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Annals of “Dunărea de Jos” University of GALAŢI
Fascicle XIII, New Series.
Issue 28, XVI (XXVII), 2009
pp. 61-65
STYLISTIC FOCUS ON E.M. FORSTER
Daniela Şorcaru
61
Language
and
Literature
Foster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been
criticized for his attachment to mysticism. The characters of Mrs. Wilcox and Mrs. Moore in
A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past and a striking ability to connect with
people from beyond their own circles.
Although he always remained to some extent an Edwardian, E. M. Forster embodied
more fully than any other imaginative writer of his generation a modern gay-liberation
perspective.
Forster’s homosexuality manifested itself in an erotic preference for foreigners and for
men of the lower social classes. Reflecting an appreciation of the natural vitality he
connected with working-class men and ambivalence about his own over-civilized
temperament, this preference helps account for his tendency to romanticize the lower classes
and for his sensitivity to the injustices of the class system at home and to the effects of
imperialism abroad.
Perhaps because of his erotic preference for working-class men, Forster was also
deeply affected by the belief that homosexuality could serve a positive social function by
helping to bridge the barriers that separate the classes.
Forster’s acute consciousness of gay oppression, as epitomized in the persecution of
Wilde, haunted his imagination throughout his life, fueling his anger at social and political
injustices of all kinds.
But notwithstanding his difficulties in making a sexual adjustment and despite recent
attempts to characterize his attitude toward homosexuality as guilt-ridden and self-loathing,
the fact is that Forster never felt shame for his sexual orientation.
What he did feel were a sense of wariness and vulnerability and that sensation of
standing ‘at a slight angle to the universe’ that he detected in the poetry of C. P. Cavafy.
Forster’s sensitivity to the pervasive homophobia of his age probably accounts for that tinge
of sadness so characteristic of the Forsterian voice. His fiction embodies a consistent system
of values centered on issues of self-realization, individualism, and responsiveness to life,
nature, and the unseen.
Forster began writing A Passage to India in 1913, just after his first visit to India. The
novel was not revised and completed, however, until well after his second stay in India, in
1921, when he served as secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior. Published in 1924,
A Passage to India examines the racial misunderstandings and cultural hypocrisies that
characterized the complex interactions between Indians and the English toward the end of
the British occupation of India.
A Passage to India was the last in a string of Forster’s novels in which his craft
improved markedly with each new work. After the novel’s publication, however, Forster
never again attained the level of craft or the depth of observation that characterized his early
work.