Grommersoft

A Sense of Deities Reconciled: A Room with a View 

By: Twayne Authors Series

The following essay analyzes the structure of A Room with a View and Lucy's journey toward enlightenment.

Forster began A Room with a View (1908) before Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and finished it after The Longest Journey (1907). Since it is the most halcyon and direct of his novels and since it was the work with which he started, we shall begin with it. Though it is his least complex book, it is his most Jane Austen-like and perhaps his most delightful. As in the earlier-published Angels, Italyacts as the chief source of vitality, and the two novels reflect the intense impact that the South made upon him in his early twenties. In Room, after the characters return to Englandin Part II,Italyretreats to the background but still acts as a formative influence.

In any case,Italyis the main force which in Part I of Room contributes to Lucy Honeychurch's liberation. The conventional Reverend Beebe reluctantly acknowledges the intuitive wisdom of Italians though it chiefly annoys him: "They pry everywhere, they see everything, and they know what we want before we know it ourselves." So "Phaethon," the driver of the carriage taking the English to the hills above Florence, reads Lucy's heart and directs her to George Emerson rather than to the Reverends Beebe and Eager when she asks in faltering Italian "where the good men are." BothItalyand the English countrywide encourage a free and open existence as compared to cramped, stereotyped, middle-class British life. The primary impression produced by the novel, the prevalence of wind and air and sunlight, establishes, as in George Meredith, the primary role of nature as redemptive power.

The English and Italian settings, rendered with complete immediacy, reveal Forster's sensitivity to place. Houses and buildings take on life in his fiction: the church of Santa Croce and the Pension Bertolini inFlorence, for example, and Windy Corner, aSurrey country house. The Florentine pension and theSurrey house focus the action in the two sections of the novel. Chapter 1 presents at the Pension almost all the actors who figure in Part I: Lucy; Charlotte Bartlett, her "proper" chaperone; George Emerson, a troubled but vital young man; his father, the prophetic proponent of the free and natural life like that advocated by the American Ralph Waldo Emerson; the Reverend Mr. Beebe, the ascetically inclined but socially agreeable clergyman of Summer Street near Windy Corner; Eleanor Lavish, an "emancipated" novelist whose unconventionality is superficial; and the Misses Alan, elderly and genteel lady travellers. Only the snobbish chaplain to the English colony, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, remains for Chapter 5.

The opening chapter of Part II introduces at Windy Comer all the other principles: Mrs. Honey church, Lucy's impulsive and affectionate mother and an endearing portrait of Forster's maternal grandmother whom he loved intensely; Freddy, Lucy's playful but instinctively sound brother; and Cecil Vyse, a "medieval" young man to whom Lucy has become engaged after his third proposal. She breaks her engagement when Mr. Emerson convinces her that she really loves his son. In the concluding chapter, Lucy and George return for their honeymoon to the Pension Bertolini which provides a frame for the novel and a reminder ofItaly's pervasive power.

Structure depends upon a number of encounters between Lucy and George which revise her staid outlook. In Chapter I the Emersons offer the ladies their room with a view; and, before retiring, the now restless Lucy gazes beyond theArno at the hills which betoken the freedom that she has not yet achieved. In Chapter 2 George appears in the Church of Santa Croce at his most lugubrious, and Lucy disdainfully pities him; but in Chapter 4 he reveals his potential strength as he supports her in his arms when she faints after witnessing a quarrel between two Italians over money, a quarrel that results in the sudden murder of one of them. After Lucy's "rescue," she and George gaze at theArno flowing beneath them and respond to its mystery and promise (though with her rational mind, Lucy is later ashamed that she has given herself away to this extent). With the death of the Italian, Lucy feels that she, too, has "crossed some spiritual boundary," though she is not sure at the moment just what it may be. When they go back toFlorence for their honeymoon, it is as if to place themselves under the spell of a force—the river—that has never ceased to exert itself. InItalyviolence enlarges Lucy's horizons, and she now feels that something has indeed "happened to the living."

In Chapter 4 Forster also suggests the effete quality of the casual tourist's culture when Lucy buys photographs of works by the great masters. Reality impinges upon the pictures when the dying man's blood spatters them and when George throws them into theArno to have them, as it were, washed pure in its waters. The principal picture, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, has symbolic meaning that is at once lucid and profound. The picture connects with the Italian springtime, the pagan atmosphere of the novel, and the birth of love in Lucy's soul. Just as the blood of the murdered man defiles the pictures, so Lucy would, through her own blindness and obstinacy, do violence to her instincts. Just as the soiled photographs return to the water that has given birth to Venus, so Lucy must immerse herself in elemental passion, in order to cleanse her soul and to attain a new life. The birth of the goddess and the death of the Italian man also suggest the nearness of love and death as the most fundamental and mysterious of our experiences.

Lucy has another encounter with George when in Chapter 6 the Bertolini guests go for a drive aboveFiesole. Lucy discovers that her standards have altered and that she does not know how to account for the change. She doubts that Miss Lavish is an artist and that Mr. Beebe is spiritual, but previously she would have been less critical. She judges them by a new criterion. Vital energy, she thinks, should animate them, but she finds them lacking in warmth and spontaneity, qualities that she has begun unconsciously to associate with George. Lucy is a woman who registers the effects of an emotional awakening before she can acknowledge its existence and cause. The Arno Valley is once more present in the distance from aboveFiesole when George kisses Lucy after she surprises him on the bank covered with violets. Going against the dictates of instinct, Lucy seeks the advice of her proper chaperone, Miss Bartlett, who dismisses George, and the ladies depart forthwith fromRome where Lucy first meets Cecil Vyse.

Encounters with George also organize the narrative in Part II, although in the first chapters it is Cecil Vyse, Lucy's fiance (or "fiasco" as Freddy calls him), who dominates. Another kiss, Cecil's self-conscious one in Chapter 9, contrasts with George's spontaneous embraces. Cecil not only takes the place temporarily of George as his temperamental opposite, but assumes in Part II the role of Charlotte Bartlett as exemplar of the proprieties. In Chapter 12 Lucy regains contact with George as he emerges like a pagan god from "The Sacred Lake," a charming country pool near Windy Corner, and emanates all of nature's freshness.

Part II is a contest between George and Cecil for the control of Lucy's inner being. In Chapter 15 a kiss again enlivens the novel. George has just beaten Lucy at tennis; while the contestants rest, Cecil reads from Miss Lavish's novel, which features an incident similar to George's first kissing of Lucy on the heights overFlorence. Miss Lavish had learned of the incident through the duplicity of Charlotte Bartlett who had enjoined Lucy to tell no one about it, even her mother. The memory of this scene arouses George, and he kisses Lucy in a copse close to Windy Corner. The outraged Lucy again does violence to her true self; she retreats from the light of truth and passion and prepares to enter "the vast armies of the benighted". After this second kiss and the lies that she tells about herself to George, Cecil, Mr. Beebe, her mother, and Mr. Emerson, pretense all but conquers her. InFlorence, after George's kiss, she had realized how difficult it was to be truthful, but by this point she has become less conscientious.

The overall movement of the novel results in enlightenment for Lucy, after several divagations into falsehood. With one side of her nature she responds to passion as it concenters in George; with another, she aligns herself with upholders of Victorian social standards, Charlotte Bartlett and Cecil Vyse. With unremitting force Lucy's instincts carry her toward a larger life than these mentors will allow. Finally, Mr. Emerson sweeps away her accumulated errors of perception when he divines her love for George, instructs her about the sanctity of passion, and gives her the courage to claim the man she loves.

From the beginning Italyis a subversive influence, causing Lucy's well-known world to break up; and in its place the "magic city" ofFlorence elicits all that is unpredictable. Passionate, vibrant, violentItalyall but overwhelms Lucy. Her sympathies for "Phaethon," the coach-driver, startle her, as he embraces his "Persephone" on the drive toFiesole. If she had been able to see more clearly, she would have recognized a god in George Emerson, who would, for his part, have seen in a liberated Lucy a real goddess. Before he kissed her in the hills, she had seemed "as one who had fallen out of heaven"; and, before her inhibitions stifled her, Lucy could identify him with "heroes—gods— the nonsense of schoolgirls". Later when she greets him at "The Sacred Lake," she thinks of herself as bowing "to gods, the heroes, to the nonsense of school girls! She had bowed across the rubbish that cumbers the world". And George was here a "Michelangelesque" figure, the essence of heroic vitality; earlier he had similarly appeared to her as a figure appropriate to "the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of acorns". But, in repudiating George a second time, she turns from a god incarnate to the academic study of Greek mythology as she prepares for her journey toGreecewith the Misses Alan. She is rejecting in the actuality a god, knowledge of whose counterparts she is pursuing in the abstract.

In order to intensify Lucy's conflict with convention and to convey the force of her muted passion, Forster uses imagery drawn from music. Music lifts her out of herself and permits her to see, at least for the moment, the irrelevance of prescriptive standards: "She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave". By force of will, she transforms Beethoven's tragic sonatas, for example, into expressions of triumph. Lucy, moreover, instinctively suits her music to her mood or situation. InItalywhere she can acknowledge the elemental, she leans toward Beethoven. When she plays for Cecil and his guests inLondon, she performs the decorous Schumann, who suggests to her "the sadness of the incomplete." It is as if she has some intimations that she is now denying the demands of life, and so cannot play her beloved Beethoven in these artificial surroundings. At Windy Corner she plays the erotic garden music from Gluck's Armide and makes her audience restless (as if they reflect her own conflicts), and she also finds it impossible to play the sensual garden sequence from Parsifal in George's presence, since she is sexually distraught at this time. When she plans to renounce the call of passion, she indulges in the artifices (for her) of Mozart.

Forster suggests Lucy's progress toward enlightenment in terms of light and shadow images (these are so numerous that full discussion is not possible). Light and darkness suffuse natural phenomena, as these respectively signify freedom and inner fulfillment or bondage and human waywardness. Forster also associates light with the Emer-sons to the extent that father and son represent spiritual truth. InItalyMr. Emerson urges Lucy to expose her thoughts to the sunlight rather than keep them in the depths of her nature. She resists full illumination, however, because she resists as yet the full promptings of instinct. George is, like Lucy, in danger of spiritual disablement, and he will enter the abyss if Lucy does not return his love, his father tells her inEngland. Lucy, in fact, will condemn herself by her evasions and lies to "marching in the armies of darkness", so long as she resists the truth about herself.

Though the clouds of pessimism often surround George, he becomes a source of light to Lucy. Both darkness and bright light characterize her encounter with him in the Piazza Signoria. To correspond with the crime that takes place there, the Piazza is in shadow and the tower of the palace arises out of a sinister gloom. Yet the tower is emblematic of the sexuality that Lucy experiences and represses, rising as it does "out of the lower darkness like a pillar of toughened gold. It seemed no longer a tower, no longer supported by earth, but some unattainable treasure throbbing m the tranquil sky". InSurrey George's kindness to his father strikes Lucy as "sunlight touching a vast landscape—a touch of the morning sun". He has just said that "there is a certain amount of kindness, just as there is a certain amount of light," and that one "should stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine." When he wins at tennis from Lucy, he is brilliant against the sunlight, godlike in appearance. In defending himself in Surrey after he kisses her, he emphasizes how his love had been kindled when he saw her the day that he bathed in theSacred Lake; the life-giving water and the glorious sunlight combined to make her beauty overwhelming. It is with this sunlight, too, that Forster identifies George and suggests that he is a Phaethon figure.

After she breaks the engagement with Cecil, Lucy realizes that George has gone into darkness; but she does not yet perceive that by her denial of sex she is fashioning an "armour of falsehood" and is about to go into darkness herself. She now becomes as one who sins "against passion and truth", or against Eros and Pallas Athena. She resists taking others into her confidence lest inner exploration result in self-knowledge and "that king of terrors— Light", the light that her own name (from the Latin, lux, meaning light) signifies and that she must acknowledge to become her true self. But for the intervention of Mr. Emerson, Lucy would stay in darkness. He gives her "a sense of deities reconciled"; he enables her, in short, to balance the claims of Eros and Pallas Athena, of sense and soul.

George, who is in part a nature god, is at his most vital seen against the expanses of the Florentine and English hills. Appropriately enough, his earliest memory is the inspiriting landscape seen from Hindhead in company with his mother and father, a prospect which unified the family in deepest understanding. In symbolic terms, both the Emersons now have, and have always had, "the view" that Lucy must acquire. External nature is always seen in motion, as if it too is in protest against Cecil's static existence and in sympathy with George's dynamic energies. Kinetic and auditory images dominate so that nature seems always active rather than passive. TheArno River after a storm bounds on like a lion, and at several points it murmurs a promise of a free and open existence for the lovers. In Surrey andSussexthe atmosphere, comprising "the intolerable tides of heaven," is always in motion. Glorious lateral views dominate the region; but this landscape becomes ominous as Lucy represses sexual passion. The sounds and movements of nature intensify to register their protest as Lucy denies life and love. Now the sky goes wild; the winds roar through pine trees; and gray clouds, charging across the heavens, obscure the white ones and the blue sky, "as the roaring tides of darkness" set in. The novel closes on a serene note, however, with nature's forces finding fruition in human beings, as Lucy on her honeymoon surrenders not only to George but to the Florentine spring and to theArno's whispers.

When Mr. Emerson counsels Lucy toward the novel's end, he emphasizes the difficulties of life, the continual presence of muddles, and the consequent need to clear them away; he quotes a friend of his (actually Samuel Butler): "Life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along". Lucy acquires now a sense of the complexities of life; and she finds that she cannot plan for it and know in advance its contingencies. This lesson she learns from her first meeting with George in Surrey, for she had not thought of meeting him when he is happy and exuberant, as a godlike being at theSacred Lake against the background of verdant nature. Lucy herself shines with intensity throughout the novel, with the result that a rather ordinary young woman is transfigured into a radiant presence, the resolution of whose conflicts becomes a matter of genuine urgency.

George is designedly less complex than Lucy, since he need not so much modify his values as gain the courage to assert them. Early in the novel George gives Lucy "the feeling of greyness, of tragedy that might only find solution in the night", though Forster fails to establish the precise intellectual grounds for his pessimism. Forster misses in George some opportunity to convey the complicated mentality of a young man suffering from a Weltschmerz characteristic of the late Victorian age and induced, among other forces, by the loss of a dynamic religious faith. But George is, on the whole, a successful creation, an archetypal personage embodying the freshness, the power, and the passion of youth.

Lucy's chief mentor and George's father, Mr. Emerson, evinces a rousing candor that is refreshing, but on the whole Forster conceived him with less decisiveness and complexity than the novel demands. His valetudinarianism, for example, is too far removed from the vitality attributed to him, and his message is too direct to be aesthetically compelling. But what damages Mr. Emerson as a presence chiefly is the dated quality of some of his ideas, ideas which reveal how shallow he is when he assumes that he is being profound. In his scathing remarks about the Reverend Eager's Giotto lecture, in theChurch of Santa Croce, Mr. Emerson exhibits a literalness of mind not far different from the fundamentalism he criticizes. Thus, he asserts that an edifice built by faith means that the workmen were underpaid and that Giotto's Ascension of Saint John is ridiculous because a "fat man in blue" could not be "shooting into the sky like an air-balloon". It is therefore difficult to agree with Forster that Mr. Emerson is "profoundly religious," for he seems to operate on the surface, rather than at the depths, of religious issues.

Forster's great success in the novel is with his rendition of the humorous and satirically envisioned persons. Some of them—the Reverend Eager, Mrs. Honeychurch, and Eleanor Lavish—Foster presents in brief, through epigrammatic summary or through their spoken words. He tells us, for instance, all we have to know of Reverend Eager, in this account of his unctuous ministrations for transient visitors: "... it was his avowed custom to select those of his migratory sheep who seemed worthy, and give them a few hours in the pastures of the permanent". The portrait is made complete when Eager discourses patronizingly upon the way in which the "lower-class" Emersons have risen: "Generally, one has only sympathy with their success. The desire for education and for social advance—in these things there is something not wholly vile. There are some working men whom one would be very willing to see out here inFlorence—little as they would make of it". Reverend Eager's apparent generosity, in fact, masks feelings of snobbishness, contempt, and exclusive-ness.

But it is with Lucy's antagonists that Forster does best: Charlotte Bartlett and Cecil Vyse. Although he presents them satirically, he also sees them sympathetically; as a result, his humor at their expense is genial as well as satiric. Charlotte and Cecil are misguided, they are hypocrites, and they extinguish the generous instincts; they cause un-happiness and they propagate darkness. But, since they are not conscious of wrongdoing, Forster not only tolerates them but feels affection for them. As a consequence, he fully delineates them; and they become large-scale figures even if they are not complex individuals who develop dynamically.

Charlotte is given to excessive propriety and is deficient, therefore, in graciousness, kindness, and consideration. Her hypocrisies are the source of much fine comedy, as is her penchant for the irrelevant. Specious and superficial incidents and ideas gain ascendancy in her mind and allow her thereby to evade uncomfortable realities that a conscientious individual would feel obliged to facet. She is able to rationalize any occurrence in her own favor. Thus she stresses Miss Lavish's perfidy in using for her novel Lucy's being kissed by George on the Florentine heights. As a result,Charlotte diverts attention from her own perfidy in telling Miss Lavish in the first place: "Never again shall Eleanor Lavish be friend of mine". Her incompetence as a person who is "practical without ability" is the source of much humor. Her packing inFlorence is protracted further than it ought to be, she is unable to pay the driver at Windy Corner because she arrives without small change and then becomes confused in her monetary calculations, and she "impedes" Mrs. Honeychurch with offers of help in tying up dahlias after a night of storm. Her sense of decorum is outlandish, as she recoils from George's casual mention in Chapter 1 that his father "is in his bath," and only she could be quite so thorough a martyr in her home to a "tiresome" boiler.

The portrait of Cecil is equally authoritative. He is the diffident man who finds it difficult to become emotionally involved even with an attractive woman. Forster describes him as resembling a "fastidious saint" in the facade of a French cathedral and as being by temperament self-conscious and ascetic. His courtship follows the are from "patronizing civility" to "a profound uneasiness." The uneasiness arises when Lucy threatens to become vital and dynamic, to be more than a Leonardesque work of art. Cecil calls himself a disciple of George Meredith, agreeing with his mentor that the cause of comedy and the cause of truth are identical, though Cecil cannot realize that he will be the individual, in the course of his engagement to Lucy, to be unmasked as self-server and hypocrite.

George Emerson appraises well his adversary. He perceives that Cecil "kills," when it comes to people, by misjudging or undervaluing them, by playing tricks on them instead of cherishing "the most sacred form of life that he can find", and by being snobbish and supercilious toward those inferior to him in station and income. Accordingly, Cecil patronizes Lucy when she confuses two Italian painters, winces when Mr. Emerson mispronounces the names of artists, becomes bored and disdainful of the Honeychurches for whom "eggs, boilers, hydrangeas, maids" form part of reality, and fails to see that it is sometimes an act of kindness for a bad player to make a fourth at tennis. In short, as with Meredith's Sir Willoughby Patterne, Cecil is an egoist, with the egoist's inability to see himself as he is, with the egoist's tendency to assume that other people exist to minister to his well-being. Something of the large dimensions of Sir Willoughby inheres in Cecil's portrait, though Lucy hardly attains the dimensions of Clara Middleton, her prototype in The Egoist.

Northrop Frye's discussion of the mythos of comedy illuminates A Room with a View which is the only Forster narrative that can be fully assimilated to these ideas of Frye's. This mythos devolves about the central characters attainment of a new society after the influence of those who obstruct their free development has been neutralized (Charlotte Bartlett and Cecil Vyse are the "blocking" figures in Room). There transpires a new life for the hero and the heroine as they move "from a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the older characters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom," under the aegis of "a benevolent grandfather,"—Mr Emerson in this novel. There are also occurs a visit to "the green world" of romance, to the healing powers of nature, as George and Lucy participate in their ritualistic honeymoon beside the life-restoring Arno River before they return, reinvigorated, to middle-class life in England. If anything, the mythic and archetypal—and romance—aspects of Forster's imagined universe are even more to the fore in his subsequent fiction.

Source: "A Sense of Deities Reconciled: A Room with a View," in Twaynes Authors Series: Twayne English Authors, Twayne, 1999.