I didn’t like Howards End. My dislike of the novel was only heightened by the fact that one character I liked, Margaret, ended up marrying Henry Wilcox, the one character I truly couldn’t stand.
That being said, I think that the novel is interesting as a reflection on the increasing urbanization in England (29-30), as well as the increasing sense of social alienation (as in Mrs. Dalloway) and rootlessness in the wake of a newly emerging global economy. I felt hopeful each time it looked like Meg and Charles might break up in the novel, that she might come to her senses and leave him. It seemed out of character to me that a woman who believed in a woman’s right to lead an independent, intellectual life (87-88, 177, 213), and who believes in some sort of social support network (72-3, 133) should marry a man who treats women as objects to be controlled/subdued, and who thinks the poor should fend for themselves (21, 38, 90, 160). He says of Meg and Helen: “they are as clever as you make ‘em, but unpractical - God bless me! One of these days they’ll go too far. Girls like that oughtn’t to live alone in London” (153) and this is only the start of his patronizing and controlling behaviour. When I attempted to puzzle out Meg’s attraction to Charles, however it seemed to lie in her desire for a home, a place to be grounded (255-6).
The early 20th century England Forster shows us is one that is transitioning. The English (and especially the upper-classes, who have the privilege of mobility) are withdrawing from nature to live hurried , transitory, urban lives (115-6). Business on the home-front is no longer as profitable as business abroad (28). The new rich, like the Wilcoxes, have made their fortunes through exploitative colonial pursuits (86, 277). Those like the Wilcoxes have new ways of living. They dwell in apartments (68) rather than fixed family homes like Howards End, the home to which Mrs. Wilcox, Charles’s wife and Meg’s friend, is so attached. Mrs. Wilcox, just before her death, wills Howards End to Meg (105), recognizing Meg’s own attachment to home and family, a home and family which begins to disintegrate when she, Helen and Tibby must find a new house, because theirs is going to be torn down to build more apartments (92). As the narrator notes, “To them (the Wilcox heirs) Howards End was just a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir” (107). Meg is such a spiritual air. She is enamoured with the idea of a fixed home in general, and with Howard’s End in particular (184, 173). She stays with Charles after his poor treatment of her sister––with whom she has a seemingly more romantic relationship––poor treatment which includes his insistence that she be medicalized as a deranged hysteric (282, 195). Meg, I think, grows attached to Charles’s stability––and that of Howards End, a stability she doesn’t have as part of a family of half-Brit half-German orphans living in London (204). She wants this stability badly enough that she is willing to give up some of her independence to get it.
We are reverting to the civilization of luggage, and historians of the future will note how the middle classes accreted possessions without taking root in the earth, and may find in this the secret of their imaginative poverty. (154)
The early 20th century England Forster shows us is one that is transitioning. The English (and especially the upper-classes, who have the privilege of mobility) are withdrawing from nature to live hurried , transitory, urban lives (115-6). Business on the home-front is no longer as profitable as business abroad (28). The new rich, like the Wilcoxes, have made their fortunes through exploitative colonial pursuits (86, 277). Those like the Wilcoxes have new ways of living. They dwell in apartments (68) rather than fixed family homes like Howards End, the home to which Mrs. Wilcox, Charles’s wife and Meg’s friend, is so attached. Mrs. Wilcox, just before her death, wills Howards End to Meg (105), recognizing Meg’s own attachment to home and family, a home and family which begins to disintegrate when she, Helen and Tibby must find a new house, because theirs is going to be torn down to build more apartments (92). As the narrator notes, “To them (the Wilcox heirs) Howards End was just a house: they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir” (107). Meg is such a spiritual air. She is enamoured with the idea of a fixed home in general, and with Howard’s End in particular (184, 173). She stays with Charles after his poor treatment of her sister––with whom she has a seemingly more romantic relationship––poor treatment which includes his insistence that she be medicalized as a deranged hysteric (282, 195). Meg, I think, grows attached to Charles’s stability––and that of Howards End, a stability she doesn’t have as part of a family of half-Brit half-German orphans living in London (204). She wants this stability badly enough that she is willing to give up some of her independence to get it.
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