WRITTEN IN A BURST of inspiration in 1913 and ’14 and set in the England of the Edwardian Age, E. M. Forster’s Maurice was “dedicated to a happier year,” though the author had no conception of when that might be. Forster shared the manuscript with trusted friends, including D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, and Paul Cadmus, but would not publish the novel during his lifetime. Only in 1971, a year after Forster’s death, would the novel appear in print.
A hybrid of the traditional marriage novel and the bildungsroman genre, Maurice was revolutionary for its presentation of same-sex love culminating in a “happily ever after” ending. Forster later declared that the “happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write [it]otherwise.” In the Edwardian Age the suggestion that gay people were capable of forming loving unions to last a lifetime was blasphemous, subversive, and probably criminal.
Even in 1971, it was the happy ending, dubbed the “greenwood idyll,” that came in for the severest criticism when the novel was finally published. Indeed, the notion of Maurice abandoning his family, friends, and career to build a life for himself and Alec in the primeval woods of England, like Robin Hood’s merry men sheltering in Sherwood Forest, stretched the imagination of even the newly arisen gay liberation movement. Although difficult to defend as plausible fiction set in the years leading up to World War I, Forster’s insistence on the triumph of same-sex love, reflected in his hopeful dedication to “a happier year,” forms the foundation of Maurice’s significance for the modern GLBT civil rights movement. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, which catalyzed that movement, and a century after the Edwardian Age, an examination of the novel’s relationship to the cause of gay liberation is timely.
Maurice is the prototypical gay-affirming coming-of-age novel. The title character, a conventional upper-middle-class Edwardian in every respect down to his class snobbery, confronts unconscious desires that begin to make themselves felt in adolescence. It is not until his second year at Cambridge University, when he meets Clive Durham, that Maurice begins his long, arduous climb to self-understanding. His realization that he’s attracted to other males, weeks after Clive confesses that he has fallen in love with him, comes only after vehement denials and a bout of “madness.”
Maurice differs strikingly from post-Stonewall gay novels in that the protagonist from the beginning lacks access to any conventional discourse with which to frame his same-sex desire. In the aftermath of the highly publicized trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, English society doubled down on the view that “the love that dare not speak its name” was something so vile that it couldn’t even be mentioned. Whether Maurice looked to education, law, medicine, or religion, homosexuality was spoken of only elliptically, in the merest “scraps of language,” which made the condemnation of it all the more baneful. An unreflective man ill-equipped to comprehend this challenge, Maurice spends most of his time in a “muddle.”
The theme of Maurice can be described as essentially the search for a compatible social construct by which the protagonist can understand himself and go on to self-actualization. At Cambridge, Maurice becomes acquainted with a character named Risley (based on Forster’s Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey), who challenges the compulsory silence imposed on unconventional subjects by insisting that people should “talk, talk, talk.” Risley stands as an antidote to the repression of authentic feelings, including those that are taboo, and it is through Risley that Maurice meets Clive.
Clive had found a model of homosexual affirmation in the culture of ancient Greece and the writings of Plato, and adhered to the stylized ideal of male bonding acclaimed in The Symposium and The Phaedrus. Clive assists Maurice’s self-discovery by giving him the referent he seizes upon when he says “I have always been like the Greeks and didn’t know it.”
Clive extols homosexuality as a higher form of love, a spiritual connection that must be left physically unconsummated to uphold its surpassing nobility. Yet a love so beaten down by over-intellectualization will starve for lack of sustenance. Maurice is left to burn, while Clive, according to the narrator, somehow becomes attracted to women. Commentators have labored to make sense of the cryptic and enigmatic report of Clive’s re-orientation, with the view that he is yielding to proscription and class pressure being the most favored. To give Clive’s sudden change context, Merchant and Ivory added a scene to their film version in which Risley is entrapped by a handsome police decoy and convicted of “gross indecency” in a case parallel to that of Oscar Wilde. The fear spawned by Risley’s ruination motivates Clive in the film version to recant his love for Maurice and seek a wife.
The loss of Clive devastates Maurice, who’s left to struggle with his homosexuality without his partner and mentor. Three sexual encounters with other men alarm him. In hope of changing, he confides to his doctor that he’s an “unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort,” but is told his situation is “rubbish” and must not be discussed. He turns to an American psychiatrist, who coolly labels his condition “congenital homosexuality,” which can be “cured” in half of the cases he sees. Hypnotic suggestion is this doctor’s methodology, but the treatment is doomed once Maurice has his first sexual liaison with Clive’s lusty young under-gamekeeper, Alec.
Alec energetically pursues Maurice as he continues to visit Clive’s country estate Penge, chasing after his carriage, grabbing him to get away from the local rector, and then watching the window of the room where Maurice is sleeping. Scarcely aware of what he’s doing, on two separate nights Maurice calls out his window: “Come!” On the second invitation, Alec climbs the conveniently available ladder and joins Maurice in bed.
To find their way to fulfillment, Maurice and Alec must get past the class difference. Alec thinks Maurice is treating him disrespectfully by not answering his letters, while Maurice grows fearful that he’s being set up for blackmail. The climactic encounter tellingly occurs in the Bloomsbury section of London, at the British Museum, where the two thrash out powerful and warring emotions flanked by Assyrian winged bulls. Spending the night together afterward, they progress toward understanding their love, with the “flesh educating the spirit,” as Forster describes it. Maurice formulates a plan, and the men make heroic sacrifices to be together. At last glimpsing self-realization, Maurice takes his leave of Clive, and he and Alec disappear into England’s “greenwood,” never again to separate. In a counterpoint to the happy ending, we catch a glimpse of a wistful Clive, toward the end of his life, haunted by a mystical vision of his lost lover beckoning him from an eternal Cambridge spring to “come.”
When Maurice declares his love for Alec to Clive’s “thin sour disapproval,” he speaks with such an uncharacteristic clarity that Clive asks him, “Who taught you to talk like this?” Maurice’s reply, “You, if anyone,” begs the question, because Clive himself has never attained this kind of self-awareness. In fact, the unmentioned source of Forster’s idea for an enduring love “outside class, without relations or money” was the relationship of proto-gay-activist Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill, who lived at Milthorpe in rural Derbyshire. Carpenter, in turn, took his inspiration from Walt Whitman and the ideal of a democratic “love of comrades.” We know this connection only from Forster’s “terminal note,” in which he described an affectionate touch on the backside by Merrill at Milthorpe as the spark for Maurice.
“Muddled” Maurice would have been unfamiliar with Carpenter or Whitman, so the four corners of the novel do not fully explain how he came to the insights that enabled him to plan a lifelong relationship with Alec. With an inspired push from the author, Maurice travels the last leg of his metaphoric journey from valley to mountaintop in an unseen leap. Through this brilliant authorial intrusion, Maurice foretells a post-Stonewall liberationist sensibility. Forster affirms gay self-acceptance and same-sex love that can thrive despite social reprobation. Maurice asserts the truth that gays cannot become fully human, fully alive, unless we embrace who we are. Forster bears witness to the centrality of coming to terms with one’s homosexuality in the formation of character for gay people. In the England of Forster’s construction, acceptance of being gay can take one outside of the dreary, suburban conventions that stifle authenticity. Homosexuality offers an escape from the suffocating English class system, anathematized as toxic to healthy relationships and human happiness.
Forster exposes the willful ignorance of his times when he has Clive announce that “[a]s long as they talk of the unspeakable vice of the Greeks they can’t expect fair play.” Elsewhere, he lays bare the scientific backwardness of earlier medical understandings of homosexuality and argues that it’s useless and pointless to try to change someone’s sexual orientation. With subtle irony Forster pillories the pretentiousness of established religion and deftly exposes the incongruities pervading society’s attitudes toward sex. His fiction provides a gay-positive discourse for individuals needing a framework to comprehend who they are, the idea of same-sex relationships, and a place for themselves in society.
Of course, the positive impact of his revolutionary portrayal of gay love was withheld for 57 years due to Forster’s decision to publish the book only posthumously. Forster has been chided by gay commentators for failing to publish Maurice during his lifetime, though his fears of censorship, defamation, and even prosecution were not unwarranted. Consider the experience of the less gay-affirming portrayal of lesbianism in The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928, which was censored and used to stigmatize its author, Radclyffe Hall.
It should also be noted that the happy endings in Maurice are limited to the pair of lovers, Maurice and Alec. Clive is tormented in old age after a lifetime wasted in a loveless marriage. Dr. Steven Centola, a Jungian psychologist, argues that Maurice fails to complete the final stage of the developmental process of “individuation.” Instead of re-emerging into the world and engaging society as a fully self-aware person, Maurice disappears with Alec into the greenwood. They save each other by hiding in darkness where their love will be left alone.
The focus of the happy ending on Maurice and Alec suggests that Forster’s artistic purpose was carried through with the completion of their relationship. Associated with the free-spirited Bloomsbury Group, Forster was a disciple of philosopher G. E. Moore, who assigned transcendent value to “the pleasures of human intercourse.” In Howards End, with its famous epigram “only connect,” Forster seems to say that the right personal relationships can sort out larger social tensions, namely in the Schlegel–Wilcox alliance. The resolution in Maurice comports with the Bloomsbury Group’s emphasis on personal feelings and defiance of repressive social conventions as the path to fulfillment in life, unaccompanied by a program of wider social and political change. For Forster, it was enough that “when two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph.”
It is safe to assume that the author had no concept of how larger society could be transformed to free GLBT people from repression. Parliament appears in the novel only as another setting where Clive’s drift into heterosexual conformity will play itself out. Of course, there was no plausible model of political agitation for the atomized gay population of Forster’s time to draw upon. While a nascent gay rights movement was emerging in Germany in the early 20th century (snuffed out by the Nazis in the 1930’s), there was no correlate in the English-speaking countries until much later.
It is only when the modern GLBT civil rights movement adopted a strategy of community organizing that larger social and political transformation became conceivable. Coalescence gave rise to “gay power,” which in myriad iterations succeeded in redirecting the course of history. Theoreticians in New York articulated and disseminated an ideology of gay pride that GLBT people could incorporate in individual and collective acts of radical self-definition. Soon a new and potent discourse had developed that equipped gay men and lesbians everywhere to accept themselves, to demand respect, and to fight for fairness and equality.
It was amid the rapidly evolving subculture of gay liberation in 1971 that Maurice finally appeared. Emancipation had not progressed so far that Maurice was welcomed without controversy. Even after Stonewall, the novel was ahead of its time. A forthright portrayal of gay love that ended rapturously for the protagonists was more than some critics could stomach. Typical of the initial negative reviews was that of Philip Toynbee, writing in The Observer, who pronounced Maurice to be “novelettish, ill-written, humourless and deeply embarrassing.” Toynbee maintained that Forster’s literary gift depended upon the sublimation of his homosexual feelings, evident in the novels he published during his lifetime. Other early commentators were even more bluntly homophobic. The flavor of Julian Mitchell’s scathing review in The Guardian was captured in its title: “Fairy Tale.” The convention that fictional gay relationships must end badly for the protagonists was still regnant at the time.
In the 1980’s, Maurice was gaining some prestige among critics. Robert Martin undertook a reassessment in a 1983 article, the first significant reading of the novel by a gay reviewer, in which he emphasized the protagonist’s progress from a “false solution” to the challenge of being gay with Clive, to more authentic self-actualization in the consummated relationship with Alec. By 1990, Maurice was being hailed as the “first gay liberation masterpiece” by Claude Summers. Even as he criticized what he referred to as “Forster’s self-erasure”—assuming Clive was the character the author most resembled—commentator John Fletcher stated in 1992 that Maurice “should now be recognized as the one classic portrayal of ‘masculine love’ … and the one explicitly homosexual bildungsroman produced within the mainstream of English literary tradition by a canonical author.” Meanwhile, in 1987, Merchant and Ivory released a sumptuous feature film adaptation of Maurice, which brought the story to the rapt attention of gay and lesbian audiences worldwide.
Maurice has found perhaps its greatest resonance in the 21st century, when the cause of same-sex marriage is on the march, a cause that Alec and Maurice poignantly emblemize. The fact that gay and lesbian couples can love long and selflessly enough to unite for a lifetime, a shocking idea when Forster conceived of it, now enjoys wide currency.
Perhaps there is something of what psychologist Jung termed “synchronicity” in the fact Maurice was published at a time, soon after Stonewall, when it could dovetail with events that Forster never imagined. By 1971, society had progressed far enough and GLBT people had entered mainstream discourse with (still-subversive) demands for equality, so that the novel was no longer in danger of censorship. Gay people were coming out in large numbers, hungry for a literature which would acknowledge and validate their existence. Maurice and Alec’s departure from the darkness of the greenwood and Forster’s own posthumous self-outing symbolized our collective emergence from history’s dark closet. Over the 38 years since its publication, Maurice has made significant contributions to gay self-actualization, not as a political treatise but as an inspiration for individual readers.
Don Gorton is a Boston lawyer and longtime activist.
