The suggestion that the two houses need at least a good dose of the other seems tolerant, wise, and appealing. It’s also noteworthy, given the fatigue of the marriage plot at this modernist juncture, that Forster chooses marriage—granted a highly symbolic and rather bloodless marriage—as the way to bring them together. He would seem to be more optimistic than Gissing, or at least less cynical, in still looking to the institution of marriage as a way to overcome profound societal divisions and bring harmony out of discord. The best thing Margaret as our heroine can do is not run a typing school, nor even keep attending those afternoon concerts, at which Beethoven”s Fifth stirs her so deeply, but marry Henry. She marries John Bull Henry Wilcox—moreover, is still married to him at novel’s end. Marriage still serves here, as the critic Tony Tanner so brilliantly defines it, as bourgeois society’s “means to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property.”
But reading the novel to its end also unsettles this sense of a balanced resolution. Margaret Schlegel is the heroine of Howards End, but Henry Wilcox is hardly the hero. Despite a lightly ironic sentence denoting that “our hero and heroine were married,” Howards End, is, in fact, a novel without a hero, even more completely, I think, than Vanity Fair. For Forster cannot restrain himself from emphatically rejecting the masculine as represented by the unfeeling and predatory Wilcoxes. Raised by his mother and aunt in the very “feminine” family house, Rooksend, (shades of the rookery in David Copperfield?), and struggling at the time of writing Howards End with his own still-repressed homosexuality, he is out of sympathy with their mode of “telegrams and anger,” and ultimately pessimistic about their reformation. They remain one-sided human beings, who fail, as much in terms of class as gender, to connect and see connections; they do not avoid brutality.
Forster’s lack of real sympathy for the realm of the masculine can be underscored by setting the Wilcoxes alongside Gissing’s nuanced portraits of Barfoot and Widdowson in The Odd Women. It occurs to me that Gissing’s male characters are already so diminished in masculine power through their anomie and inertia that they hardly need to be cut down to size. They are not brisk captains of industry like Henry Wilcox, arrogant eldest sons like Charles, or thoughtless imperialists like Paul. And in ways they would impose themselves on women—Widdowson by means of his jealousy, Barfoot through his freethinking, they are not especially effective. Men in Howards End, on the other hand, for all their obtuseness, are still running society and doing their best to retain their male prerogatives and supremacy. At least property-owning privileged men are doing so—not the poor clerk Leonard Bast, an aspirant to culture, not power, who, interestingly, seems to be a victim of both the masculine and feminine strains in the novel. Helen Schlegel seduces him, Henry loses him his job, Charles Wilcox hits him with the flat edge of an ancestral sword, and the Schlegel bookcase falls on him just as his heart gives out (can culture kill?). Possibilities of connection between classes dwindle as Forster’s epigram shifts from robust imperative to poignant conditional: if only we could connect!
And what about Forster’s grand scheme of connecting the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, of merging their two houses? When Helen Schlegel, pregnant with the child of Leonard Bast, turns up at Howards End, the country house owned by Henry Wilcox but spiritually the property of his first wife, who wished to bequeath it to Margaret, Henry doesn’t want Helen to stop there. Margaret, at this point forced to choose between her husband and her sister, chooses her sister without a flicker of hesitation. “She was fighting,” Forster tells us, “for women against men.” Henry, a man upholding a sexual double standard, is “criminally muddled.” He cannot connect.
Through various ensuing twists of the plot: Leonard’s arriving at Howards End in the midst of this crisis; his dying of the heart attack, which the law courts determine is induced by Charles’s assault; Charles’s having to go to prison for manslaughter, and Henry’s collapsing in the midst of all this tragedy, Wilcox masculinity, it is fair to say, is defeated. If it cannot be tempered, it can be tamed.
At the novel’s conclusion Henry bequeaths Howards End to Margaret, and the two sisters literally enact their claim to English soil as we encounter them out of doors in the sun-drenched fields along with Helen’s baby by Leonard Bast, while a tired shadowy Henry remains indoors with his hay fever. We also learn that Margaret will bequeath Howards End to her nephew.
If we look simply at who is living in the house at the end of the novel, Henry, Margaret and Helen, and the male baby, it would be possible to conclude that the feminine and the masculine, the well-off and the dispossessed, have in some important way come together. But as Lionel Trilling has pointed out, the final connection is forged at the cost of too thorough a “gelding” of the male. Henry Wilcox, according to his wife’s diagnosis, is “eternally tired”; he collapsed when he began “to notice things.”
Henry reminds me a lot of Mr. Dombey at the end of Dombey and Son. Both Dickens and Forster seem to be saying that strong arrogant patriarchs need to be broken in order to be saved. But their gaining of heart doesn’t mean they get put back together again. The description of Henry as “eternally tired” is followed two pages later by a view of him as “pitiably tired,” just in case we didn’t catch the point. Yes, he can still smile, as he manages to do at Helen on the novel’s last page. But it is the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, who are literally left standing in the field, their bond intact and undiluted, beneficiaries of their “love rooted in common things” and their shared sanctification of “the inner life.” Glowing with energy
