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).

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).

Home as the territory of certainty: more notes on Kevin Power's "The Yellow Birds"

Private Bartle, the protagonist of Kevin Power's The Yellow Birds, returns from Iraq having lost his faith. Not his faith in God or any particular religion, but the belief that the world makes sense, observes an order, has a meaning we might get at. He says, "At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance. Order became an accident of observation"(32-33).  He and his fellow soldiers spend a lot of time trying to look at he carnage around them and to draw sense and comfort from it. When a comrade dies, they see it as confirmation that they are less likely to. They imagine they are too small and insignificant to get killed. In hindsight, with a costly wisdom, Bartle realizes, "we were wrong. Our biggest error was thinking that it mattered what we thought"(13). Visiting a cathedral in Germany on his way back, he thinks he "could have picked up a handful of dirt from the street outsie, some wax from a candle on the alterpiece, ash from the incense as it swung past. I could have wrung it out, hoping I might find an essential thing that would give meaning to this place or that time. I did not. Certainty had surrendered all its territory in my mind"(60).

As Bartle is flying back to Richmond, from his one year tour, he has a moment where a thought slowly crawls across that attention of his consciousness. He begins to think, 'I want to go.....,' but he can't complete the thought for a moment. Only after a few seconds does the word "home" cross his mind. Although he doesn't quite know consciously what to make of this funny delay in the expression of his desire, it points to the fact that Bartle will have a hard, maybe impossible, time coming home. It doesn't exist as it did.

Home is a place of certainty. It is a center that lends you all your frames of references. It is where you have family and friends who love you and lend you a sense of your own significance. You matter because you matter to your loved ones, all the people back home. But, if the idea of certainty and significance have been blown away, torn from one like a limb, it is also hard to re-establish the authenticity, or truth, of home.

Bartle certainly doesn't feel it. At some point, in Iraq, he has lost his faith and his feeling of home. He can no longer imagine himself at home as he was. As he and his mother cross the James on a bridge into Richmond, he doesn't recall how he spent his youthful days on the river but instead sees himself as a soldier and imagines how he would navigate along its shore in the face of a hostile enemy. When he finally enters the room he grew up in, he's afraid to remove his army gear. As he removes it piece by piece, he fears "disappearing." He adjust slowly to being home. He stands in his room and is surrounded by a world of familiar smells and sounds but now "it was all filler. The noise, the  sound, they existed  just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home"(111).