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There is an interesting sexual metaphor in Coal Dust (cha. IX) of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love involving a horse, rider, and train. The literal image is Gerald Crich waiting with his horse while a train races by, forcing the sensitive red Arabian to bear its noise and terror. In metaphor, though, Gerald’s subjugation of his horse represents the violent defloration of an increasingly unwilling virgin. (more…)

Arthur Miller, playwrite of Crucible and Death of a Salesman fame has died of congestive heart failure. He was 89.

My analysis today focuses not so much on the characters and plot as the text itself, and the particular language that the author chooses to employ.  Some long computer analysis of the text produces a list of phrases used throughout the book, ordered by relative frequency.  Among these, several clusters stand out:

• The rich and the poor
• Margaret and Mr. Wilcox
• Howards end and Mrs. Wilcox
• The Schlegels and chaos
• Tibby, Juley, Mundt, and other minor characters

All of them use certain motifs.  The rich and the poor tends to focus around Leonard Bast and the ensuing arguments between the Schlegels, their dinner guests, and most notably Mr. Wilcox who sparks a long chain of arguments with his advice about the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company.  Margaret and Mr. Wilcox express a certain tension between the true emotional self and its outside presentation, tensely trying to connect to another, to the ominous music of goblin footsteps. Mrs. Wilcox and Howards End reoccur as a fixed point in the book.  At regular intervals we always come back to Howards End, a place to begin the narrative afresh, and with new insight.  Forster uses the surrealism of Howards End like a night’s sleep to embed the story into our minds before he continues.  It’s a resting point.  The Schlegels (Helen in particular) are intimately associated with chaos through the goblin metaphor, and their cry of Panic and Emptiness!  Like an oriental gong, any hint of disorder, goblins, or panic highlights a significant event in the book.  Finally, there are those minor characters who don’t appear to cluster in a significant way.  We can think of them, in a broad sense, as simply chess pawns, moving the plot of the story along for the major characters.

Now, while chaos: goblins present the most obvious repetition in the book, I would instead prefer to focus on the theme of rich and poor that I find presented throughout Howards End.  Let’s walk back to the first whispers of rich and poor in chapter 4.  Helen breaks off her engagement with Paul because, being rich, he fears poverty:

“Charles was talking to him about Stocks and Shares, and he looked frightened.”  […] Margaret saw horror latent in the scene.

At first, it seems that Helen only hates Paul’s frightened look in simple conversation.  The topic of conversation is more telling:  Finance.  Stocks and Shares which bring riches or bankruptcy are what actually frighten Paul.  Being rich, he doesn’t fear the increase of his riches.  Rather, it is his fear of poverty that leads to Helen to break the engagement.  A man who would fear actual poverty is also in danger of that condition. 

Helen would simply prefer to ignore the issue of the rich and poor.  Take, for example, the ridiculous opening to Chapter 6:

We are not concerned with the very poor.  […]  This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.

This is stratification.  The rich live in their own layer, the poor in their own abyss.  Either you are in heaven or in the deeps of hell.  Few are on the periphery of the abyss.  Yet, there is one such man, Leonard Bast, who “was not in the abyss but could see it” (cha. 6).  Looking at the world through his life, we clearly see the rich and poor, for he lives between the two.

The Schlegels fit into the opposite realm.  Unlike poor Leonard, they are “for riches” (cha. 7).  “Money for ever” is their battle cry, and they live in high class, high culture, and comfort.  Not having to work, Margaret ironically lectures Tibby:

“Men have developed the desire for work, and they must not starve it.  It’s a new desire.  It goes with a great deal that’s bad, but in itself it’s good, and I hope that for women, too, ‘not to work’ will soon become as shocking as ‘not to be married’ was a hundred years ago” (cha. 13).

At this point, I feel that there is a profound miscommunication between the heavens and the abyss.  The Miss Schlegels try and peer down into working-class life, but have no idea that reality doesn’t fit their view.  They see the lower class through their own upper class lens, and miss a great deal of the picture.  For instance, they easily dismiss all that is wrong with the lower class by saying that it “goes with a great deal that’s bad.”

On the other hand, Leonard yearns for the higher classes and culture, but he too doesn’t understand the delicate negotiations of the heavenly class.  In polite society he stammers and stutters, causes scene and scandal, and even forces his wife to come calling for him at another lady’s house!  It’s clear that neither really yet understands how the other works.  The sisters’ discussion of how to dispose of £1,000,000 foreshadows the breaking point of the tension between the rich and poor.  Using Leonard Bast as an example, they say:

In short, he might be given anything and everything so long as it was not the money itself (cha. 15).

Of course, that is exactly what happens.  Thrown out of his new job, Helen takes Leonard Bast and his ex-prostitute wife into the family for help.  As the story breaks, Helen drags the Basts in front of her sister:

“They’re starving,” she shouted.  “I found them starving!  […]  He has been turned out of his bank.  Yes, he’s done for.  We upper classes have ruined him, and I suppose you’ll tell me it’s the battle of life” (cha. 26).

In their high class society, this is a breach of protocol: association with the wrong, elements, causing a scene and scandal, and financially supporting an inferior.  Quite naturally, the family’s reaction is to ask:

            “Helen, are you mad?” (cha. 26).

It is ironic that Leonard is fired from his banking job.  The bank, bastion of the upper class, has thrown him out.  Now he is dependent on the rich entirely, for work, for food, for sustenance.  Yet, their only concern to be rid of him—read Margaret’s response:

“I won’t have such theatrical nonsense.  How dare you!  Yes, how dare you!”  (cha. 26). \

We start with two bipartite classes.  Helen tries to reach down into the poor, and Leonard up to the rich.  So far, neither party has truly succeeded, except to bring each other relatively more discomfort and suffering.  Is that the only result of the mingling of opposing classes?  Can the rich and poor interact without tragedy?

Where this will go, I do not yet know.  However, I am not hopeful, as the rest of the chapter Heralds additional unfortunate mingling between the rich and poor and the hot sexes.  Mr. Wilcox and Mrs. Bast dredge up an old secret affair, and the sense of class-tragedy increases.  There will be no good end to this.

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