A Perspective On The Binary Structure In Howards End

E. M. Forster is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up as "Only connect" in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End. The story in the novel centers on the inheritance of Howards End and the marriage of the heroine. As one of Forster's two best-known works, Howards End explores the irreconcilability of class differences with the analysis of the social reality and human civilization. Critics have almost exhausted the study of the novel, including the themes about connect, the gender relations and the myriads aspects of its style and rhetoric, etc. However, a thorough analysis of the binary structure in Howards End remains a field that demands further attention.In Howards End, Forster employs several pairs of binary oppositions to present the conflicts in modern society, such as men and women, city and country, ideal and reality, etc. This thesis, applying the theories of binary opposition, makes an analysis of the novel with its focus on the various pairs of opposing elements in the text, and explicates Forster's outstanding artistic narrative in depicting the characters, sharpening the conflicts, and establishing the theme. The author of this thesis probes into the binary structure of the novel and finds out how Foster has the complex facts of the modern society successfully presented in a fictional world full of binary oppositions. And Forster expresses in the novel the ideas which transcend those traditional ones of binarism. Instead of considering the opposites are mutually exclusive, he holds that the opposites are contradictory and complementary as well. The proposal of "only connect" can be seen as Forster's expectation for resolving the conflicts and promoting duality harmony in the development of human society. Therefore, we can see that the self-defeating story narrated in Howards End is of profound significance in putting people into deep thinking about their life and values, and furthermore about industrial civilization and human destiny.