Shane's Reviews > A Room with a View

That Forster was critical of the British Empire and its classist, racist, and sexist nature was evident in his novels and this one is no different. Empire rears its ugly head when it deigns to visit foreign locales like India in A Passage to India and Italy in Room with a View.

Country-bred, upper-crust ingenue Lucy Honeychurch, is escorted by her older, spinster cousin Charlotte Bartlett around Florence on her first overseas trip. They do not like their hotel room and are offered one “with a view” by the working-class Emersons, father and son. Yet Lucy does not like the “offer” because it was made crudely, and it takes the Rev Beebe, a fellow vacationer, to intercede and straighten matters out. This minor incident reveals the cracks and imbalances in the British social structure. Let’s see:

1. Women were to inspire others, not to achieve themselves.
2. The English scorn Continentals, especially Italians for their crude behaviour, although they admire their art. “The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace,” says Miss Lavish, the novelist.
3. The idle upper classes like to gossip. They do not work.
4. While the lower classes believe in democracy for all, the upper classes believe in aristocracy for a few. “Refined people despise the world,” says Cecil.
5. Upper-class women scream at thunder and faint at the sight of blood
6. The accent is not on feelings but on conduct. An inappropriate kiss (there are two in this book) between ill-matched classes can lead to disastrous consequences.

Lucy comes of age in Florence when she tries to reject the affections of young George Emerson who kisses her inappropriately in a grove of violets. On the rebound, and rushing off to Rome to escape George, she gets engaged to Cecil, a man of her class, a bore who is more interested in books than people. Yet, by a string of coincidences, George and his father take up residence close to Lucy’s country home back in England, and after he plants the second inappropriate kiss on her, she is forced to face her feelings and take on the whole upper-class establishment in which “the young rush to destruction until they can learn better, a world of precautions and barriers to prevent evil but do not bring good” – a world that neutered her cousin Miss Bartlett’s life to one of sterile loneliness and passive-aggressive rebellion.

Old Mr. Emerson, a man accused unjustly by the mean-spirited chaplain, Mr. Eager, as “the man who murdered his wife,” turns out to be the wisest of them all. His prophetic lines ring to the heart of the matter: “The only perfect view is of the sky above, all views of earth are bungled copies of it” and his words to Lucy, “It is easier to face death than to live in a muddle.” His final words to her are what set her off from her shackles: “You love George!”

Forster uses familiar devices from his other novels: English tourists on an excursion in a foreign land where a dark deed (a kiss, in this case) takes place while no one is looking; scenes heading in one direction are abruptly cut off, with their outcomes revealed later in the novel; a preference for dialogue to reveal action rather than narrative, reminiscent of a stage play. Given that this novel was written over a hundred years ago, one has to make allowance for the excessive verbiage and archaic words.

Given his homosexuality which was outlawed at the time, one cannot help but think that Forster, the perennial outsider, was on the side of the working-class Emmerson’s, imbuing them with knowledge and tastes beyond their crassness, wanting them to win the jewel in the crown, being Lucy in this case.