Connection in Forster’s Howards End Essay -- Howards End Essays

The epigraph of E.M. Forsters novel Howards End is just two words only connect. As economical as this gesture seems, critics and interpreters have made practically of this succinct epigraph and the theme of connection in Howards End. Stephen Land, for example, cites a demand for connection, in the sense of moving freely between the two Forsterian worlds - the two sides of the hedge, the customary world of social norms and the arcadian or paradisal world of individual self-realization - has its roots in earlier stories... 1 He goes on to say that severally character must reconcile or connect for himself the range of conceptual polarities exposed by the story - prose and passion, seen and unseen, masculine and feminine, new and old (Land, 165). Land reads the novel as some sort of compromise between these two worlds - the realm of social justice and the realm of the individual. Other critics have made similar gestures. jam McConkey, for one, feels that Margaret entrust reconcil e the human and transcendent realms so that she may live in harmony with the human the voice senses the connection through its remove from both. 2 These critics seem to blear connection with reconciliation, seem to read the novel as a triumph for humanism and social justice. I feel this is a little firearm of . . . fudging. True, the characters in Howards End experience reconciliation at the close of the novel - but reconciliation occurs only when love passes out of the novel, when the narrative ceases to be a bridge between two worlds. The meaning of the word connect diminishes as the novel progresses, gradually loses its mythic, transcendent meaning. The only connect moment referenced in the epigraph comes wh... ...any remnant of the bridge between the paradisal world and the world of manners and civic duty. The concept of connection is so degraded as to be unrecognizable. This is what happens subsequently love fails. The celestial omnibus will not stop at Howards End again. 1 Stephen Land. Challenge and Conventionality in the Fiction of E.M. Forster. New York AMS Press, 1990 (165). Hereafter cited parenthetically. 2 James McConkey. The Novels of E.M. Forster. New York Cornell University Press, 1957 (79). 3 E.M. Forster. Howards End. New York Penguin, 1986 (154). Hereafter cited parenthetically. 4 E.M. Forster. The Celestial Omnibus. The Collected Tales of E.M. Forster. New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1952 (61). It seems prudent to note that this story was first published in 1911, one category after Howards End appeared.