Empires of Objects: Accumulation and Entropy in E. M. Forster's Howards End
Henry S. Turner
[T]here seems something else in life besides time, something which may conveniently be called "value," something which is measured not by minutes or hours, but by intensity, so that when we look at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles...
-- E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel 19
One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.
-- E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy 6-7
Speaking to a BBC audience in 1946 on the topic of the "Challenge of Our Time," Forster addressed with candor and typical irony a dilemma that he felt keenly and unapologetically: his attempt to reconcile the ubiquity of the "New Economy" with the "Old Morality" that he felt was disappearing and which was to remain so indispensable to him in later years:
But though the education [I received] was humane it was imperfect, inasmuch as we none of us realized our economic position. In came the nice fat dividends, up rose the lofty thoughts, and we did not realize that all the time we were exploiting the poor of our own country and the backward races abroad, and getting bigger profits from our investments than we should. We refused to face this unpalatable truth ....
All that has changed in the present century. The dividends have shrunk to decent proportions and have in some cases disappeared. The poor have kicked. The backward races are kicking--and more power to their boots. Which means that life has become less comfortable for the Victorian liberal, and that our outlook, which seems to me admirable, has lost the basis of golden sovereigns upon which it originally rose, and now hangs over the abyss ....
[Y]ou are brought back again to that inescapable arbiter, your own temperament. When there is a collision of principles would you favour the individual at the expense of the community as I would? Or would you prefer economic justice for all at the expense of personal freedom? In a time of upheaval like the present, this collision of principles, this split in one's loyalties, is always occurring. (Two Cheers 56-58)
Faced with the growing disenfranchisement of England's working class and the ugly legacy of Victorian imperialism, the clarity and force with which Forster perceived the demands of ethical responsibility proved difficult to reconcile with his equally profound allegiance to private feeling and individual memory. This very ambivalence was to play a more subdued but nonetheless central role in Forster's later biography of his great-aunt, Marianne Thornton, where it runs throughout his nostalgic account of the Clapham Sect and its distinct blend of philanthropy, sentimentality, and moral conservatism.(n1) As a family portrait the work is perfectly balanced, at once generous and deeply sympathetic--even proud--but always shrewd, sharply observed, and conscious of anachronism. Here was the very source of emotions that Forster recognized as most intimately and resolutely his own—the deep attachment to a family home not least among them--and yet the picture jarred with the contemporary world he observed around him, where a friend's farm could be commandeered by the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and appropriated for subdivisions and public housing.(n2) His awareness of his own contradictory position could only be made more acute by his fond exercise in family biography: as a young boy Forster had inherited from his great-aunt Marianne the seed capital for a lifetime of investment, dividends, and freedom from conventional wage labor. Although the bequest was to cause him occasional dismay throughout his life, he recognized that it left him free to pursue a career as a professional writer.(n3)
Written more than three decades before Marianne Thornton, Howards End (1910) marks the conversion of a writer's personal ambivalence into a specific formal problem: the work may be read as an extended meditation on the difficulty of representing capital accumulation, in all its elusive and terrifying abstraction, as a total process.(n4) Here Forster's negotiation between money and morality takes place through the narrative's persistent attention to the physical objects of everyday life. As concrete objects cluster around the novel's characters to form the fabric of their lives and environments, their accumulation becomes both the narrative's preeminent thematic concern and its primary structuring principle. Forster indicates his discomfort with the modes of capital accumulation made possible in his age by delineating a world in which personal objects and places act as repositories for a sentimental "value" that exceeds the vicissitudes of commerce and commodification. The novel articulates an ambivalent fascination with material substances of all types, as Margaret nostalgically embraces objects for their promise of cultural permanence and stability even as the narrative voice regards them with detached irony, mistrust, or even disgust. In these latter moments Forster is forced to confront the question of how entropy and surplus--the disorder provoked by a super-abundance of objects, people, property, and spaces--fit into the logic of nationalism and imperialism, and how this peculiar, contradictory logic might be accommodated within the formal techniques of the modern novel.
<!--pagebreak-->Schlegels and Wilcoxes, family and home, genealogy and real estate: these oppositions form the basic thematic and theoretical structure around which the narrative's total trajectory has been plotted. Nearly every scene charts, in its minute way, the inexorable division of the "house" into these separate conceptual components, and the air of uneasy anticipation that hovers throughout the novel can be traced to the discomfort that Margaret feels as she becomes aware of this growing bifurcation and of the forces that threaten her family's once-solid foundation at Wickham Place. As the Schlegels and Wilcoxes become increasingly intertwined, the separation of family from home can only become more acute, largely because each family's perception of the "house" differs so radically. Each conforms to a distinct, and opposing, model of accumulation: on the one hand, Forster offers the chiffoniers, books, and embedded genealogical memories of the Schlegel household, and on the other the luggage and real estate of the Wilcoxes, with their insistence on the infinite fungibility and latent liquidity of belongings.(n5)
Forster's initial description of Schlegel pere, for instance, sketches the faint sense of anachronism ("a type that was more prominent in Germany fifty years ago than now" [26]) updated in his daughters, with its essential characteristics clearly preserved:
He was not the aggressive German, so dear to the English Journalist, nor the domestic German, so dear to the English wit. If one classed him at all, it would be as the countryman of Hegel and Kant, as the idealist, inclined to be dreamy, whose Imperialism was the Imperialism of the air. (26)
The reluctant imperialist inveighs against the "clouds of materialism obscuring the Fatherland" (26) and those men who only "care about the things that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the following order: Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful; imagination, of no use at all. No"--for the other had protested --"your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here. It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven .... They collect facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?" (27)
The Schlegel sisters, however, do not appear as resolute as their father in their condemnation either of imperialism or of the narrow materialism and methodical accumulation on which it rests. Margaret, remarks Forster, will "at times dismiss the whole British Empire with a puzzled, if reverent, sigh" (25), and she retains a vision of the imperialist as hard worker and civilizer (not to mention paragon of productive and knowing masculinity) until the final pages of the novel. As she enjoins Tibby:
you must work, or else you must pretend to work, which is what I do. Work, work, work if you'd save your soul and your body. It is honestly a necessity my dear boy. Look at the Wilcoxes .... With all their defects of temper and understanding, such men give me more pleasure than many who are better equipped, and I think it is because they have worked regularly and honestly. (109)
Margaret at first playfully adopts a position vis-a-vis work that might describe Forster himself, and she certainly shares his awareness that "lofty thoughts" depend on "nice fat dividends" (Forster, Two Cheers 56-57).(n6) But later in the novel, as Margaret continues an earnest defense of the great civilizer--and in the name of "us literary people" (171), no less--Forster's gentle irony allows him a polite, but no less firm, distance from the comfortable liberal credo she articulates:
<!--pagebreak-->If the Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No---perhaps not even that. Without their spirit, life might never have moved out of protoplasm. (171-72)
For Forster, it is not only Margaret who "pretends to work" but also the Wilcoxes themselves, as they expend relentless energy doing nothing in particular; aside from Paul (at best a half character, dimly visible over the colonial horizon, clumsy from the saddle, and burnt by the sun) the "work" of the Wilcoxes is distilled into Henry's dictation of a letter (no doubt with great purpose) and his worry over property management.
While the Schlegels gather in a world of cozy "feminine" interiors ("'I suppose that ours is a female house,' said Margaret .... 'it must be feminine, and all we can do is to see that it isn't effeminate'" [41]), the Wilcoxes recline in the leather interiors of accumulated imperial spoil:
The dining room was big, but overfurnished .... those heavy chairs, that immense sideboard loaded with presentation plate, stood up against [the room's] pressure like men. The room suggested men, and Margaret, keen to derive the modern capitalist from the warriors and hunters of the past, saw it as an ancient guest-hall, where the lord sat at meat among his thanes. Even the Bible--the Dutch Bible that Charles had brought back from the Boer War--fell into position. Such a room admitted loot. (159-160)
Forster's use of free indirect discourse here again allows him to introduce a critical irony toward the Wilcoxes that cannot be attributed entirely to Margaret herself. Despite her avowed impatience with imperialism--"An Empire bores me, so far, but I can appreciate the heroism that builds it up" (110)--Margaret's complicity lies less in her equivocations than in her willingness to invest psychologically in the materials that empire makes available: she animates these objects with her own visions of masculine grandeur and epic process, just as later, after Henry's proposal, she will exclaim romantically over shares in a currant farm (141). But her swelling concern for the past, both personal and national, and its accumulation in the things of everyday life, is also precisely what separates her and her sister Helen from the Wilcoxes, who care only for the accumulation of profits and the commerce of the future.(n7) "You see," says Helen to her cousin,
the Wilcoxes collect houses as your Victor collects tadpoles. They have, one, Ducie Street; two, Howards End, where my great rumpus was; three, a country seat in Shropshire; four, Charles has a house in Hilton; and five, another near Epsom; and six, Evie will have a house when she marries, and probably a pied-a-terre in the country-which makes seven. Oh yes, and Paul a hut in Africa makes eight. (167)
The list undergoes perpetual revision as the novel continues: by Chapter 31 Henry has both acquired and finally succeeded in jettisoning Oniton (after much implied time and effort), and two pages later we catch a glimpse of Henry and Margaret's plans for the construction of their new home.
<!--pagebreak-->It would appear that to represent capital accumulation as an ongoing, abstract process, Forster has adopted a narrative strategy similar to that discerned by Elaine Scarry in the novels of Thomas Hardy, in which "the structure of all narrative action entail[s] (and often even depend[s] on) the physical continuity of man and his materials" ("Participial Acts" 60).(n8) But Hardy's problem, according to Scarry, and that of the nineteenth-century realist novel more generally, was to represent the process of work. What are we to make of Howards End, in which work-as-process is no longer a question of productive human action--no longer Scarry's humanist vision of the body-at-work—but rather of Margaret's generalized principle of social and personal betterment on the one hand, and an inexorable, silent mechanism on the other, the work not of bodies but of investment, distanced calculation, and profit-making? How much more difficult a problem for representation, when work as the production-of-things--Scarry's vision of work as the personal, intimate transformation of the material environment--has become work-as-accumulation, work as the production not of substance but of possibility, of opportunity, of the further production of abstract representation itself?
Scarry's reading of Hardy suggests two formal possibilities that Forster might adopt for representing the process of accumulation. He might, for instance, "subdivide the activity of work not into temporal units but into task units..." (65-66). But work-as-human-production--work as task--however attractive to the late-nineteenth-century narrative imagination, seems quaintly out of place in the world of early twentieth-century modernism. The division of the "task unit," after all, was crucial to assembly-line mass production and would soon make possible the capital accumulation strategies of Fordism.(n9) Representing the process of accumulation—a self-perpetuating process--by dividing it up into "task units" is simply not an option in a novel such as Howards End, especially when the body that performs those tasks has been eliminated. "Work" of this type, the "work" of imperialism and the Wilcoxes, busies itself precisely with the effacement of the material body, whether through displacement and repression (the "invisible" colonial margin and its labor), or through the abstract conversion of labor into commodities and profit.
Bodies in Howards End--such as they are in a novel whose witty chat, felt confessions, and class-marked characterizations insist repeatedly on the importance of the intellect, the spirit, and the emotions--suffer the onslaught of cheap possessions and obdurate things, innumerable objects that resist Scarry's (and Father Schlegel's) vision of a reciprocal, Hegelian relation with their neighboring human subject. It would be worth pausing, for a moment, to consider the Basts, certainly the most "embodied" characters of the novel: here embodiment is distinctly pathetic, sick, fragile, and bloody (in the case of Leonard), if not monstrous (in the case of Jacky). Do we dare to read their squalid dinner scene, after Scarry, as "part of the resculpting or remaking of the body.., entailed in work"? ("Participial Acts" 56). The grotesque communion here between the laboring body and its needs--congealed tongue, fat, and dissolving gelatin--could not be further from the ennobling dialectic of self-fulfillment that the nineteenth-century novel would seem to promise.
Nor could the Schlegels be said to participate in this process: they seek spiritual things, an "unseen" that transcends, rather than clinging mercilessly, to the human experience. Helen's sudden (and transgressive) embodiment is the only legacy of a man who does not, after all, "labor" in any familiar sense of the word. Leonard Bast, insurance clerk, produces nothing: he is a condition of possibility for the management of possibility itself, the anticipation of accident and loss, disruption and chaos. He is, moreover, a dispensable condition, as likely a figure for surplus as the throwaway furnishings of his rented flat. These possessions wound: Leonard cuts himself on Jacky's picture, the blood "spilling over onto the exposed photograph" (46), just as Margaret will do 12 pages later, in Mrs. Wilcox's bedroom, although here, as she has just finished uttering to Tibby and Helen, "money pads the edges of things" (58). When Tibby rouses himself to bestow upon the Basts Helen's desperate and utterly inappropriate gift of capital, they have vanished into the pool of surplus populations and underclass space, leaving behind them only a "scurf of books and china ornaments" (253) to mark their disappearance.
<!--pagebreak-->This moment, like other discussions of investment and income that appear during the course of the novel--Margaret's personal moral code ("all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders" (59), or the playful discussions of philanthropy at the women's group, for which Bast is no more than a "conversational hare" (to borrow an expression from Margaret's dinner party)--manifests most clearly the tension between Forster's recognition of capital's indispensability and his profound desire to be rid of it. Like Helen, who "confuses wealth with the technique of wealth" (177), Forster seems fascinated by the power of money to change things and people but at the same time distrustful of its superficiality, of the structures that produce it and that are required to manage it, and of the world of impermanence it ushers in.
NOTES
(n1) I am grateful to the anonymous reader for this journal who suggested that I consider Marianne Thornton for the light it sheds on Forster's attitudes toward money and property and on my reading of Howards End.
(n2) Marianne Thornton is particularly remarkable for its memorializing of Battersea Rise, the Thornton family estate, and for the way it records the Thornton's distinct imaginative and sentimental investment in houses. It was a sensibility that Forster shared, and I am struck by how clearly Howards End pre-figures his later exploration of this aspect of his family and of his own earliest memories; he explicitly acknowledges the role that his childhood home in Hertfordshire played in his creation of Howards End, the house (301).
(n3) I am indebted to Delany for the information on Forster's inheritance and what he suggests to be Forster's "lifelong preoccupation with the morality of living on unearned income" (285). Forster himself provides a brief comment on the topic at the conclusion of his biography of his great-aunt (Marianne Thornton 324; see also Furbank, esp. 1:24 and 2: 317). Forster's dilemma, Delany argues, "is how to uphold the civic and cultural virtues intrinsic to the rentier way of life, yet avoid complicity with commerce or technology" (291). While Delany is chiefly interested in tracing Forster's own attitudes and moral views as they are articulated through the novel's characters, I will be concerned with the way in which these attitudes produced a set of specific formal representational problems, which Forster sought to solve through his treatment of objects and property.
(n4) My thesis here owes a considerable debt to the work of Scarry, in particular "Participial Acts" but also The Body in Pain. I will take up Scarry's argument, and my differences with it, in more detail later. Born makes claims that are similar to Delany's and my own, noting the centrality of real estate to Forster's social and aesthetic vision (142) and claiming that Forster's "preoccupation with surfaces, houses, and the substance of material living . . . becomes a strategy of moral penetration" (142-43). Critical responses to the novel are usefully surveyed in Page; for the purposes of this paper, see in particular ch. 4, "Can a Marxist like Margaret," 37-44. I draw also on Jameson's discussion of the determining power of imperialism on the formal innovations of modernism and on Howards End, and on Said 62-80.
(n5) Bradbury (128-43) observes a similar series of distinctions; Stone also argues that oppositions between the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes are played out primarily in terms of houses (237-38).
<!--pagebreak-->(n6) The virtues and contradictions of the novel's liberalism have been well rehearsed over the years; following Trilling's influential 1943 study, representative examples include virtually every essay in the anthology edited by Bradbury. For more recent reconsiderations of liberalism see Armstrong, who highlights the importance of architecture and horizontal spatial movement in the novel (esp. 187-88), and Levenson. Two articles explore similarities between Howards End and the pragmatic philosophy of Richard Rorty: Born, who offers a helpful reevaluation of the central critical claims for the novel's liberalism, and May, who reads Margaret as the premier example of the Rortian "liberal ironist."
(n7) Born overlooks the real qualitative differences in the investments Margaret and the Wilcoxes make in places and things when he argues that "for all their differences, in this respect [the concern for property and social mobility] Margaret and the Wilcoxes are identical" (154).
(n8) See also 64-65: Although, then, work is extensively represented in the novel... it is at the same time... a deeply difficult subject to represent. The major source of this difficulty is that work is action rather than a discrete action: it has no identifiable beginning or end; if it were an exceptional action, or even "an action," it could--like acts in epic, heroic, or military literature--be easily accommodated in narrative. It is the essential nature of work to be perpetual, repetitive, habitual. There is no formal convention in any genre of literature that would make it either possible or desirable to portray it in all its constancy and repetitiveness ....
(n9) See Harvey's discussion (125) of early-twentieth-century economic planners such as F. W. Taylor, whose The Principles of Scientific Management was published in 1911, only a year after Howards End.
WORKS CITED
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel and Related Writings. The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster. Vol. 12. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Edward Arnold, 1974.
------. Howards End. The Abinger Edition of E. M. Forster. Vol. 4. Ed. Oliver Stallybrass. London: Edward Arnold, 1973.
------. Marianne Thornton: A Domestic Biography, 1797-1887. New York: Harcourt, 1956.
------. Two Cheers for Democracy. New York: Harcourt, 1951.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
------. "Participial Acts: Working. Work and the Body in Hardy and Other Nineteenth-Century Novelists." Resisting Representation. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 49-90.
Stone, Wilfred. The Cave and the Mountain: A Study of E. M. Forster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1966.
Trilling, Lionel. E. M.
Forster. Norfolk: New Directions, 1943.
