both Winston Churchill and Graham Greene have mentioned the importance of Haggard's Umslopogaas in their fantasy life as boys" (85). Kipling, perhaps, played an even greater role in conditioning British readers, as Leonard Woolf--who used to go riding with Forster on Putney Common--noted of his Anglo-Indian associates:

the white people were also in many ways astonishingly like characters in a Kipling story I could never make up my mind whether Kipling had molded his characters accurately in the image of Anglo-Indian society or whether we were molding our characters accurately in the image of a Kipling story.

(qtd. in London 71)

Quite obviously, adventure stories "were understood (implicitly) to answer to the political needs of imperialist nations and their ruling classes" (Green 82). Imperial effects, in other words, were apparent across a broad array of cultural forms, determining the vocabulary with which the ruling classes understood themselves and their subjects.

As several critics have noted, there is every indication that the period after about 1900 saw a significantly greater emphasis laid on "traditional Anglo-Saxon values," particularly in the educational arena. Kathryn Castle has delineated the increasing jingoism of school textbooks in the period immediately prior to the First World War, concluding that, with regard to the representation of Indians in historical readers, "while the image of India and her peoples had always been co-opted in the texts to support the intervention of the British, this process became extraordinarily self-serving by 1914" (36). Not only were Indian subjects shown to be their own worst enemies, but British heroism and good intentions became the focus of many readings to the point that, as Castle notes, the

Oxford Survey of the British Empire published in 1914 ... admitted that a concentration on the "heroism of the British" meant that a study of the incident [the Mutiny] "added to rather than diminished British prestige." (36)

This increasingly "patriotic" discourse was a programmed response to two related but distinct pressures. On the one hand, the ruling classes were subject to an increasing level of anxiety about their ability to maintain political dominance. This fear was fueled by a variety of events, including, among others, the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902), the

US eclipsing the UK as the principal world economic power in 1895, the increasing financial and military threat of a newly unified Germany, the death of Victoria in 1901, and the growing fear of national degeneracy at home. (8) On the other hand, the convincing electoral victory of the Liberals in 1906 went a long way toward uniting the country behind one imperial policy after a sustained polarization of views. As Ronald Hyam has argued, the victory of the Liberals, while ensuring the end of the "grand imperialism" of the Unionists in favor of a more democratic commonwealth ideal, also put an end to the more aggressive denunciations of imperial rule:

Most Conservatives, except a diehard, imperial-federationist group, conceded defeat. The future would lie with the Liberals' loosely structured "Commonwealth of free nations"... and the Labour Party became more Imperial minded. (53) (9)

Even the nascent Labour Party; as Nicholas Owen has noted, tended to find it politically expedient to conform to the dominant discourse of the period, one that directed any criticisms at "speculators and financiers"(191) rather than the imperial government.

It is not altogether surprising, therefore, in this period of anxiety, pessimism, and bipartisan agreement on imperial matters, that the official organs of epistemic control (the state, the school, and the church) came increasingly to use a rhetoric of racial superiority to justify their position and try to control--through the development of a consensual view of history--divisive elements at home and abroad. (10) Whether articulated by science or the church, school, or the state, the dominant political discourse defined the Anglo-Saxon norm more and more narrowly Thus, although the parliamentary debates on domestic and European issues were fraught and highly charged, a variety of social, economic, and political factors combined to produce a general consensus on imperial policy and, perhaps more significantly, on its representation and justification in educational texts.

This increasingly narrow definition of the "ideal man' the embodiment of the Anglo-Saxon character, that accompanied this increasingly jingoistic discourse was not, of course, completely totalizing. In the British ruling class, the brutality of the South African War certainly created a temporary opposition to the colonial system. And, although the factors identified above ensured that this threat was largely contained within a few years, oppositional positions remained possible--even if, as we shall see in Forster's writing, the stances from which this opposition could be voiced were severely circumscribed. The fact that much of the imperial rhetoric was a response to forces emanating from the colonies meant, furthermore, that certain positions might be misrecognized, thereby briefly allowing a counterhegemonic positioning: attributes ascribed to foreign inhabitants by the official discourses of state control could be redirected by modernist artists toward local residents and valorized in surprising ways.

Forster, clearly, was aware of the related domestic and imperial interests that came, through the medium of education, to focus on the values of hard work and commitment--values, we should note, that linked empire, education, social policy, and literature. The middle classes, Forster wrote,

gained wealth by the Industrial Revolution, political power by the Reform Bill of 1832; they are connected with the rise and organization of the British Empire; they are responsible for the literature of the nineteenth century. Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy.

("Notes on the English Character" 3)

Famously, Forster accused the educational systems of the time of retarding the emotional development of schoolboys:

And they go forth into a world that is not entirely composed of public-school men or even of Anglo-Saxons, but of men who are as various as the sands of the sea. ... They go forth into it with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts. (5)

This is not to say, as Forster is at pains to point out, that the English character is necessarily unemotional, but that it is stunted by an educational practice that encourages calm during physical emergencies--exactly the temperament thought to be required in hot, hostile lands. As Forster puts it, the regimen of discipline and work produces a "nervous system" that "acts promptly and feels slowly" (7). Educational practice thus created a common imperial purpose that both maintained existing domestic class structures and shored up the imperial project. And it was against this structure that Maurice--whose hero is, after all, an Anglo-Saxon with a well-developed body, fairly developed mind, and undeveloped heart--can be seen to act.

Indeed, from a certain perspective, Maurice charts the almost perfect functioning of the educational institutions of the age--and, in so doing, exposes the imperial projects of domination and exploitation that were so central to the establishment of widespread educational access in England in the late nineteenth century. At both his prep school and at Sunnington, a public school, Maurice is constantly pressured to 'loin" the ranks of those demonstrating the true Anglo-Saxon character: to be a "good citizen" (16), "brave" (17), and "sympathetic" (19). From his prep school master, Mr. Ducie, he learns the lessons of love: to be "chaste with asceticism" (19) and to strive for the "love a noble woman, to protect and serve her" (19).At Sunnington, he learns the value of a "bright friendly face," the "backbone of the school" (25), and does things because they are "proper" (22). The object, clearly, is to produce a "quiet, honourable, prosperous" (135) member of society. To counter these strict stereotypes--defined to create normative Anglo-Saxon rulers--Forster was forced to focus, in his fictional work, on largely familiar, domestic settings with largely normal characters. In the colonies, Anglo-Saxons confronted only the unspeakable murmurs of other worlds--the horrifying breath of the Congo or the echoing ou-boum of the Marabar Caves--but in the Home Counties these exemplary Anglo-Saxons could be more closely inspected and their "educated" constitution examined.

Textual positions, sexual identities

Both Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India are somewhat unusual in their creation of a textual space whose strangeness is largely the function of the characters' actual geographic displacement from "home." By contrast, as the catalyst for psychological change, most canonical works of the period rely on cultural or social displacement within a familiar geographic locale constructed by the imperial needs of the era. Maurice is a clear example, though not the only one in Forster's work. Where Angels Fear to Tread suggests that local issues were liable to be interrogated intensely, out of all proportion to their value, because of foreign concerns. Mrs. Herriton's curt discussion with her cook is a case in point:

she spoke just too much, and the cook said that if she could not give satisfaction she had better leave. A small thing at hand is greater than a great thing remote, and Lilia, misconducting herself upon a mountain in Central Italy, was immediately hidden. (18)

Reading Forster's earlier writings reveals that the disruptive forces unleashed by the imperial experience--and represented within the Indian novel as noncommunication between civilizations--were not simply "unrecognized" in other works but were sublimated into the expression of "deviant" relationships between characters in largely familiar, comforting settings. The arrogance and anxiety of the imperial period produced an aesthetic that found in the genteel society of Edwardian England a tapestry of competing discourses that was just as useful to the purposes of modernity--in its pursuit of those "collisions of past and present" (Schleifer, Modernism 68) that Schleifer sees as a distinctive feature of modernism-as were the plains of India or the rivers of Africa. In novel after novel, Forster's heroes and heroines are disturbed in their own backyards by characters emerging from lower social situations. Yet in all these "domestic" encounters, there is a trace of the imperial project. Gino, the happy-go-lucky l ower-class Italian in Where Angels Fear to Tread is "not particularly clean" and does not have "the face of a gentleman"(28). Is he a "dirty" native or an "unrefined" member of the lower classes? It is hard to tell: a "cruel, vicious fellow" (118), he is "poor," "cunning," and "indolent" (39)--an epithet applied automatically by many school textbooks to "natives."

Similarly, Leonard Bast, the determined clerk from Howards End, has a problem with concepts-"he could not string them together into a sentence" (31)--and is suspected of being a kleptomaniac by Mrs. Munt: ignorant and quick fingered, he would surely be at home in the London underworld or the Indian subcontinent. Once he is welcomed by the Schlegel sisters, however, his "primitive good looks" (85) come to the fore. The figuration of these characters marks the limits of the colonial experience: the anxiety of noncommunication expressed in A Passage to India arises, in these earlier novels, from social relationships within the domestic sphere, social relationships whose potential for subversiveness was largely limited to sexual behavior. Indeed, Maurice's overnight encounter with the lower-class Alec appears to take him to a foreign country: at breakfast the following morning, "he spoke to a race whose nature and numbers were unknown, and whose very food tasted poisonous" (175).

In other words, the works of Forster might be said to master the potentially contaminating discourses of race and class by displacing them onto various familiar environments: Cambridge, Sawston, London, Monteriano, Penge. These recognizable "home" sites would be less textually disturbing than the exotic, uncomfortable spaces of the colonies or the depressing, discomforting prisons of the slums. Thus the Home Counties, more than India or the Congo, offered an experimental field for formal innovation. In a spectacularly depressing irony, the shining light of British civilization fell not on the brutally repressed subjects living in foreign climes or miners' hovels in Nottingham but on the imperial masters and their sexual peccadilloes at the manor. This defensive transposition from the "colonial" anxiety to modernist alienation was not confined to Forster: it is the necessary consequence of the modernist aesthetic that is, as Jameson has noted, "organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity" (114)--a conception of the self that relies on the exclusion of possibly contaminating influences from "abroad." The discursive structuring of these "foreign" influences--particularly as it informs canonical, colonial texts--determines the movement from colonial" practices of control to policings of sexual identity.

This sublimation--from the anxiety born of colonial rule to an intense focus on Anglo-Saxon sexual identity--was mediated by the idea of work. Whereas the natives had a tendency to sloth and indolence, the British colonist understood the redemptive power of work. (11) Paul Wilcox, the younger, impecunious son in Ho wards End who is trying to make a career for himself in Nigeria, is described in these very terms by his mother:

[h]e doesn't want the money, it is the work he wants, though it is beastly work--dull country, dishonest natives, an eternal fidget over fresh water and food. A nation who can produce men of that sort may be proud. No wonder England has become an Empire. (82)

What makes the fraudulence of this statement particularly obvious--revealing the rapacious economic interest underlying protestations of Protestant ethics--is that the reader has already been informed by this point in the narrative that "Paul hasn't a penny" (17).

In Maurice, however, the value of work is seen rather differently. No longer simply the ideology of a self-interested imperial class, work is figured as an intervening force between the individual and his or her desires. Maurice, the slow-witted, emotionally stunted product of the public school system, gradually comes to realize his homosexuality; largely through the intervention of Olive, his first love. But, after a three-year affair with Maurice, Olive "changes" and announces his intention to marry. Having lost his first true love and unable to see any chance for finding another in his homophobic society, Maurice turns to work, not only the work of the commercial and financial world but also the all-encompassing, disciplined effort to engage continuously in useful activities. His choice of activities is striking:

He joined the Territorials--hitherto he had held off on the ground that the country can only be saved by conscription. He supported the social work even of the Church. He gave up Saturday golf in order to play football with the youths of the College Settlement, in South London, and his Wednesday evenings in order to teach arithmetic and boxing to them.... He cut down his expenses that he might subscribe more largely to charities--to preventive charities: he would not give a halfpenny to rescue work. (126-27)

This ritual was all part of Maurice's effort to practice the minor arts of life that he had neglected during his time away from normal society with Clive: "punctuality; courtesy, patriotism, chivalry even" (125). Is it purely coincidental that homosexuality was held to be the consequence of tardiness, rudeness, (foreign) nationalism, and effeminacy? And that these qualities were often ascribed to nonwhite or lower-class members of the British Empire (that is, those designated as inferior by the master code)? By focusing on hard work, a privileged mode of existence in the imperial realm, Maurice hopes to overcome his surprisingly "native" predilections. In effect, Maurice strives to become the "ideal man" that Mr. Ducie had sketched for him at preparatory school: "chaste with asceticism" who would, one day; "love a noble woman ... protect and serve her"(19)--a very white British man, in other words, of the late nineteenth century and one who would surely have nothing to do with an amber-hued gamekeeper. This m ovement, in which colonial tensions (between the ruling class and the native subject in his guise as a gamekeeper) are domesticated, marks a larger process in which the dangerous, uncontrollable dislocations of the colonial encounters are transformed into concerns about specifically upper-class European practices. Nor was this limited to Forster: Lady Chatterley's affair with the gamekeeper Mellors is played out against the strike-ravaged background of the Nottingham coal mines.

The history of Maurice is, of course, closely tied to the question of Forster's liberal humanism and the rampant homophobia of early twentieth-century Britain. It is also a text that draws out and highlights the tensions inherent within the discourses of the dominant cultural institutions, tensions that helped construct a modernist barrier to a strong interrogation of political-power practices. Not simply a novel for "a happier year" (4), Maurice gives a glimpse of the moves that the dominant discourse allowed its subjects in their pursuit of freedom. Indeed, in the very fact of Maurice's posthumous publication we can perhaps begin to see the extent to which the displaced colonial tensions of the imperial period forced Forster to an examination of a sexuality that was beyond the mores of his era. So powerful, in other words, were the impulses generated by the colonial encounter--and we shall shortly examine Forster's own colonial sexual encounter--that Forster was able to write, but not publish, an openly hom osexual text.

Forster's writing of Maurice some six months after returning from his first trip to India becomes, then, more than simply a chronological coincidence. For, following the tendency for modernist texts to seem to avoid imperial complications, Maurice is cleared--by both commentators and Forster himself--of any contagion by imperial forces, despite the fact that he had just returned from a trip to India that would, ultimately, produce his masterpiece. Forster's own discussion of the provenance of Maurice is well known. As he puts it in the "Terminal Note" to the novel,

[i]t was the direct result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe ... he was a believer in the Love of Comrades, whom he sometimes called Uranians. It was this last aspect of him that attracted me in my loneliness.... I approached him through Lowes Dickinson, and as one approaches a savior.... It must have been the second or third visit to the shrine that the spark was kindled and he and his comrade George Merrill combined to make a profound impression on me and to touch a creative spring. George Merrill also touched my backside.... The sensation was unusual and I still remember it....It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts ... I had conceived. (217)

This is an extraordinary passage. The increasing concentration on Anglo-Saxon manliness in the dominant discourse required an oppositional stance, and Forster provides one here with his own myth of origin. It draws on Greek mythology and, specifically, on the discussion of same-sex love in Plato's Symposium. Uranus, of course, was the mythical father of the Greek Titans and of Heavenly Aphrodite, who is regarded, in the Symposium, as the love that inspires homosexual relationships. Forster draws on these associations to create an alternative to heterosexual forms of conception, suggesting that Maurice was conceived when the Uranian, George Merrill, touched his backside. In alluding to a Greek myth of origin for his story of homosexual love and by appropriating the enormous authority of Platonic conceptions of masculine love, Forster is offering an alternative conception of masculinity at a period in which the epistemic institutions of state, church, and school were conspiring to define manhood in terms strict ly amenable to increased imperial power and domestic control. When Clive professes his love, Maurice is "scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul, and exclaimed, 'Oh, rot! ... Durham, you're an Englishman. I'm another. Don't talk nonsense'" (56).The confusion, of course, is caused by Maurice's failure to appreciate the full meaning of the book given to him by Clive, Plato's Symposium. It is against the Anglo-Saxon conception of manhood--one specifically constructed in the service of an increasingly threatened political exercise in domestic and imperial control--that Maurice takes a stand.

I do not want to suggest here that all texts written by members of oppressed or suppressed identity groups are (or can only be) solely counterhegemonic, or that, even within the context of imperial literature, Maurice is first and foremost an antinationalist text that explicitly opposes the dominant formations of a national culture. (12) A reading of Forster's other work reveals that the homosexual impulse is frequently opposed to the dominant Anglo-Saxon force, and there is certainly a long history of homoerotic writing from which Maurice draws some of its grace. (13) However, I do wish to highlight the Platonic origin of the novel, a "conception" that tries to hide Maurice's desire to work hard and overcome his lack of punctuality, courtesy, and patriotism from both his homosexuality and his position as an imperial subject.

In light of the complex array of influences (both positive and negative, oppositional and complicit) working through the text, I want to draw attention to some of the discursive conditions that allow for Maurice. Crucially, these involve a repulsion toward the intolerant monster of the Anglo-Saxon racial myth and an attendant discovery of the roles of the church, state, and school in fostering the racial myth of superiority. Ann Stoler suggests that the nationalist discourses on sexuality of the late nineteenth century

were predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were worthy of recognition and whose were not. (8)

Reimagining sexual desire in novels could therefore be seen to attack the dominant discourse at the moment that it set out to determine who was worth listening to and who wasn't. The dismantling of this myth of imperial worthiness by the construction of equally valid, parallel lifestyles is, I think, a key element in other writers of early modernism. Lawrence's Women in Love, for instance, deliberately appropriates deviant sexualities in the construction of an alternative form of society. Ho wards End, too, tries to conceive of England as "radically split--between Wilcox capitalist imperialism and Schlegel humanitarianism" (Wright 23), thereby attempting to offset the assumed dominance of Anglo-Saxon imperialism with the almost sleight-of-hand introduction of a competing discourse. The "unspeakable" love of Maurice--and the "unspeakable" sexuality of many Lawrentian encounters--takes its place beside the horrors and the ou-boums of the boundary texts, Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India.

In considering how sexual relations are implicated in the transition from colonial tensions to modernist aesthetics, it is worth recalling that Forster's trip to India in 1912 was not solely in pursuit of material for a forthcoming "Indian" novel. Syed Ross Masood, to whom Forster had made several declarations of love in 1910 and 1911, had returned to India, and Forster longed to see him again. There was, thus, a certain sexual charge to Forster's trip, an aspect that is interestingly absent from

Forster's account at the beginning of Maurice with its emphasis on the wholly European genesis of the novel. We should remember too that Carpenter--the father of Maurice--was a devoted student of Hinduism. (14) The necessity of this potential misrecognition, in which colonial tensions are displaced onto well-educated, Europeanized versions of alternative identities, has not yet been fully explored. What systems of signification determine that Maurice can only be conceived by a European writer under the watchful caresses of his two European parents? Or, more bluntly, what forces ensured that an unpublishable novel of hidden, homosexual love would be written after an extended tour of India?

If Maurice participates in opposing the dominant myth of British racial superiority, it does so in terms of a discourse of which the empire was an offshoot. To counter the Anglo-Saxon of imperial discourse, texts like Maurice--by necessity, situated within the confines of comfortable, knowable, upper-middle-class English life where the rule of law was accepted and generally upheld--draw their strength and plausibility from the convincing atmosphere of the known. A large part of this familiarity does, of course, stem from that tradition of bourgeois individualism whose aesthetic form, as Stephen Greenblatt has argued, is the realist novel. His comments on the world of this realist novel apply, it seems to me, equally well to the world of Forster: it "relies on a massive police apparatus, a strong middle-class nuclear family, an elaborate school system" (64).

Into this general atmosphere of the known (the secure police state of the morally guarded Home Counties), it was possible to introduce variables: homosexuality, class-crossing affairs, Germans, Italians. This was, with the notable exceptions of Heart of Darkness and A Passage to India, the sole terrain on which readers and writers were able to conceive of equally valid lives and relationships between valuable individuals. Maurice is made possible by the tensions inherent in the imperial discourse of colonial and class control, but these tensions must be all but eliminated before a narrative can emerge. Maurice, the struggling homosexual trapped in homophobic England, owes his livelihood to countless colonial and working-class subjects who were too unrecognizable, too foreign, to exist in the world of peace, police, and realist prose narratives. Yet to situate Maurice, Leonard Bast, Lilia, the Schiegel sisters, and the Wilcoxes in the truly foreign, colonial arena was, as A Passage to India finally reveals, no t a coherent possibility. (15) Social intercourse between individuals from different civilizations would have required the too obvious pretense of an equality of civilizational discourses--all too obvious because the very presence of the ruling class was justified by the discourse of guardianship. In other words, the assumption of English superiority in imperial discourse provided the material for an exaggerated Anglo-Saxon myth and narrowly defined the arena within which competing conceptions of the Anglo-Saxon could be presented.

Howards End is, perhaps, the most telling example of this domestication of imperial tensions among Forster's novels, setting itself the task, according to Anne Wright, of "defining and rejecting what is wrong with England, and establishing a positive configuration" (23)--a task that it hopes to accomplish without lifting its gaze from the Home Counties! Indeed, Howards End can only envisage disruption occurring from the lower middle classes, embodied, in the novel, in the figure of Leonard Bast. Figures further removed from the Anglo-Saxon norm are incomprehensible to the narrator: "we are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet,,(35). (16) Modernist texts, opposing the ever-narrowing definition of valuable human existence with narrative evasions, complications, and contradictory assertions, were nonetheless forced to maintain as a given the authenticity of individual experience. In order to oppose the imperial vision of a rigidly defin ed Anglo-Saxon identity, Maurice has to be a man with most of the qualities of this kind of Englishman, sharing his preoccupation with work, altruism, and responsibility. His task in the course of the novel is to learn that lifestyles slightly beyond these narrowly defined boundaries can have value.

This belief in the integrity of the individual is a motif in much of Forster's fictional work: the Schiegel sisters in Howards End come to appreciate that other modes of life--Leonard Bast and the Wilcoxes (17)-- are also valid; the Herritons in Where Angels Fear to Tread come, stubbornly, to an understanding of the worth of Lilia, Gino, and Miss Abbott; and, although the narrator of Howards End is incapable of conceiving life forms beyond the lower middle classes, Ernst Scblegel speaks directly to the integrity of each human life in his diatribe against imperial expansion, in a speech that jabs fiercely at the poets and scholars who glorified empire:

It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally.... Oh yes, you have learned men, who collect more facts than do the learned men of England. They collect facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within? (23-24)

In fact, Maurice's "great" achievement throughout the course of the novel is to achieve this realization about the existential value of others, the right of every human to be treated fairly and equally. This is not a shallow victory: as a product of the public school system, Maurice has been taught to measure out his feelings like a bag of potatoes to ensure that he is never bankrupted. His early years are spent in training for an imperial post where he will need to act quickly and feel slowly But the novel traces the gradual development of Maurice's "heart," noting several points at which Maurice decides that other people have vital existences too. The first occurs at university, where Maurice senses a little freedom after the muddling claustrophobia of school: "once inside college his discoveries multiplied. People turned out to be alive ... they too had insides" (32). Later in the novel, after considerable emotional upheavals, the narrator comments of Maurice that "his troubles had taught him that other pe ople are alive, but not yet that they are different" (140). By the end, with Alec, the lowly working-class boy, he will be able to assert the right of two consenting adults to form whatever union they see fit. In the context of the period, this is an achievement. It is, however, as the epigraph to this essay ought to alert us, a victory paid for in canonical currency: unspeakable sexual identity makes possible the destruction of history and tradition, class and race, money and responsibilities.

Notes

(1.) This is not to argue that these texts participate actively in the construction of a controlling imperial discourse, though Chinua Achebe, for instance, has famously denounced the role of Heart of Darkness in determining and perpetuating Western attitudes about "Africa" by relegating the entire African continent and population to a mere background against which the West plays out its own concerns. In his strongly worded condemnation, Achebe writes, "Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.... Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?" (11). Nor is it to suggest that they enthusiastically celebrate the successes of empire. These roles, it seems to me, are more properly attributed to works by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and, a little more problematically, Rudyard Kipling.

(2.) It is, of course, true that the mysterious Marabar Caves are also an effect of the Orientalist discourse so well analyzed by Edward Said, which requires that the East has to be ultimately "mysterious." I certainly do not want to refute the accuracy of this assertion here but would emphasize instead that other discursive impulses are also revealed in the representation of the Marabar Caves. Specifically, I would like to chart the impulse in Forster's text toward a total inability--that might also be a refusal--to create a wholly new language.

(3.) Figures are taken from The Oxford History of the British Empire, vols. 3 and 4.

(4.) See, for example, John Cell.

(5.) Several commissions throughout the 1860s focused on the respective roles of public, grammar, and working-class schools, arguing that reform was required to optimize the output each class could deliver. The Education Act of 1870 that created school boards across the country would lead, by 1899, to free elementary education for all and, in 1902, to free secondary education. Subsequent acts in the 1870s required ever greater numbers of students to attend school until, by 1880, practically every child in Britain was attending school until the age of 11.

(6.) The extent of this rhetoric becomes especially marked in Where Angels Fear to Tread. The upper-middle-class society of Sawston comes to the "realization" that Gino and Lilia's son must be raised in England.The baby, in a remarkable parallel to the controversy that surrounded the young Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez, becomes a pawn within this discourse of Anglo-Saxon norms. His English relatives try to steal off with him to England, in the hope that "it" would then become "Low Church ... high principled .. tactful, gentlemanly, artistic" (113).

(7.) John Mackenzie notes the extent to which this curriculum was couched in terms of unchallengeable patriotism: "There are few, if any, dissident voices within school geography and history texts, for to take a contrary line would inevitably have been seen as unpatriotic"(221).

(8.) Forster, it would appear, certainly felt himself to be living in a period of crisis. Comparing his age with that of Matthew Arnold's, he wrote, "the collapse of all civilization, so realistic for us, sounded in his ears like a distant and harmonious cataract, plunging from Alpine snows into the eternal bosom of the Lake of Geneva" (Abinger Harvest 69).

(9.) And, as Furbank notes in his biography, Forster's attitude toward India conformed to this Liberal position:

Forster and Dickinson, and Liberals like them, at this period, scarcely envisaged independence for India...[they] came to India in a mood of optimism, still believing in the power of disinterested social criticism. (220)

(10.) Of course, the Anglo-Saxon myth has a long history in British literature. Some of this is neatly captured in Albert Thibaudet's 1919 comment that Robinson Crusoe was a book written "for a race, not for a public" (Green 78).

(11.) As J. M. Coetzee notes in his study of South African writing, European colonization required constant effort on the part of the white colonist. Sloth could not be tolerated, for

the degeneration of the white colonist in Africa was no peripheral matter to his masters in Europe, in that it threatened one of the arguments by which expansive imperialism justified itself: that those deserve to inherit the earth who make best use of it. (3)

(12.) Though it is interesting in the light of the counterhegemonic force of Maurice and its appropriation of earlier Greek myths to note that a similar complex of concerns--individuality, nationhood, honor, duty, and disgrace--is visible in Plato's Symposium. As Foucault notes in the second volume of The History of Sexuality,

Phaedrus recalls the principle that should be one's guide in the love of young men as well as life in general: "shame at what is disgraceful and ambition for what is noble; without these feelings neither a state nor an individual can accomplish anything great or fine." (205)

A formulation like this would certainly have won the approval of Lord Meath.

(13.) For a fuller discussion of this, see Boone.

(14.) For a fuller discussion of Carpenter's Indian influences, see Gregory Bredbeck. According to Bredbeck, Carpenter had traveled widely in India and Sri Lanka and was an avid student of the sacred Sanskrit texts.

(15.) In fact, as Bette London has recognized, Adela's attempted intimacy with the other produces a breakdown that is the inevitable consequence of contagion by the unfamiliar, foreign, uncontrollable voice. It is, writes London, "a case of cultural transgression with its attendant disease" (186).

(16.) It is of course possible to read this, as Stuart Sillars has done, as an ironic admission of the bourgeois novel's structural and ideological inability to deal with the lives of "others." But whether it is self-deprecating, self--conscious irony or sheer ignorance, the narrator cannot move his gaze beyond the Home Counties, and this inability is the result of the limits proscribed by the imperial discourse of the period.

(17.) The realization is slightly ironic in the context of the novel's humanitarian discourse, since the Wilcoxes are the ones who have "fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank no doubt, but they have formed our civilization" (77).

Works cited

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Boone, Joseph A. "Vacation Cruises; or the Homoerotics of Orientalism."

PMLA 110.1 (Jan. 1995): 89-107.

Bredbeck, Gregory. "Queer Superstitions: Forster, Carpenter, and the Illusion of (Sexual) Identity." Queer Forster. Ed. Robert K. Martin and George Piggford. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. 29-58.

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Cain, P.J. "Economics and Empire: The Metropolitan Context." The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 3. Ed. Andrew Porter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.31-52.

Castle, Kathryn "The Imperial Indian." The Imperial Curriculum. Ed. J.A. Mangan. London: Routledge, 1993.23-39.

Cell, John W. "Colonial Rule." Brown and Louis 232-54.

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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin, 1988.

Forster, E. M. Abinger Harvest. New York: Meridian, 1955.

-----. Howards End. New York: Norton, 1998.

-----. The Longest Journey. London: Edward Arnold, 1984.

-----. Maurice. London: Penguin, 1983.

-----. "Notes on the English Character." Abinger Harvest. New York: Meridian, 1955. 3-14.

-----. A Passage to India. London: Everyman, 1965.

-----. Selected Letters of B. M. Forster. Vol. 1. Ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank. Cambridge: Belknap, 1983.

-----. Where Angels Fear to Tread. Middlesex: Penguin, 1971.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol.2. The Use of Pleasure. New York: Random, 1986.

Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. New York: Harcourt, 1978.

Green, Martin. "Adventurers Stake Their Claim." Decolonizing Tradition. Ed. Karen Lawrence. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992.70-87.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Hyam, Ronald. "The British Empire in the Edwardian Age." Brown and Louis 47-63.

Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983. 111-25.

Kipling, Rudyard. The Oxford Authors: Rudyard Kipling Ed. Daniel Karlin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Lawrence, D. H. Women in Love. London: Penguin, 1960.

London, Bette. The Appropriated Voice. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990.

Mackenzie, John M. "The Popular Culture of Empire in Britain." Brown and Louis 212-31.

Owen, Nicholas. "Critics of Empire in Britain." Brown and Louis 188-211.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.

Schleifer, Ronald. Modernism and Time: the Logic of Abundance in Literature, Science, and Culture, 1880-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

-----. Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory. U of Illinois P, 1990.

Sillars, Stuart. Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910-1920. New York: St. Martin's, 1999.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

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Wright ,Anne. Literature of Crisis, 1910-22. New York: St. Martin's, 1984.

I would like to thank, particularly, Dr. Aparna Dharwadker and Dr. Ronald Schleifer for their comments on previous versions of this essay, as well as the members of the "scholarly publications" graduate seminar at the University of Oklahoma in 2001 :Jennifer Boots, Ron Brooks, Stacie Elfrink, Non Guthrie, and Philip Marzluf.

Quentin Bailey is a graduate student at St. Catherine's College, Oxford. His present research focuses on the penal and police reforms in England during the romantic period.

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