Howards End by E.M. Forster

"'Somehow, when that kind of man looks frightened it is too awful. It is all right for us to be frightened, or for men of another sort--Father, for instance; but men like that! When I saw all the others so placid, and Paul mad with terror in case I said the wrong thing, I felt for a moment that the whole Wilcox family was a fraud, just a wall of newspapers and motor-cars and golf-clubs, and that if it fell I should find nothing behind it but panic and emptiness.'"

At first glance, it would seem that Forster's Howards End, the story of two English families at the turn of the twentieth century, bears little resemblance to A Passage to India, a later work set in India during the height of Britain's colonial supremacy. The latter, while tenderly exploring the lives of its characters, is set against a backdrop of epochal events, and the entanglements that arise between Englishman and Indian are the ripple-like repercussions of a broader clash of civilizations. Howards End, on the other hand, describes a clash of a much smaller scale: that between the upper-middle class and the middle-middle class.

Typically English! you might cry. So inexplicably obsessed with the fine gradations of class! But while Howards End is concerned with quintessentially English dilemmas, and is more humble in historical and geographic scope, it bears similarities to its worldly successor. It is perhaps even more disturbing, suggesting that the fathomless mystery of the other can reveal itself not only in far-flung places, but right next door, amongst one's countrymen.

Howards End is the name of a house, and serves as a symbol of England as a whole. The claim to this property becomes a contest between the practical-minded and business-sound Wilcoxes and the idealistic and art-obsessed Schlegels. The Wilcoxes have their hands on "all the ropes" of the material world; the Schlegels a deep dedication to the more nebulous world of human relationships. In their dealings with each other, as well as with the pitiable clerk Leonard Bast (a representative of the lower-middle class), we see the hypocrisies and strengths of the warring clans. As Virgina Woolf puts it, the story is a "struggle between the things that matter and the things that do not matter, between reality and sham, between the truth and the lie." Forster accomplishes this all with humor, keen observation and great feeling.

Beneath it all is the terror that comes from gaining a glimpse of another's life. It is a threat to the fortresses we make of our beliefs; it is the shaking of the earth under one's feet. The most famous scene in Passage to India occurs at the Marabar Caves, where Mrs. Moore, new to the country, hears a disconcerting echo in one of the caves. It is a sound that is beyond language, beyond understanding; to her it sounds like "boum." What this "boum" means remains vague, but we know it shatters the foundation upon which she has built her life, a foundation that began to crack when she came into contact with an alien culture. Reading Howards End, perhaps we can put words to that sound: panic and emptiness, panic and emptiness.