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by: Jeremy W. Hubbell Hubbell has an M. Litt. from the University ofAberdeen, Scotland, and currently seeks a Ph.D. in history at the State University ofNew York at Stony Brook. This essay purports that the place of technology in civilization haunts A Room with a View. Though they had profited handsomely by industrialization,Britain's upper classes did not view technology with the enthusiasm characteristic of Americans. They still held to the feudal or "medieval" view, which held that profit should accumulate in their pockets—they saw themselves as the center of the universe. Technology, for the elite, achieved a good investment return, which they enjoyed, but it also increased the prosperity of the lower classes. Gains in productivity allowed for healthier wage packets while union action shortened the workweek. Thus, members of the working class began to play sports on their off days, women went shopping in arcades built with new building technology, families rode bikes and went on outings to museums and parks. The elite did not meet this alteration bravely and continued to insist on class separation. This tension is at the heart of E. M. Forster's novel A Room with a View, whose message of ultimate compromise includes dismantling the nature versus civilization dichotomy. Cecil Vyse, who offers a speech to Lucy Honey church to the effect that the classes ought to intermingle, notes that the rabble are even eating better so that "the physique of the lower-middle classes was improving at a most appalling rate." Before industrialization accelerated in the eighteenth century, Europeans regarded themselves as warring against nature for their very lives. That changed when the Renaissance revived science and took advantage of medieval mechanics. Attitudes altered as civilization gained the upper hand and began to control nature. By the nineteenth century, control was all but attained and philosophic figures like Thomas Carlyle began to suggest a new attitude of harmony. They declared that the battle was over; civilization and its technics were harmonious parts of nature, not at war with it. Theories of evolution helped bolster the idea that by cooperating with nature, humans would prosper in both wealth and health. One technology stands out in this period and in Forster's novel because it was the growth engine of the nineteenth century economy, the steam engine atop a wheel carriage. The rich invested heavily in the railroad in the late nineteenth century and they received handsome rewards. However, the railroad allowed unprecedented social mobility and created an entirely new class of rich people. Walt Whitman captured the appreciation of this technology in his 1851 poem, "To a Locomotive in Winter." There, the locomotive was a beautiful creature set free in nature. The railroad quickly became more than just a creature; it became a liberator of people and latent potential. The railroads enabled greater prosperity for all people which led, of course, to increased mingling of the classes. The railroad, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in "The Young American," "is the magician's rod, in its power to evoke sleeping energies of land and water." Emerson celebrated technology because it enables people to further their abilities to open up land to agriculture and the progress of civilization. Only by the employment of technology can people build a Garden of Eden where everyone is fed and clothed—a garden, after all, employs cutting-edge agricultural technology. That is the message of Forster's book, a realization that the American spirit is a good one andBritainwould do well to learn from it. Britain, as the novel shows, may not be able to Americanize because of people like the Vyses and, therefore, places likeItalymight be the better place for that spirit. The discussion of technological advance occurs at several points in the novel. While inFlorence, Mr. Eager notes the way in which trams enable people of the lower classes to take outings in the countryside. However, the reality of a working person's life justifies Mr. Eager's pity for them. Still, trams enable the "poor" to walk where only the rich had previously. Sir Harry Otway enunciates the anxieties of the rich to Mr. Vyse. He fears, he says, that he will rent to the wrong sort of person because the physical barriers that had kept the rich apart have been overrun. The rich had always been able to afford the time and expense of country estates, but both time and expense were being leveled by the railroad. "The train service has improved—a fatal improvement, to my mind. And what are five miles from a station in these days of bicycles?" He worries that the bike and the train will enable the working-class man to afford a home away from the toxicity of industry (cars will soon make the matter worse). His fears are realized when the Emersons, the working-class heroes of the novel, move in. Though only Mrs. Honeychurch makes the connection, Mr. Emerson, who was a mechanic before going into journalism for socialist organs, follows the teachings of the American philosopher already mentioned. George, appropriately, works as a clerk for a railroad company. Otway had hoped for a bank clerk, an occupation he understood, but in the new economy, suggests Forster, the railroad clerk becomes the victor. The novel assesses the anxiety of the wealthy classes in terms of its inability to change its view of life by which is meant, philosophies of life or interpretations of the universe—how things work. The rich, like Otway and Vyse, are conservative; they want class separations maintained with themselves at the top according to the medieval ideals. They see nature as something to be controlled for their benefit as it was in feudal times. They can be thought of "as in a room" or protected by "fences" and ensconced in palaces and churches. Members of this view "have no profession." Instead, they manage and accumulate wealth—the Vyses are parasites whose salary is made up of dividends. The Emersons are liberals, meaning they believe in individual rights and democratic institutions. They are humanists and base their judgments about society on empirical data "of," not from (as in stolen), nature. Thus, they can be thought of as a view without obstructing walls. People who share the Emersons' view live by their own labor and they enjoy bodily pleasure. Reason governs their behavior. In Freudian terms, a person of cathexis focuses his mind toward one goal or view of life. Such a person can be described as anal or unyielding. This person frequently becomes the center of a comedy whose end is his catharsis. That is, events and experiences of disruption force the person of cathex-ion to see things differently and realize he had been narrow-minded. A catharsis is, literally, a release of psychic energy, a release from being anal, which allows for a readjusted and more balanced psyche. Forster's comedy is different. The Vyses cannot help but live up to their name, which conjures the Latin verb "to see." Vyse also conjures the mechanical apparatus, the vise. As the leading members of society, such allusions are fitting. The Vyses stick to their rules and view of society normally described as hive-like. The blending of the biologic and mechanical is no accident. The society which the Vyses lead is, in modern parlance, like the Borgs from Gene Rodenberry's Star Trek series. They attach people to their system after a period of molding. In terms of the history of technics, the society of Vyse is a megamachine whose purpose is to maintain its members and itself by acquisition of new members and adamant adherence to decorum. The cathected are not saved by the story; hope lies in the young who have not yet made up their view. Forster hated the megamachine of the Vyses'. In a short story written after A Room with a View he was even more vitriolic in his characterization of this tendency in humans to live in cathexion. In "The Machine Stops," a machine does all of society's work so that the humans can sit in their rooms away from each other and continually fabricate aesthetic systems. The body is left to atrophy. However, Forster does not foresee total divorce from the body and, therefore, maintains the hope of reconnecting with the body or giving the room a view. The Emersons are that hope. They are part of the middle class whose physique has improved with industrialization. They believe in communal recreation of the Garden where technology does not take over society but positively aids people in their lives. The Emersons, in their ideal, can be thought of as a utopic view of boundless progress. Forster, a pragmatist, believes in a compromise made possible by Lucy who, as light, can bring the two worlds together. She brings music, art, and literature to match George's modern philosophy and technology. The marriage of the two views happens inFlorence—one of the cities responsible for the change inEurope described as the Renaissance. That epoch of rediscovery held out the possibility of compromise from the outset. A historical example of this can be found in the efforts of a man who lived inFlorence during the Renaissance and arguably has had the greatest view of the cosmos. His very name has become a synonym for clear sight. His sight would not be obfuscated by religious doctrine or doubt but fueled by Baconian practice. Galileo Galilei, court mathematician to the Medici, had the clearest view of all the Renaissance thinkers and it was straight up. His observations led to the downfall of the old geocentric view of the universe and the rise of a heliocentric view of the universe. Forster's location of his novel about views and technological attitudes was appropriately placed inFlorence. Forster's sense of compromise matches Galileo's, who did not want to overthrow or disagree with the Catholic Church (the story often told about his "trial"). Instead, Galileo believed he utilized his God-given talents to explore God's wondrous creations in order to glorify the Catholic faith. Galileo failed to observe a separation between religion and science. "It was the old, old battle of the room with a view." The statement stands like a thesis within a theory about human nature. While it appears to announce that there is nothing new in the Lucy problem, it also luxuriates in the timelessness within the problem. Industrial progress can be a boon so long as its goal is to make human lives better; industrial progress cannot be, for Forster, an end in itself. In other words, humans cannot be bound to machines. The choice depends upon our view of things, a problem as old as Plato's room. The old, old battle is over whether or not humans will stay looking at the shadows on the wall or go out of the cave. The Emersons remind the reader that "there is only one perfect view—the view of the sky straight over our heads, and ... all these other views on earth are but bungled copies of it." Forster celebrated life and sunlight but he was not against technology. Forster, writing at a time whenEurope had created a science of fatigue and was obsessed with industrial efficiency, points out that the important things are to observe nature as our forebears did. And maybe observe and pay attention to each other. Machines, as critics of Taylorism were quick to see, can numb the senses of the human worker. Forster wants that worker to be able to have fun in the sun once in a while far from "the world of motor cars." Source: Jeremy W. Hubbell, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001.
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