By way of an epilogue to my series about Forster’s Maurice, this writing prompt.
[Three Seated Men With Arms Around Each Other], Artist Unknown, 1860s, from The Metropolitan Open Access Collection
Unlike just about every other novel ever published, E. M. Forster’s posthumous gay novel, Maurice, comes with a guide to the way Forster wrote the novel that is also a kind of coming out note as well, just in case the novel itself is not enough. The Terminal Note as he calls it begins with a hilarious description of the novel as having been inspired by a touch on his buttocks from George Merrill, the lover of the famous sexual freedom pioneer and activist Edward Carpenter. I believe he touched most people’s, Forster offers before passing along to the next point as if he did not consider himself special as regards George’s attentions, and as if he had always been this free and camp with his reading public. Forster's novel is often described as a love story, and is often described as being a novel about “being gay,” but I think it is more appropriately described as a novel about someone who learns that he is gay and as a result is determined to escape the social class and the culture he has been born into and the loneliness it expects him to adopt as the price of belonging to the status quo: a life lived inside of a marriage to a woman he does not love or desire, with children and a home and a job working, in the case of Maurice, as an investment banker, as his late father did before him. He is expected to be the latest model of this kind of banker, as his father was, and his father is often invoked by those who knew him as a way to get Maurice to return to that life when it seems clear he wants out.
The three main characters are Maurice Hall, his first love, Clive Durham, and his second love, Alec Scudder. Forster explains they represent three different social classes in Great Britain of 1913. Their social classes still exist as they have for centuries, their types also. Forster notes that Maurice is of the suburbs, or middle class; Clive is of Cambridge, or ruling class; and Alec is working class. He was hoping to dramatize the unequal ways the laws of the country worked on the lives of men like these men. Maurice meets Alec when Maurice is a guest of Clive’s at his country estate; Alec is on the job as a gamekeeper, a job that entails not just looking after the hunting parties on the estate but many other kinds of helping out. There is no other way for the three of them to be in one place otherwise.
From the start, the novel offers the written and unwritten rules of the world to Maurice, one after the other or side by side. There is no antagonist to speak of, unless you count the world, and perhaps you should. No specific single enemy stands in Maurice’s way. The novel is the account of his education in the ways of the world, to use that old phrase that has never meant too many good things. Maurice is in an apprenticeship of a kind, a feature of the Bildungsroman—but here it is an apprenticeship in what it means to be queer in the world he was born into—he is an apprentice to his desires that must be kept secret if he is to stay within his social class.
The novel is entirely in third person and does not stay close to Maurice entirely but predominantly. The move to other POVs are frequent and are given to see Maurice from the point of view of others. Clive’s point of view is offered near the novel’s middle, where we are told his own sexual-romantic identity story, and what it was like for him to fall for Maurice—how that created his own self-rejection and his determination to have first a chaste love affair with Maurice and then to abandon it. His POV returns at the end, when Maurice appears in his study at night for a goodbye. I think of this as a “student has become the master” moment with Clive, offered before he vanishes like Batman would, while Clive is still talking.
The prompt here is meant to help analyze the novel but it is also meant to give you a chance to consider, what secret self do I have that I might want to write a novel about? Sometimes we don’t even know it until the opportunity opens up. I began writing these prompts for students based on our conversations about the novels and stories we’d read as a way to get them to analyze the story differently. It’s a way to diagram a novel with an eye toward creating the conditions for a new and different novel. The prompt is meant to get you thinking, not to operate as a rule book. You should break with it as soon as the story inspired by what’s previous feels cornered.
In any case, the prompt, which went out to the students in the class by email and is now below as well for sustaining subscribers.
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