Class and Art in E. M. Forster’s Howards End

Year 2018, Volume: 18 Issue: 18, 229 - 245, 19.10.2018

Hatice Yurttaş

https://doi.org/10.30767/diledeara.472610

Abstract

Howards End presents a world in flux and mobility in the advent of modernism where art and literature are tested for their ability to save the individual in the context of a quest for an English house, Howards End, which on a symbolic level represents not only the English but all humanity. Forster shows the world of literature and art in a very pessimistic and critical way with an emphasis on the lower-class’ futile striving for art and culture and on the over determination of class differences even for a cultivated upper-class individual with socialist aspirations. The destruction of the lower class, represented by Leonard, by the two upper-class families, the Schlegels, representing the German idealism and the Wilcoxes, the brutal capitalists, shows that appreciation of art does not make the refined mind immune to sharing a common ground with the philistine upper-class. Forster suggests that literature does not have the power to change the society, and that class and gender hierarchy cannot be overcome by literature or art.

Keywords

feminism, German idealism

References

• Mathew Arnold (1993). ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, The Norton Anthology: English Literature II, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 6th ed., p.1397 Austen, Jane (1994), Pride and Prejudice, London: Penguin Group. Berlin, Isaiah (2004), Romantikliğin Kökleri, trans. Mete Tunçay, İstanbul: YKY. Forster, E.M. (1987), Howards End, ed. Oliver Stallybrass, London: Penguin. Green. Robert (1969 January), “Messrs Wilcox and Kurtz, Hallow Men”, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 14, No.4, p.231- 239. Helfer, Martha B.(1996 Spring), ‘Dorothea Veit-Schlegel’s Florentin: Constructing a Feminist Romantic Aesthetic’, The German Quarterly, Vol. 69. No. 2, p. 144-160. Hodge, Elizabeth (2006 Summer), ‘The Mysteries of Eleusis at Howards End: German Romanticism and the Making of a Mythology for England’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 13, No. 1, p. 33-68. Hoy, Cyrus (1960 March), ‘Forster’s Metaphysical Novel’, PMLA, Vol. 75, No 1, p. 126-136. Hoy II, Pat C. (1985 Summer-Autumn), ‘The Narrow, Rich Staircase in Forster’s Howards End’, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 31, No.2/3, p. 221-235. Lange, Victor (1955 Autumn), ‘Friedrich Schlegel’s Literary Criticism’, Comparative Literature Vol. 7, No.4, p. 289-305. Littau, Karen (2006), Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania, Cambridge: Polity Press. Ruskin, John (1993), ‘From The Stones of Venice’, The Norton Anthology: English Literature 2, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Sixth ed. Shiner, Larry (2001), The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, Chicago: Chicago UP. Tompkins, Jane P. (1980), ‘The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response’, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins, Maryland: The John Hopkins UP.