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Critically, A Room with a View has been treated as a fine example of travel literature, character development, satire, comedy, writing style, and a modernization of ancient myths. Forster's novel was immediately popular with readers and early reviewers praised the novel, enjoying the Jane Austen-style observation of human society. Acclaim began with a review in the Morning Leader (October 30, 1908) which declared the work the best of the year. C. F. G. Masterman's review in The Nation plugged the work because it deftly satirized Edwardian England. Virginia Woolf, writing for the Times Literary Supplement in her article "The Novels of E. M. Forster," and collected in The Death of the Moth and other Essays, declared the book a wonder for its beauty. However, Forster's friend also criticized Forster's characters as unsatisfying. Later critics have not agreed with Woolf. Writing almost sixty years later, Jeffrey Meyers thought the characters exactly fulfilled their functions. In "The Paintings in Forster's Italian Novels," Meyers discusses how character response to Giotto's fresco, "The Ascension of St. John," "reverberates throughout the novel." Their "aesthetic responses become identified with moral issues" that are hashed out in the novel. Meyers furthers his claim by noting that Forster believed in art as a means for people to learn how to take up the Emerson view and celebrate life. The characters satisfy this principle to the degree to which they proceed to adopt a new view. A Room with a View cemented Forster's reputation as a writer that began with his short stories and his first two novels. The third novel won him the compliment of being Austen-like in his observational ability and gained him admittance to a line of comic writers from Fielding to Dickens. Frederick C. Crewes comments, in his "Comic Spirit," that Forster and Austen's "comedy is generated by ironic contrasts between what is superficially 'proper' and what is truly reasonable." Land, in his E. M. Forster, writes that Forster doesn't simply write about class or race "but rather like Jane Austen he uses the attitudes and habits of a class as a framework or image for the exploration of human behavior." At the same time, the novel found him accused of writing melodrama. "Technically," writes Walter Allen in The Modern Novel, Forster's work—except A Passage to India—"are as melodramatic as any in Victorian fiction." Forster is redeemed, for Allen, by his personal attitude whose pure humanism allows him a tone as pure as Fielding or Thackeray. A few years later, Forster defender Joseph Epstein responded in his review for the New York Times Book Review. "Technically . . . Forster's novels form a connection between the ethical-culture and traditional forms of the 19th century novelists and the main preoccupation of the novelists of the 20th—Forster takes up, that is, where George Eliot leaves off and leaves off where D. H. Lawrence takes up." But, he goes on to say that placing Forster there "is really not to place him at all." For Forster looms so large in English letters that he transcends it. Forster, for Epstein, rooted himself in his nation's character and remained decent about it. Though Forster, like Jonathan Swift and Samuel Butler, satirizes his nation through fantasies, he never humiliates his characters. Forster attempted to deal with timeless themes by modernizing ancient myths. Lionel Trilling, in his E. M. Forster, uncovers Forster's secret way of doing this when he notices that there is a "barricade" in each of Forster's novels. "The opposed forces on each side are Good and Evil in the forms of Life and Death. Light and Darkness. Fertility and Sterility ... all the great absolutes that are so dull when discussed by themselves" are made interesting in Forster because he uses the "comic manner." Forster wrote in light of the comic theory being developed in his day by George Meredith, Sigmund Freud, and others. This theory holds that characters who have too much of an absolute within them need to be adjusted—usually, as Northrop Frye says, by a chaotic clash with nature. John Lucas deftly shows how this works in Room with a View as well as the essential role music plays in the novel. In his essay "Wagner and Forster," Lucas first places Forster's novel in its cultural milieu. He describes how Wagner dominated European arts at the close of the nineteenth century. He also notes the importance that Forster himself ascribed to the art of music. He relates these two facts to the dynamics of the novel. Thus Wagner's Parsifal—a retelling of the Grail legend with only one major change—is shown to be a guide to deconstructing the text. Also, music proves to be the only available technique to wire in the problems Lucy faced. By making her a pianist, Forster can quickly build up her character in notes familiar to the music fans of 1908. To the reader of today, this element is easily forgotten but in 1908, playing Beethoven or Mozart was a crucial distinction. According to Lucas, Lucy's "transition from Beethoven through Schumann to Mozart . . . [prefigures] her decline into a probable future of middle-class sterility." The call for Parsifal, but Lucy's inability to deliver as George steps into the room, is, therefore, an essential scene to the novel's denouement. Lucy cannot play the score of a work in which she plays the lead role. In light of Maurice, critical interest in Forster' s third novel was revived by gender identification theory. For example, Claude J. Summers, in his E. M. Forster, declares the novel "a bold festival of domestic comedy and sexual celebration; A Room with a View assimilates into a heterosexual plot the ideology of homosexual comradeship." Summers' essentialism, fortunately, becomes rational in the hands of other critics who point out that Forster's sexual identity motivated his insight into Edwardian personal relationships. Forster, soon after the publication of the novel, worried that it already appeared dated. By all accounts, A Room with a View remains one of the best Edwardian novels and a novel whose observations on human nature retain relevance.
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