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Miss Theresa and Miss Catherine Alan are normally referred to as "the Miss Alans who stood for good breeding." They are yet another example of what Lucy might become by followingCharlotte. They have chosen independence but within the confines of society's rules. They can remain single but they gain little in doing so. They are dull people who see the world as a book. They travel to read the great book and learn about life but they cannot live for themselves. They cannot be passionate living people. They must be staid, demure, and carry their guidebooks. They are part of the Army of Darkness. Lucy is actually en route to join them when she confronts Mr. Emerson. At this moment, the Greek spirit, in the form of life with George, can be hers but she thinks she wants to study past Greek civilization. Fortunately, she chooses to live life now. Cousin Charlotte is not as rich as Lucy and travels with monetary help from Lucy's mother. In return for this help,Charlotte tries to impart her wisdom to Lucy by acting as chaperone. Instead, she comes off as a self-serving spinster who loves to play the role of "prematurely aged martyr."Charlotte is also a prude, absurdly so.Charlotte successfully manipulates Lucy into a successful match with Cecil. When this proves obviously stifling to her protégé,Charlotte orchestrates an escape route in the form of independence and travel toGreece. The Comic Muse has the last laugh, however, andCharlotte's visit to church allows Lucy to converse with Mr. Emerson who convinces her to marry George. The happy couple wonder whetherCharlotte intended the fortuitous meeting. At first appearance, Beebe seems to be a tolerant man hoping to see Lucy blossom in all the glory she can possibly attain as a young woman. Through the course of the novel, however, Beebe reveals that he wants Lucy to become a gothic statue—celibate, religious, and proper. Mr. Beebe thinks people are "better detached." As his name suggests, Beebe is a drone worker for the hive. He is a clergyman who ministers to the needs of the hive's proper functioning. Lucy, for Beebe, is a problem. Mr. Beebe has a theory about Lucy which he shares with Cecil while he doesn't know of the couple's engagement. Some day, Beebe thinks, Lucy's musical ability will merge with her quiet living. Then she will be both "heroically good, heroically bad." He pictures her in his diary as a kite whose string is held by Miss Bartlett. In the next picture of the Lucy series, the string breaks. Mr. Beebe, therefore, is disappointed when he hears that Lucy is to marry Cecil. In the end, when he hears that Lucy loves George, Beebe shows her a genuine concern for the first time. However, his feelings about the idea of Lucy's life with George remain ambiguous; he only wants to help Lucy. Mr. Beebe has taken charge of the education of his niece, Minnie. The little girl looks to Lucy as a role model and shows that she has Emersonian potential when she insists on sitting outside at the pub. Mr. Eager serves as chaplain to the English expatriates living aroundFlorence as well as to the tourists. However, he helps to keep the two groups separate. The expatriates jealously guard their knowledge and access to the realFlorence from the ignorant tourists with their Baedekers. Every so often, a tourist will appear inFlorence who is above-average. Only such select people are taken by Mr. Eager to the expatriate group. Lucy receives such an invitation. However, the inclusion of others on the outing by Mr. Beebe dissuades Mr. Eager from taking her to "tea at a Renaissance villa." The younger Emerson, George, "has a view too." Though freed of the molds of religion by his father's enlightened scheme of education, George is a classic melancholic depressed by too much knowledge. Mr. Beebe reveals several of the works George has imbibed—books that easily lead one to a despondent view of life. Reflecting the Freudian airs of the time, George's melancholia can be cured by sex. Happily, Mr. Emerson sees very quickly, Lucy's problem can also be solved by sex. The two young people are introduced and love takes over. George scoffs at a society that wants to bar him from kissing a woman when he wants to and running through suburbia naked. "He had sighed among the tombs at Santa Croce because things wouldn't fit;... after the death of that obscure Italian he had leant over the parapet by theArno and said to [Lucy]: "I shall want to live, I tell you." Playing tennis he shows that he wants to live and in doing so seems to shine like the sun. By the end of the novel, George and Lucy will, like Phaeton and Phoebus, show that life must be lived in the fullness of the moment. Mr. Emerson has a distinct view which frees him from answering to a specific social order or mechanic clique. Mr. Emerson is a man of the Enlightenment who values experience and science and, in his thoughts about education, conjures Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Taken together, Mr. Emerson— in comic theory terms—is the wise elder who comes off as an angry old man. He views his purpose in life as that of a teacher—he wants to free the minds of the young so they will make decisions and personal philosophies based on experience, not the dictates of society. He reveals this in his encounter with the child in Santa Croce. Mr. Emerson is horrified that a child plays in the dark of a church instead of running around in the sunshine. Mr. Emerson "is kind to people because he loves them." Such honesty horrifies members of society who are accustomed to the awful machinations of women likeCharlotte and men like Cecil. Mr. Emerson looms large in the novel, for his singular gesture of room-swapping disrupts the ritual of society beyond recovery. The Emersons have the rooms with a view—they can see the beauty ofItalyand the role of passion in life. By giving his room to Lucy, Mr. Emerson lets her taste this view—a view she will come to adopt as her own. His reasons for doing so allow a discussion of the assumptions underlying the view held by society— thus, on the matters of religion, gender, education, art, and music, Mr. Emerson shows Lucy that there are alternatives. As with Lucy, society assumes that Freddy will take his rightful place and become Lord of Windy Corner. Charlotte, in Part I, presents Freddy as the chivalrous type who would defend his sister's honor against any who might dare sully it. However, Freddy fails at chivalrous calculating. Thus, in his amusement over Cecil's medieval request for his sister's hand, he replies rashly; "Take her or leave her; it's no business of mine!" But Freddy does not pose such thoughts intellectually—Freddy acts in the heat of the moment. Freddy embodies the comic spirit—he is a "seize the day" type of character. His response to Cecil and other social blunders indicate this. While Mr. Beebe theorizes the Garden of Eden, Freddy asks, "what about this bathe?" Enough talk, says Freddy, let's have fun. Still, Freddy tries to gain an education in manners though he merely acquires bruises. His endless self-consciousness about the way in which he handled Cecil pains him. Freddy doesn't like Cecil but he adores his sister. He tries to emulate Cecil once he knows him but George disrupts Freddy's education. George also encourages Freddy's natural philosophy. Freddy believes in the notion of "freedom of the individual"—so long as nobody else is hurt. Lucy, the protagonist, is from a middle-class family accidentally brought up in society through association with bluebloods. Her coming of age involves an achievement of wisdom, or view, of life. In the process, she unsuccessfully attempts to mold herself into a proper woman to please her mother, her teacher (Charlotte), and her fairy-tale suitor (Cecil). Within this route, she might have emulated the Miss Alans who represent a kind of feminine freedom within the rules of Cecil's world. Instead, she becomes "a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved." Her decision costs her to "break the whole of life." By accomplishing such destruction and deriving genuine happiness, she becomes a beacon to others; she shows that women can have a view alongside a man. Lucy's name announces her allegorical status. Her name comes from the Latin word for light. Throughout the novel Lucy cannot help but love light (especially sunlight), nature, and views of pretty scenes. However, the world which longs to possess her is the "army of darkness." There, bourgeois rules, fashion, and rooms are the views that must be enjoyed. Such a life of shadows does not accommodate members of the light. Lucy's challenge in the novel is to stay true to herself and have a clear view or be a proper woman and be snuffed out. Throughout the work, Lucy's journey toward her true nature as a light is revealed in the degree to which she stands in the shadows. Her final epiphany, of course, finds her fumbling in the dark before Mr. Emerson. This darkest and most trying of hours gives way to the brilliance of happiness with George. Widowed mother of Lucy and Freddy, Mrs. Honeychurch is mistress of Windy Corner. The house was a speculative venture on the part of her husband, an honest solicitor, but its early existence in what was becoming a suburb ofLondon made the newly arrived aristocracy regard the Honey-churches as old blood. By the time they learned of the error, it was too late and the middle-class family had been raised to the upper class. Mrs. Honeychurch is an antifeminist who mistrusts passion. Despite being in charge of her own household, she glories in doing what she can to uphold traditional gender roles. She gets worked up about women who do not take up their proper place, saying "beware of women altogether"—especially women writers. She compliments men as embodiments of their chivalrous role. Aware of the change that occurs in Lucy around music, Mrs. Honeychurch hopes Lucy will "never live a duet." The stock phrase "Miss Lavish is so original" is used several times to describe this representative of early-twentieth-century liberated woman. Society members perceive her as being a radical, wise woman of the world and they tolerate her as such. This tolerance and encouragement symbolize the traditional ability of the upper classes to purchase and enjoy the superficially subversive artists, art-work, or person. Miss Lavish, in a way, plays the role of fool. She may appear to understand how lifeless society is but she can't bear to leave the courtroom. She remains the clown, not a spout of wisdom, because she doesn't care about others. Mr. Emerson, her opposite, does care and does succeed in saving a soul from society's vise. As a novelist, Miss Lavish mirrors Forster. Her novel about an Italian romance uses Lucy as inspirational material. The book should entrap Lucy in the "army of darkness" but the opposite happens. Lucy sees herself incompletely in that artwork and sets about finishing her creation of herself. A member of the local aristocracy inSussexand a friend of the Honeychurch family, Sir Harry Otway has recently purchased the Cissie and Albert cottages from Mr. Flack. These two cottages, to many in the area, have ruined the traditional main street. In late-twentieth-century parlance, the cottages are sprawl constructions that are hurriedly built without regard to the established aesthetic. Otway's inability to prevent their construction brought him much criticism from his peers. He now hopes to assuage the predicament by finding good tenants. Proper, in this case, is homogenous. Otway hopes to find a certain tenant with the right class, race, and ethnic identities. Such screening will become a mainstay of suburbs as they try to keep out blacks in the course of the twentieth century. In terms of the novel, Otway represents another failure of an otherwise likable person to keep pace with the times. Significantly, it is Cecil who "helps" him complete the search. Phaethon, in Greek mythology, was allowed by his father, Helios, to drive the sun chariot for a day. Unable to control the horses, the chariot began to burn the earth until Zeus' thunderbolt knocked Phaethon into the riverPo. He is the mythological counterpart to George, a railroad worker, who will succeed in driving a new chariot in a new way. The driver of the carriage on the outing toFiesole begs permission to pick up his "sister." As it turns out, Phoebe is his girlfriend and they proceed to behave as young lovers, right under Mr. Eager's nose. Her name conjures the Titan daughter of Uranus and Gaea in Greek mythology who signifies brightness and the moon. Thus, she is a symbol of femininity and of the passion of the night with all the mystery such symbolism affords. Phoebe is Lucy's counterpart; Lucy becomes a beacon for others to follow when escaping from the "army of darkness." "Appearing late in the story, Cecil... was medieval. Like a Gothic statue. [Whose] head . .. was tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision, he resembled those fastidious saints who guard the portals of a French cathedral." More importantly, Cecil represents masculine sexuality as seated inRome to oppose the passionate sexuality represented by George in Renaissance Florence.Rome, as seat of the Pope, represents the heart ofEurope's dark medieval traditions within the universe of Forster's novel. As a representative of the gothic, Cecil invokes the traditions of chivalry, celibacy, rules, sins, and the stringent attitudes that allowed witches to be burned—misogynistic and fearful of bodily passion. Cecil is a Victorian mother's dream and he has thrice asked Lucy for her hand in marriage. Lucy does say yes, on the very day in fact that Sir Harry Otway finds tenants for his rental property. Cecil makes this connection and it is appropriate because Cecil views relationships in feudal terms. For Cecil, Lucy is an artwork whose possession will aggrandize his self-worth. Cecil's mother represents the crushed light that Lucy might become. "Mrs. Vyse was a nice woman, but her personality, like many another's had been swamped byLondon ... the too vast orb of fate had crushed her." She, unabashedly, reveals the intentions of the society people arrayed against the Emersons' and Lucy's natural inclinations. To Cecil she orders, "make her one of us." As a woman of society, her judgment on whether a person will "do" is sacrosanct and Lucy steadily wins her approbation.
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