A new approach to character: Ghastly!
Choosing to address the following two questions, I will deal both with Forster’s smash-and-crash style as well as his attention to the development of character in Howard’s End:
Woolf wrote directly about Forster, whom she grouped with Lawrence as being what we might term half-experimental — her exact words are much more interesting, of course (13). What did she mean, in the case of Forster, do you think? Or is Forster in 1910 already doing more of the “smashing and the crashing” than she credits him with?
–Some things someone ought to discuss somehow: the tree with the pigs’ teeth, the house of the title, the third and fourth movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the opposition of Wilcox to Schlegel (and where does Bast fit into this schema?), the place of and attitudes toward Empire, the various conventions–literary and/or social–that we see, or see broken.
E.M. Forster’s experimental style and attention to character conspire to produce Mrs. Ruth Wilcox. A ghost of a character, she forms the invisible steel spine of the story of his book. Everything in the first 11 chapters hangs upon her, yet she herself is inscrutable. When we begin to feel that we finally know something about who she is, she abruptly dies. Who, then, is Mrs. Wilcox? Our first glimpse of Mrs. Wilcox is in Helen’s letter to Margaret. Wandering around the garden, she leaves an non-impression on Helen. The letter simply recounts her gardening habits, giving us no information about Mrs. Wilcox the person:
“Mrs. Wilcox was already in the garden. […] No wonder she sometimes looks tired. She was watching the large red poppies come out. Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow” (Cha. 1, par. 4).
All we know after reading Helen’s letters is that Mrs. Wilcox is a woman with bland habits who tires easily. By writing her character so dully, Forster takes the image of a normal woman, and fades it slightly. When asked about the Wilcoxes by her Aunt, Margaret can only reply “I gathered nothing,” for there is an air of slightly less than nothing to explain them.
A firsthand glance at Ruth Wilcox confirms her unreality. At the end of Chapter 6, Forster describes in the most ethereal way. She trails “noiselessly over the lawn,” carries a “wisp of hay” in her hands, and belongs not to the scene, “but to the house” itself. Rather than connect with her lively family and Ms. Schlegel, who are in fierce dispute about Helen’s engagement to their Paul, Mrs. Wilcox simply “let [her ancestors] help her,” appealing rather to the dead. The impression is that Mrs. Wilcox may not really be alive in any normal sense of the word. A final account, from the voices of sister and Aunt, completes the characterization:
“But Mrs. Wilcox knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Everything; though we neither of us told her a word, and had known all along, I think.” (Cha. 4 par. 4)
Mrs. Wilcox left behind mingling memories of “sweetness and horror,” a phantom who knows everything without being told. Whether it’s from a girl’s thoughts, a straight narration, or even in dialogue, Forster leaves us perfect hints to Mrs. Ruth Wilcox’s indescribable ephemeral existence. Half in and half out of conventional reality, he builds a story whose main character is a shade. The ghost haunting Howard’s End is Mrs. Wilcox.
Yet somehow the characterization works. Perhaps it is because he leaves Mrs. Wilcox shrouded in mystery that she seems so strong. This might be what Virginia Wolf called bold writing. Rather than completely describe a character, and describe it to death, EM Forster is raising to life a persona that is already dead and half-invisible. Our own curiosity propels us along lines of the story to try and discover if we will ever see Mrs. Wilcox take on flesh and a rosy complexion. Our interest takes us into her shadow.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2005 at 7:41 pm and is tagged with red poppies, steel spine, e m forster, aunt margaret, fifth symphony, exact words, wilcox, bast, fades, new approach, beethoven, first glimpse, pigs, schema, conventions, ghost, opposition, attitudes, crash, empire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.