Pursuing Harmony-a Perspective On Forster’s Contradictory Feminist Views As Reflected In Howards End

Edward Morgan Forster (1879—1970) was a famous British novelist in the first half of the20th century. He published six long novels altogether, among which Howards End is one of his most complicated and controversial works with its hard-defined epigraph of "only connect". This thesis is a tentative endeavor to reinterpret Forster’s feminist views by comparatively analyzing the overall contrasted structure and characterization in Howards End. Against his special living backdrop, Forster showed his concerns about women and desire for social harmony, which is well exposed in the epigraph "only connect" of his masterwork-Howards End. Howards End is a story of two sharply contrasted groups of people-the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels whose opposing views are interwoven. As opposed to the Wilcoxes’ sticking to the traditional patriarchal ideology, two Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, are portrayed as "new women" and endowed with a strong zest for spiritual pursuit. The novel highlights the two sisters’confrontations against the Wilcoxes’supreme authority. Meanwhile, the contrasting personalities of the two sisters-Margaret and Helen are also presented to the reader. The two sisters, though both are "new women", go on different roads respectively in the course of their feminist pursuit, which signifies the typical traits of the two major types of feminists at that time. Forster, with contrasting characterization of them, further reveals his attitudes towards his contemporary feminists. Helen, with the typical traits of extreme feminists, defies the concept of "connection" in her every endeavor for which she has paid heavy price in the end, while Margaret, by contrast, tries to strike a happy medium, revealing to us her conservative but contradictory feminist views. On one hand, Margaret shows us a rebellious "new woman" image insisting on her feminist pursuit, while on the other hand, she panders to the popular belief admitted by the male-dominated society, revealing her support and submission to male authority. Nevertheless, it is the contradictory image of Margaret that successfully achieves the "connection" of two genders with her compromising deeds, and she then becomes the incarnation of the ideal new woman image in the novel. Forster, through depicting such contradictory image as Margaret, demonstrates to the best his feminist views based on the idea of harmony.