Never sin against affection: notes on Howards End

In Howards End, Forster continually works his themes by examining and expanding on phrasesa and words: balance, beauty, planning, the seen/unseen, proportion, the inner life, and confession to name some. Affection is a word that plays a prominent role in developing Forster's ideas. It is central to what moves and keeps the book and the Schlegels whole and moving forward.

Affection is positioned as the Schlegel's religion and saving grace. Meg grows concerned about Helen's behavior, her reticence, the formal tone of her letters and her unwillingness to meet in London. Unable to figure out how to proceed, she approaches Henry for a solution. As a practical man of business and science, he asks whether Helen has ever behaved similarly in the past. Meg takes offense and, annoyed, informs him "'You know quite well that Helen never sins against affection'"(240, Penguin 2000).

To sin against affection is to turn agains those feelings of tenderness and care that spring from shared objects and experiences. Such ties spring in part from nature, from sharing the times and places circumstances impose. In addition, such ties are given birth and are sustained through conscious effort and nurture. Once formed, to violate these binding feelings is to sin, to go against something sacred and beautiful.

Meg herself violates those feelings when she goes along with Mr. Wilcox's plan to abduct Helen and send her to a doctor. In part through loyalty to her husband, in part because she believes it to be the practical thing to do, Meg becomes part of the plan to "ambush" Helen. However, when she fully comes to realize what she's done, she rejects the plan and all practical considerations and sides with Helen. These contradictory and sudden swings in mood, belief and impulse are central to Margaret's character and central to Forster's notions as to proper thinking and feeling. Always, one thinks by doing, by going first to one position and then reverting to a contradictory position when the original one grows untenable or distasteful. As Meg begins to tell Mrs. Wilcox, "'Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed, and a deadlock-gracious me, I've started preaching!'"

When confronted by Helen, Meg quickly renounces Mr. Wilcox and his ways as given expression by his plans for Helen. Confronted by her sister, the ties of affection well up and Meg realizes they trump what might be the right and proper thing to do. Resisting her husband's arguments and entreaties, she tells him and his men to go away and that she will deal with Helen on her own. She declares, "'It all turns on affection now....Affection. Don't you see?...Surely you see. I like Helen very much, you not so much...And affection when reciprocated, gives rights'"(248).

Yet, affection proves an imperfect binding agent. In their time apart, they have grown apart. Sharing different lives and circumstances, they now occupy different places in the social order and their thinking and possibilities have diverged in significant ways. Meg realizes "Something had come between them. Perhaps it was society, which henceforward would exclude Helen. Perhaps it was a third life, already potent as a spirit. They could find no meeting-place. Both suffered acutely and were not comforted by the knowledge that affection survived"(252).

For Forster, affection springs from contact, from sharing time and place. It grows with the amount of time and place shared and it is threatened by physical separation.  For eight months, the two sisters have lived lives apart and a distance has grown between them. Different paths and places have changed them and the affection built on past selves is no longer as strong. However, it proves strong enough. Ten or so minutes together, in Howards End and among the furniture of their childhood home, ends up drawing them back closer together.

I love the way Forster sketches out what amounts to an almost mechanical etiology of affection. The renewal and rebirth of the affection between the sisters almost could be seen as springing from the family furniture which the two sisters suddenly find themselves among. Each piece tells them a part of their shared history, their shared story. The stories and the memories call them back to each other and restore the affectionate ties in no time at all. The sisters quickly come to "the knowledge that they never could be parted because their love was rooted in common things. Explanations and appeals had failed; they had tried for a common meeting-ground, and had only made each other unhappy. And all the time their salvation was lying round them-the past sanctifying the present; the present, with wild heart-throb, declaring that there would after all be a future, with laughter and the voices of children"(255).