CORINNENOTES
A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
Written by Sam Croucher.
Forster once wrote in one of his letters (I’ve forgotten which one but I can find out for you if you want) that an English man will come out of school with:
“a well developed body, a fairly developed mind, and an undeveloped heart.” He was at pains to state that the heart was not a “cold heart” merely an “undeveloped” one and this is what RV is essentially about.
It is, as I call it, “The quest of the undeveloped heart”
Though it appears to be a tale of fairly mild-mannered stuff and it is a light read – in no way is it as hard hitting as Eliot for example(!) – it is actually full of really important subtleties, ironies, symbols, and themes that make it really important and interesting. I’m going to stop rambling on about it and give you some evidence of why I believe this!
· The Title: A Room with a View – take it in its abstract form – what does it mean? What do views entail? What kind of things do they open us up to? Why is this important? If the room had no view, what would that be like? Then consider how many times the word ‘view’ is mentioned (it’s mentioned a lot!) and you begin to see where Forster is trying to take you.
· The view is synonymous with opening oneself up to Life, Light, Youth, Spring (and so birth), Passion, and LOVE.
· Lucy has to open herself up to all of these things and recognise as well as understand them before she can be happy. Through understanding them she can understand herself and that is the hardest trial that she must face.
· RV is about the examination of the self and also of the pre-conceived ideas and customs which are not always necessarily the best to follow. Tact and delicacy are not necessarily beautiful and do not always produce a good effect. When Mr Emerson offers Lucy and Charlotte the rooms, the offer may not be tactful or delicate, but it is certainly beautiful and kind. There is an on-going battle in the book between tact/delicacy/middle-class conventionality and beauty and truth and real, passionate love.
· MUDDLE – not getting onto a muddle is important because it tends to take people off the right road of discovery and take them right back to where they started. There is muddle everywhere in the book – the 1st muddle with the rooms of L and CB. Final muddle of Lucy struggling against herself and her love at the end of the book. Significantly, Mr Emerson solves both. (If you look at the book again, you will also see that it is very cyclical in nature – it starts in Italy, it ends in Italy; it begins with the acquisition of a view, it ends with the acquisition of it; the Miss Alans are still travelling; its spring again when L and G are married; they are even in one of the original rooms!)
· Tons and tons of parallels and opposites:
Light vs. dark/ - shadow related to both
Spring vs. autumn
Christianity vs. Paganism
Clothes vs. nudity
Middle Ages vs. Renaissance
Mozart (Classical) vs. Beethoven/Schumann (Romantic)
· And then symbols – the South, Sun, Light; Flowers, Nature, Violets; Water, Baptism, Blood; Views; Rooms
· Parallels/opposites between people e.g. CB and Lucy; CB and Mr Beebe (personally I reckon they change places – Beebe who was always so nice before becomes really horrible and CB, though not outwardly changed, gives her blessing to the newly married couple by getting them together as she did); Miss Lavish and Mr Eager (both who are meant to be so ‘nice’ and who really are the most superficial and quite horrible (to use the word again) of all the characters in the novel, though you may disagree with me on that one); Mr Eager and Mr Emerson; George and Cecil.
· EMF always has a trick up his sleeve as well. Poss. indications of CB redeeming herself in the end e.g. when the 1st kiss happens, she is “brown against the view”. Fair enough, brown is the colour of her dress, but why brown in the first place? Traditionally a colour of earth/soil hence an association with life, could be a poss. indication that CB can give. Also, when find out that she joined the armies of the benighted, you get new insight into her character – she was like Lucy once, in the self-same situation. Don’t really realise till end but perhaps she wanted to make amends for what happened in her past and give the choice that she did not make 30 years ago. She also gets married to Mr Eager, feel almost that her work for L is done – L is married to a nice bloke so she can go and pursue her own interests. CB is very crafty and very manipulative. She is the catalyst really for the whole relationship between G and L – she emphasises the kiss by being there, as it then become more special and more of an issue, she keeps bringing the matter up to L, bringing up the “ghosts” with more vividness than if she had left it alone.
· I don’t think you can quite assume with any character of EMF’s because they tend to have the surprising tendency of shocking you just when you think its all safe.
· EMF attacks religion quite a lot whereas very much praises the Greek/Roman gods/myths that appear in the book e.g. Phaeton, Persephone, Pan, the gothic statue (Cecil).
· Book is also about travel – literal travel in the form of the 2 Miss Alans; metaphorical travel in the form of L’s journey.
· Is marriage the end as it is in the C19th? Sense of their journey into love as just beginning. That sense is definitely reinforced if you read the appendix ‘A View without a Room’. Marriage is more than just the defining moment in a girl’s life – more about finding yourself through love and marrying the one you love because of it.
· Narratorial intervention – comments largely on the characters/scenes in the book. I know this did happen quite a bit in the C19th but I don’t know if it had faded out by the end of the century. [It had started to, for example Henry James's narrators are much more ambivalent about the characters they describe than those of Thackeray or Eliot - Corinne] If it had, you could take a resumption of this technique as being quite daring and modern.