Maurice in Queereaders

Apr 08, 2009 Tara Lynn rated it really liked it

Shelves: booklist-for-2009, lgbt-selections

Somewhere along the lines of picking up any LGBT fiction I could lay my hands on, I found Maurice, which was probably my first Forster novel. I have to give the man credit for his choice of themes, in a culture that was still willing to prosecute people for sodomy. It's pretty conventional romantic fiction for the time, completely unremarkable if not for the fact that his two romantic leads were men.

I believe there's a movie out there with Rupert Everett, but I don't remember being impressed by ...more

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Feb 28, 2009 Jamie rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2010, lgbt

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I don't hate this novel, but having read it twice within the past year, I'm still not at all sold on it either. Assuming that my prof would be able to convince me of its power and beauty, I went into my second read with a high-heart and a yearning to think of this as a radical intervention in representations of gay male desire. Alas, I came out of class even more opposed to such a notion than when I went in. Maurice is sometimes quite well-written and incredibly poignant--I think of the scene be I don't hate this novel, but having read it twice within the past year, I'm still not at all sold on it either. Assuming that my prof would be able to convince me of its power and beauty, I went into my second read with a high-heart and a yearning to think of this as a radical intervention in representations of gay male desire. Alas, I came out of class even more opposed to such a notion than when I went in. Maurice is sometimes quite well-written and incredibly poignant--I think of the scene between Maurice and his mother, when she ignores his 'illicit' kiss because she wants to mean as much as she once had to him. Other times, I have to confess that I find the prose to reek of a lazy Jane Austen--in fact, the book feels at times like Jane Austen had written Brideshead Revisited in a creative slump (if Austen *could* be bad).

People are right to remind me that, whoopee, the book refuses to conclude gay love with tragedy, therein making it palatable to a post-sexology audience; however, I'm deeply deeply troubled by the inflections of class in the novel. Alec follows a long literary tradition of equating the lower-classes--particularly servants--with the body; Alec literally seems to be a body, open for use, at times (re: the "Come" scene with Maurice at the window). The dichotomy of the novel is not between hetero- and homo-sexual identities, but rather between the mind and the body, that great Western philosophical split. So Clive and Maurice inhabit the Greek aesthetic model of male-male love, the "children of the sun," while Maurice and Alec seem to embody the practice of the theory, wherein a social subordinate is penetrated and 'trained.' I don't mean to say that there is a necessarily exploitative undercurrent to Maurice's desire, but that Forster's decision to exemplify the relationship *through* class plays into troubling social hegemonies. Not to mention I feel that the book is significantly weaker in terms of pacing and style once Clive 'comes out' as straight.

In any case, it's a book of its time. The cultural traces of Freud and sexology haunt the text, and Forster does stage some intriguing fractures in this history; however, the writing is hit-or-miss, the plot frequently plods, and the politics are only very minutely radical--mostly, there's a disturbing retrenching of the status quo. Call me back once I've read Howard's End this summer, and we can talk Forster again. ...more

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