A Room with a View

by E.M. Forster

If they were hypocrites they did not know it, and their hypocrisy had every chance of setting and of becoming true.

People congratulated Mrs. Honeychurch, which is, I believe, a social blunder, but it pleased her,

First time I've noticed the narrator refer to himself

dowagers.

The spirit of the generations had smiled through them, rejoicing in the engagement of Cecil and Lucy because it promised the continuance of life on earth. To Cecil and Lucy it promised something quite different—personal love.

Ew. I understand why they want to believe this, but are we sure it's a good match?

“Inglese Italianato?” “E un diavolo incarnato! You know the proverb?” She did not. Nor did it seem applicable to a young man who had spent a quiet winter in Rome with his mother.

Lmfao. The call-out

epigram,

He longed to hint to her that not here lay her vocation; that a woman’s power and charm reside in mystery, not in muscular rant.

Gross

possibly rant is a sign of vitality: it mars the beautiful creature, but shows that she is alive.

LOVE

Beware of women altogether. Only let to a man.”

So Mrs Honeychurch sucks. Girl, YOU ARE A WOMAN. Do you think you deserve to be discriminated against on the basis of sex?

“I had got an idea—I dare say wrongly—that you feel more at home with me in a room.” “A room?” she echoed, hopelessly bewildered. “Yes. Or, at the most, in a garden, or on a road. Never in the real country like this.” “Oh, Cecil, whatever do you mean? I have never felt anything of the sort. You talk as if I was a kind of poetess sort of person.” “I don’t know that you aren’t. I connect you with a view—a certain type of view. Why shouldn’t you connect me with a room?”

A room with a view. Trapped in but looking out.

When I think of you it’s always as in a room. How funny!” To her surprise, he seemed annoyed. “A drawing-room, pray? With no view?” “Yes, with no view, I fancy. Why not?” “I’d rather,” he said reproachfully, “that you connected me with the open air.”

Like the kite metaphor.

Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all the other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way.

Most of these houses were larger than Windy Corner, and were filled by people who came, not from the district, but from London, and who mistook the Honeychurches for the remnants of an indigenous aristocracy. He was inclined to be frightened, but his wife accepted the situation without either pride or humility. “I cannot think what people are doing,” she would say, “but it is extremely fortunate for the children.”

Stolen rich bitch valor

in Italy, where any one who chooses may warm himself in equality, as in the sun, this conception of life vanished. Her senses expanded; she felt that there was no one whom she might not get to like, that social barriers were irremovable, doubtless, but not particularly high. You jump over them just as you jump into a peasant’s olive-yard in the Apennines, and he is glad to see you. She returned with new eyes.

Call-back to the conversation about fences

A rebel she was, but not of the kind he understood—a rebel who desired, not a wider dwelling-room, but equality beside the man she loved. For Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions—her own soul.

“I shall hate those Miss Alans!” Mrs. Honeychurch cried. “Just because they’re old and silly one’s expected to say ‘How sweet!’ I hate their ‘if’-ing and ‘but’-ing and ‘and’-ing.

Dude, now that I know Mrs Honeychurch is esteemed thanks to community misunderstanding, her exclusion of these widowed ladies is even less excusable. Maybe she fears they will detect her common origins? Maybe she's threatened

An interval elapses.

Okay, randomly present tense?

Like his sister and like most young people, he was naturally attracted by the idea of equality, and the undeniable fact that there are different kinds of Emersons annoyed him beyond measure.

dee-sire-rebel.

Rebel

Mr. Vyse was a tease—something worse than a tease: he took a malicious pleasure in thwarting people. The clergyman, knowing this, looked at Miss Honeychurch with more than his usual kindness.

For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. “There was a great scene over some violets.

Omg Lucy and George kissed among the violets. And passionately-- not like that garbage with Cecil

They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa.

Omg and the Emersons filled the room with those violets. A room with a view

They found the whole room a mass of blue—vases and jugs—and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’

A room with a view. Also, his kiss was technically ungentlemanly-- but beautiful. It was how Cecil imagined his first kiss with Lucy

She saw that for the future she must be more vigilant, and be—absolutely truthful? Well, at all events, she must not tell lies.

Lol she plans to keep the kiss with George hidden

He stared at her, and felt again that she had failed to be Leonardesque. “No, you don’t!” Her face was inartistic—that of a peevish virago.

She's a person, not a painting, property, or possession

The Comic Muse, though able to look after her own interests, did not disdain the assistance of Mr. Vyse. His idea of bringing the Emersons to Windy Corner struck her as decidedly good, and she carried through the negotiations without a hitch.

I like these mythological references.

“So you do love me, little thing?” he murmured.

Rolling my eyes. "Thing"? Condescending

“Yours affectionately,

HAHAH

Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not.

She tried to tell Cecil even now when they were laughing about some beautiful lady who had smitten his heart at school. But her body behaved so ridiculously that she stopped.

It feels like a heavier secret because the connection between George and Lucy was great. Also causing unavoidable physiological responses

She and her secret stayed ten days longer in the deserted Metropolis visiting the scenes they were to know so well later on.

Noooo she will know it well in the future??? So she is going to marry this turd, Cecil?

Lucy saw that her London career would estrange her a little from all that she had loved in the past.

Adolescence. Transitions. Liminal spaces.

The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete—the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art—throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb.

"Incomplete" -- it's hard to cope with

even with Cecil she was mechanical, and behaved as if he was not one son, but, so to speak, a filial crowd.

Oh nooo so Cecil's got mommy issues as well? Ouch

As she was dozing off, a cry—the cry of nightmare—rang from Lucy’s room.

"Room" mentioned

“Pictures!” the clergyman continued, scrambling about the room. “Giotto—they got that at Florence, I’ll be bound.” “The same as Lucy’s got.”

Because they both look back fondly on their time together in Florence, perhaps?

“The Garden of Eden,” pursued Mr. Emerson, still descending, “which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies.”

Naturists of the world unite and take over

“In this—not in other things—we men are ahead. We despise the body less than women do. But not until we are comrades shall we enter the garden.”

Women do not despise their bodies by nature. It is patriarchal social conditioning (e.g. Religion) that teaches them to be ashamed of their bodies

“When I was a young man, I always meant to write a ‘History of Coincidence.’” No enthusiasm. “Though, as a matter of fact, coincidences are much rarer than we suppose. For example, it isn’t purely coincidentally that you are here now, when one comes to reflect.”

Hehehe I have come to love this messy clergyman, Mr. Beebe

“Let me give you a useful tip, Emerson: attribute nothing to Fate. Don’t say, ‘I didn’t do this,’ for you did it, ten to one.

“In there’s the pond. I wish it was bigger,” he added apologetically. They climbed down a slippery bank of pine-needles. There lay the pond, set in its little alp of green—only a pond, but large enough to contain the human body, and pure enough to reflect the sky.

It's making me think of Walden Pond. Was that Emerson or Thoreau?

“Apooshoo, apooshoo, apooshoo,” went Freddy, swimming for two strokes in either direction, and then becoming involved in reeds or mud. “Is it worth it?” asked the other, Michelangelesque on the flooded margin. The bank broke away, and he fell into the pool before he had weighed the question properly. “Hee-poof—I’ve swallowed a pollywog, Mr. Beebe, water’s wonderful, water’s simply ripping.” “Water’s not so bad,” said George, reappearing from his plunge, and sputtering at the sun.

It is worth it. Dive in

She had imagined a young Mr. Emerson, who might be shy or morbid or indifferent or furtively impudent. She was prepared for all of these. But she had never imagined one who would be happy and greet her with the shout of the morning star.

it is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life.

LOVE this quote. A good reminderfor me, because i stay workshopping and rehearsing interactions

So ran her thoughts, while her faculties were busy with Cecil.

puerile,

supercilious,

She obeyed, but loitered disconsolately at the landing window. It faced north, so there was little view, and no view of the sky. Now, as in the winter, the pine-trees hung close to her eyes. One connected the landing window with depression. No definite problem menaced her, but she sighed to herself, “Oh, dear, what shall I do, what shall I do?”

A room without a view. Darkness-- no path forward

Lucy artfully fed the flames of her mother’s wrath. But soon the conflagration died down, and the ghosts began to gather in the darkness. There were too many ghosts about. The original ghost—that touch of lips on her cheek—had surely been laid long ago; it could be nothing to her that a man had kissed her on a mountain once.

Ghost of a "flame" sure does indicate passion. Also i hadn't realized that the kiss was on the cheek! That's why she woke from her dream clutching her cheek, while she was in London. I figured but wasn't 100% sure

You are young, dears, and however clever young people are, and however many books they read, they will never guess what it feels like to grow old.”

This from the same lady who would deny elderly widows access to the neighborhood??