The ways Margaret's mind turns in Howards End

There's something unique and attractive about the way Margaret Schlegel thinks in E.M. Forster's Howards End.

Her thinking is clearly driven by impulses. But, almost as if she does a careful, rational survey of her impulses before deciding upon the one that calls strongest. When considering how to respond to Mrs. Wilcox's visit to Wickham Place, she sits by a sleeping Tibby and "Her mind darted from impulse to impulse, and finally marshalled them all in review"(56). Forster's sentence captures the unique combination of instinct and reason that characterizes Margaret's decision making.

Ultimately, she comes to choices by holding a conversation between her impulses and her reason. When she suspects Mr. Wilcox's invitation to look at the Ducie Street house is driven  by his romantic interest in her, she doubts her suspicion. She asks herself, "If he liked her, if he had manoeuvred to get her to Simpson's, might this be a manoeuvre to get her to Lond, and result in an offer of marriage?" As the narration proceeds, we learn that the preceding question is not mererly the narrator's recapitulation of what Margaret is thinking. It is the very question she puts to herself, and "She put it to herself as indelicately as possible, in the hope that her brain would cry, 'Rubbish, you're a self-conscious fool!' But her brain only tingled a little and was silent"(134).

Yet, when she comes to choices, she holds them at a humble arm's distance. In part, I think Forster aligns this type of mental posture as one more symptom of the Schlegels' general rootlessness. Yet, there's something attractive in the way she almost self-consciously courts doubt, especially in contrast to the Wilcox certainty. She tells Mr. Wilcox "'I don't believe in auras, and think Theosophy's only a halfway-house-'" and frowning Mr. Wilcox, thinking her incapable of certainty, finishes her sentence, "'-Yet there may e something in it all the same,'"(132). Margaret corrects him, "'Not even that. I may be halfway in the wrong direction. I can't explain. I don't believe in all these fads, and yet I don't like saying that I don't believe in them'"(132).