For about a month at the beginning of this year, I attended a Baha'i church on Sundays. Despite my resistance to their proselytization, they managed to succeed in getting me to read this short volume. For the most part I found it slightly better than innocuous, and enjoyed some of the passages that flipped certain traditional metaphors on their heads: "Thou [the reader] art my stronghold . . . my love is in thee" and "Thou art my lamp and my light is in thee" are reflective of the view that we do not live in God's house; we are his house, and he lives in us (10,11). The book was not entirely free from religious taint, however. Sadly, the view that God is the savior of the reader and that the reader must abase him or herself, begging for succor contaminates what is otherwise a fairly pleasant book.
E.M. Forster: A Room With a View
I enjoyed my first meeting of a book club to which my sister invited me this month. For one thing, the books are chosen not only for their literary merit but also for the significant merit of being short. Knowing that I was going to be meeting with a group of English majors and teachers, I couldn't help but write a paper in my head as I read. The title is "Looking Over", and here is the gist.
I often judge the merit of writers on the care with which they choose their titles. Great Expectations and Vanity Fair are examples of titles that unlock the meaning of a book before the first page is even turned. Forster similarly conveys his meaning with the title of this novel, indicating preemptively that the central idea is one of enclosure, and a way out of it.
The book is filled with images of boundaries, and not surprisingly curtains and windows are chief among them. As early as the fourth page of chapter one, Miss Honeychurch "Hastened after her cousin, who had already disappeared through the curtains--curtains which smote one in the face and seemed heavy with more than cloth" (7). Forster conveys his meaning perfectly: there are more than simple physical boundaries between the young lovers of the story. An idea that recurs in the service of this theme is that of looking across something--George across the table, then across the spot where a man is murdered and finally, most significantly, "not across anything" (39). It is at this moment that the invisible boundary between George and Lucy first is breached, and something as simple as the tossing of some tourist cards into to river becomes an epiphany.
The other characters in the book reveal something about themselves through their treatment of boundaries as well. The fact that "The drawing room curtains at Windy Corner had been pulled to meet, for the carpet was new and deserved protection from the August sun" shows Mrs. Honeychurch's view of the issue, and does much to explain why she frowns upon Lucy's marriage at the end. Cecil's explanation to Lucy "that you feel more at home with me in a room" reveals something about each of them, for Lucy rightly feels that Cecil "is the sort that no one can know intimately" (99, 161). No wonder, then, that she can only be with him when the world, of which the young Mr. Emerson is a significant part, is closed out
When Lucy finally finds her metaphorical "room with a view" in George, and as they look together out of the literal open window in the final chapter, it is clear that the boundaries keeping Lucy boxed in before were not merely social ones, just as the boundaries that Mr. Emerson was without were not. It is clear by the end that Lucy had managed to escape not only from the walls that society puts around us, but from the walls that we put around ourselves, those that keep our true spirit in the dark, those that can only be aired out by such windows as music, nature and, yes, love.
I shall add, although it would not go into any paper that I felt compelled to write, that the descriptions of Florence took be back there mentally to a trip that I took with my family--especially the church of Santa Croce, and that my father is a nice doppleganger to Mr. Emerson. His tendency to transgress social boundaries was delightfully coined "social rape" by my brother, who is occasionally not a dullard.
W.S. Gilbert: Princess Ida
I was compelled to read this as preparation for performing in it this coming Summer. Of course, Gilbert is not always the deepest of literary figures, but the more I read it, the more I appreciate that his interpretation of Tennyson's "The Princess" gels nicely with my own. See earlier in this blog the idea of sets of three that I think unlocks the latter. Gilbert's lyrics are subtly peppered with reinforcements of that theme, and I grin knowingly to myself often when I recall that I am the only one in the cast who has probably read the original.
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