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By: Eric Haralson In the following essay excerpt. Haralson analyzes the homoerotic elements of theSacred Lake episode in A Room with a View. A Room with a View, published in the same year as Forster's meeting of James, gives a convenient gauge of his progress along his different novelistic "road," as well as an inventory of the obstacles lying in it. In this monitory tale in which young lovers transcend "the rubbish that cumbers the world," obstructing both emotional and physical expression, old Mr. Emerson's much-quoted pronouncement that "love is of the body" seems a staunch rebuttal of the austerity that Forster disliked in James. Further, the novel (unlike James's) boasts characters whose clothes explicitly "take off," as with the three men who disport themselves in the Sacred Lake, a scene memorably circulated in popular culture through the Merchant Ivory film adaptation. Already in 1908, that is, Forster found himself searching—in the terms of Bristow's analysis—for "a public and plausible form" of representing homoeroticism in unobjectionable relation to both heterosexist taste and feminine authority; and already his text betrayed a crisis of representation, remaining "regulated—if not, by necessity, mystified—by profoundly heteronormative assumptions". As a narrative hot spot, the bathing scene conveys Forster's sense of the male body, in especial, as a "restless captive of culture" that "animates and disrupts the social order" and that the social order struggles always to recontain. Yet just as the clothes that "take off" eventually go back on—"To us shall all flesh turn in the end," they taunt from the lakeshore, countermanding the Thoreauvian dictum on the Emersons' wardrobe— Forster is ultimately compelled to cloak his critique of the "normal" in the garb of the normal, thus risking the same "cocooning and muffling" he deplored in James. Before addressing theSacred Lake episode in detail, however, it will be useful to review Forster's characterization of his three bathers—Fredd), Honey church, George Emerson, and the clergyman Mr. Beebe—and of the negative countertype Cecil Vyse, who will show up with his intended, Lucy Honeychurch, and her mother to put "a confining and depressing end to the affair," as Samuel Hynes says. Young Freddy, whose letters to his sister Lucy are "full of athletics and biology" and who is seen "studying a small manual of anatomy," can easily be pegged as the earnest, hail-fellow-well-met creature of such homosocial institutions as the British public school and (prospectively) the medical establishment. Forster has fun with Freddy's efforts to sever the maternal apron strings ("Oh, do keep quiet, mother . . . and let a man do some work") and permits Cecil to sneer at him as the sort of muscular-Christian "healthy person . . . who has made England what she is," but Freddy also scores points for his glad animal movements: "Apooshoo, apooshoo, apooshoo . . . Water's simply ripping". In George Emerson, who will dislodge Vyse as Lucy's true mate, Forster tests out a prototype of the new-age male—a character, as Bristow writes, who incorporates "an idiosyncratic blend of cultural interests . . . where the appreciation of art and 'love . . . of the body' are not separate". Yet, although George is dedicated to securing the heterosexual love-plot, and will emerge from his dip "bare-chested" and "radiant" to smite Lucy's vision, Forster simultaneously invites another frame and another kind of gaze—not only by annexing the post-Whitmanian tradition of bathing-boys scenes but also, and less obviously, by stocking George's library with his own early readings of a homoerotic hue, notably Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh and A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad, which, as Forster said, "mingled with my own late adolescence and turned inward upon me". Completing the trio, the "stout but attractive" Mr. Beebe is a slightly more hopeful incarnation of the Victorian bachelor figure whose line of descent, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has shown, includes John Marcher of "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903) and other "poor sensitive gentlemen" whose psychic constitution opens onto homosexual panic, it not homosexual possibility In a tactful but no longer difficult allusion, Forster notes that Beebe has "rather profound reasons" for responding coolly to women and for seeing them as objects of strictly anthropological curiosity, even though as a "feminized" man of the cloth he lives mainly among them. Forster's indirection in describing Beebe, moreover, is inscribed in the cleric's own manner of commentary—or what Freddy calls his "funny way, when you never quite know what he means." Not coincidentally, what puzzles Freddy's amiable but restricted mind is Beebe's contention that Vyse can only impersonate a (hetero) romantic suitor, being in actuality "an ideal bachelor. .. like me—better detached." And even though Forster satirizes Charlotte Bartlett's lament to Lucy, bemoaning the death of chivalry ("Oh, for a real man! . . . Oh, for your brother!"), Charlotte's sense of Beebe as "hopeless" in this regard also tags him as exemplifying another style of masculinity. An extra emphasis on "masculinity" is warranted here, for Forster takes pains to discriminate between Mr. Beebe and Cecil Vyse as, respectively, the hearty and mostly sympathetic "ideal bachelor"—one who, as Charlotte primly objects, "laughs just like an ordinary man"—and the repugnant variety, one of the "despicable and regressive species of mocking intellectuals" who combined, for Forster, a precious Paterian-Jamesian aestheticism with a Wildean lassitude and antiathleticism ("I have no profession," says Cecil, "It is another example of my decadence". It is Beebe, after all, who analogizes Vyse to a Gothic statue, implying "celibacy," where a Greek statue implies "fruition"—who perceives, in a word, that Vyse is insufficiently masculine for either heterosexual or "masculine love" (as it will be named in Maurice) and thus perniciously opposed to the currents that replenish and "fructify every hour of life". In this way, too, Beebe distinguishes himself from the novel's other clergyman, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, who fatuously praises Giotto's frescoes for being "untroubled by the snares of anatomy" and for avoiding the corporeal "taint of the Renaissance". Beebe's consent to strip and swim, then, aligns him provisionally with the adversaries of "drawing-room twaddle" and genteel Baedeker discourse (echoes of Lamb House, to Forster's ear), which chastely applauds Giotto's "tactile values" and holds that "a pity in art ... signified the nude"—as in Charlotte's disdain for another water-borne being, Botticelli's Venus. Like Mr. Emerson, who pontificates about the paradise to be regained when "we no longer despise our bodies," like Lucy Honey church, who "by touch... come[s] to her desire" and "entertain[s] an image that [has] physical beauty," but decidedly unlike Cecil Vyse with his "depths of prudishness," Beebe votes for— and with—the body at the Sacred Lake. What makes the lake sacred in Forster's fable is no great mystery, although here again the level of popular, heteronormative signification and reception shades into more covert "messages" and a queerer take on the scene As a medium of more or less generic lubrication, tumescence, nakedness— and notice that Lucy, too, had bathed there until "found out" and reclaimed for gentility by Charlotte—the take emblematizes Mr. Emerson's projected paradise on earth: "set in its little alp of green ... [it was] large enough to contain the human body, and pure enough to reflect the sky". Further, to the extent that the episode advances George's conquest of Lucy, the lake reprises the riverine bed of violets in which they first kissed inItalythat ejaculative "primal source whence beauty gushed out" to "irrigate" the grass with "spots of azure foam". At this level, both the hyperidealized scenery—the "beautiful emerald path, tempting the feet towards the central pool"—and the sacramentalized passion it induces ("a call to the blood ... a momentary chalice for youth") subserve anEden whose beckonings and indulgences wear a look familiarly heterosexual, or at the very least "neutral". To put this another way, Forster's obligatory insistence on scenic "purity" and, by extension, on the innocent frolicsomeness of his male bathers does little to retard the normative thrust of the narrative or to disturb the normative valence of the "floods of love . . . burst[ing] forth in tumult" that it seeks to celebrate. Yet as we remarked in sorting through George Emerson's library, in which Housman huddles next to Nietzsche, the heralded bathing scene manages to gesture toward a different call to the blood and a different kind of sexual immersion as well. As hinted by the unidentified "aromatic plant" flourishing near the pond's "flooded margin"—almost certainly a tribute to Whitman's calamus, or sweet-flag—Forster provides a comic, if inevitably veiled, variant of the "greenwood" fantasy of masculine love that concludes Maurice. In a setting "beyond the intrusion of man" and nestled in the bosom of nature—in an aqueous vessel, no less, that conjures up both seminal and amniotic associations— Freddy, George, and Mr. Beebe find a social space where not only anticorporeality but also hetero-sexist presumption and regulation are put in suspense—where for a moment, in the parlance of Maurice, the Law slumbers. Whether "rotat[ing] in the pool breast high"—in Forster's campy depiction—like "the nymphs in Gotterdammerung," or "play [ing] at being Indians," or kicking their bundled clothes like schoolboys at soccer, or "twinkl[ing] into the trees," the three men try on alternative genders, ethnicities, and social roles in a temperate carnival of deviance. In fact, they even try on each other's costumes in a homoerotically coded sequence of exchanges: Freddy, who significantly cannot see the repressed Cecil Vyse "wearing another fellow's cap", here makes off with Beebe's waistcoat, while George dons Beebe's "wide-awake hat" and ends up wearing Freddy's "bags." These often phallically connotative swap-pings and sharings, in turn, culminate in a figurative instance of male-male conception when Freddy announces, giddily: "I've swallowed a pollywog. It wriggleth in my tummy". But as we know—and as Forster, for all his lighthearted treatment, underscores—the Law only slumbers, soon to arouse and reinstate itself, as the amalgamated powers of the maternal, the domestic, the female-amative, and the bourgeois-respectable intervene to terminate this idyl of masculine adhesiveness. Freddy's weak protest against the restoration of conventional rule ("Look here, mother, a fellow must wash,. . . and if another fellow—") is quelled when Mrs. Honeychurch declares that, being naked, he is "in no position to argue" and gains his compliance by means of a time-honored token of motherly concern: "All these colds come of not drying thoroughly." Meanwhile George, in all his "barechested" radiance, gets carefully reinvested in the heterosexual paradigm, calling Lucy to her romantic fate "with the shout of the morning star," and Mr. Beebe finds himself painfully recalled to reality and propriety, imaging—in his paranoia—that "every pine-tree [is] a Rural Dean". Perhaps most telling, from the standpoint of Forster's adjudication of masculinities, is his cast- ing of Cecil as unwittingly arrayed with the feminine forces of normalization—a notion embedded in Beebe's sentinel cry of alarm, "Hi! Hi! Ladies!," which seems to collapse Vyse with his female companions. By now well-established as a condescending poseur who "believe [s] that women revere men for their manliness," Vyse here shows even more sharply as a walking parody of the English patriarch, "who always felt he must lead women, though he knew not whither, and protect them, though he knew not against what". To this ersatz version of an already corrupt gender style the Merchant Ivory film furnishes an added accent as Cecil—gloriously overplayed, as hardly seemed possible, by Daniel Day-Lewis—bushwhacks through the bracken, "ladies" in tow, in quest of new territory to colonize on behalf of the constrained body, male privilege, and imperial aggrandizement. We may confidently speculate that Forster, whose later novels criticize just such a "desire for possessions [and] creditable appendages," would have appreciated this touch. A Room with a View might be read then as a concerted attempt to reject what Forster saw as the mistaken scheme of values informing James's oeuvre, as well as a critique of the sociopolitical context that surrounded and conditioned those writings. In a calculated riposte to authors like James, who believed fiction should delineate the "elementary passions ... in a spirit of intellectual superiority" and who anticipated modernist misgivings about sentimentalism's "connection to a sexual body", Forster set out to give his third novel a "stifling human quality"—to make it "sogged with humanity" (in the aptly fluid terms of Aspects of the Novel) and not to deny the "sentimentality . . . lurk[ing] in the background" of muchreaderly pleasure. As I began this essay by suggesting—and as would become apparent in the experiment of Maurice—one powerful (if still hidden) motive of Forster's campaign to make a great good place for the body and naked feeling in fiction was the hope of clearing a narrative field for homosexual subjectivity—for the "generous recognition of an emotion and ... the reintegration of something primitive into the common stock". Not only did the "common stuff" that Forster missed in James's characters need to be reanimated in the conversation of culture, but that same move should open a way toward acceptance of less common—or rather, less commonly acknowledged—sexualities as well. In the final analysis, though, we must ask whetherA Room with a view accomplishes or even effectively predicts such a "rout of... civilization" in this more ambitious sense or whether instead— as queer theory posits, and as Forster would perceive with growing acuity—certain costs attach to the traditional "marital teleology of the comic text" with its policing of nonnormative masculinities. If one means to contest the cultural position that Forster found inadequately contested in James by asserting that love is "of the body," why stipulate (as Mr. Emerson does) that love is "not the body"? Might stopping this one step shy of fully "carnal embracement"—a last-ditch reticence encountered in all of Forster's fiction, including Maurice—involve renewed concessions to a spiritualized "love" that is always in peril of being (re)engulfed in het-eronormativity? Doesn't A Room with a View forfeit something politically vital by deferring to the usual script with its "idiotic use of marriage as a finale," as Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel, repeating an opinion he held even at the time of the novel's composition? Or if one does nod, in the same work, toward other possible desires and consummations, how much gets changed, in the realm of the real, when the nod is only to those in the know? The rhetorical posture of such a line of inquiry is perhaps unavoidably invidious, and as we have seen, Forster's private ruminations were not without self-doubt and self-recrimination on this score. Yet to charge "queer Forster" with not being queer enough—or with failing decisively to subvert het-erosexist narrative conventions—would seem to miss the point. For how, in fairness, was one to "reveal the hidden life at its source" when "mutual secrecy" had always been the enabling premise of society, and especially when the state and its agencies of sexual regulation made one pay with one's body for certain disclosures? To leave Forster's perennial quarrel with Henry James simply in the region of psychobiography—the influence of somebody upon somebody, to adapt Woolf—would be to neglect the collective testimonial of their works to the efficacy and resilience of homophobia in what is called, evidently without conscious irony, the life of man. Source: Eric Haralson, Queer Forster, edited by Robert K. Martin and George Piggford, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 66-72.
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