Is There a Place for Me? – Remorse of Gay in E.M.Forster’s Maurice

Is There a Place for Me? – Remorse of Gay in E.M.Forster’s Maurice

Dr.S.Ravikumar

Assistant Professor

Sree Sevugan Annamalai College

Devakottai.

            From the dawn of the world, the people worship the land, water, air, space and fire and the natural resources. Besides, they respect the living species of the Earth also. But for the case of Gay or Lespion, do you believe that they are fairly treated by the people? Indeed, we don’t have a positive answer. The people refused to accept them as a human being and treated them as an alien. Due to the neurological problems, they like the male or female vice versa. It couldn’t be understood by the society. The society doesn’t acknowledge the feelings and emotions of the LGBT. Hence, they have forced to have a relationship with their own gender people and become Gay or Lespion.

            On seeing the LGBT on the streets, the people see them as prostitute and cursed them that they break the shackles of their golden traditional values. It is beautifully explained in Maurice by E.M.Forster. He also hesitated to publish this novel, even though he had written it before World War I. he thinks that if he publish it, the society won’t recognize him. And so, he waits for the right time and makes some necessary changes in this novel to convince the society. In order to create this novel optimistically, he has added some flovour to strengthen his views on the treatment of homosexuals. But, it does lost its originality and remains unchanged. It becomes a snap shot of homosexual love. It can be seen from his words:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam in the greenwood. […] happiness is its keynote – which by the way had had unexpected result: it has made the book more difficult to publish ( E.M.Forster, Terminal note of Maurice 236).

            With reference to the abovementioned verbatim, the researcher could see that there is room for homosexuality in England during his life time. It forces him to withhold this novel. In addition, it has the contents: to envision a world, fictional and realistic, in which two men could “fall in love and remain in it” was beyond the scope of the modern writers. Generally, most of the eminent philosophies and theories were ridiculed by the rulers as well as the people in the beginning. But, later they understood the reality of those words. Likewise, this novel was also waiting for the delivery for six decades.

            In Maurice, Forster breaks the traditional customs of man marrying woman. He creates an eponymous character Maurice Christopher who married another man Alec. Earlier he had a romantic relationship with Clive Derham, his Cambridge colleague, when he was studying. But, his dream of love becomes dreams only and it has made him frustrated. Because, Clive married a women by obeying the chain of social beliefs. It has been expressed by Maurice remorsefully:

I was yours once till death if you’d cared to keep me, but I’m someone else’s now – I can’t hang about whining for ever – and he’s mine in a way that shocks you, but why don’t you stop being shocked, and attend your own happiness? (230)

             

In his early days, Maurice is not interested in having heterosexual and feels discomfort. He thinks that even birds and bees also do not have this kind of physical contact. Then, its being a human being, why do we violate the nature? It nurtures his mind. Eventually his inner urge doesn’t allow him to prevent him from heterosexual and has an illegitimate relationship with Mr.Ducie, when he is fourteen years old. His ambivalent state of mind is revealed through the mouthpiece of Mr.Ducie:

He was attentive, as was natural when he was the only one in the class, and he knew that the subject was serious and related to his own body. But he could not himself relate it; it fell to pieces as soon as Mr.Ducie put it together, like an impossible sum (emphasis mine 7).

It shows his inadaptability with the mechanism of heterosexual involvement. It is because of linking of not only organic but also the genetic roots. In Maurice, the hypnotist, the act putting people into a state that resembles sleep but in which you can hear and respond to questions or suggestions, tries to recover Maurice to recover from his dilemma and find that he is affected by the ‘Congenital homosexuality’ (167). It helps the people to arrive at wrong conclusion about Maurice. After knowing that it is incurable so-called disease, Lasker Jones, the hypnotist, made a conversation about the state of England in regard to homosexuals.

“And what’s to happen to me? Said Maurice, with a sudden drop in his voice. He spoke in despair, but Mr. Laskar had an answer to every question. I’m afraid I can only advise you to live in some country that has adopted the Code Napoleon,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“France or Italy, for instance. There homosexuality is no longer criminal.”

“You mean that a Frenchman could share with a friend and yet not to go to prison?”

“Share? Do you mean unite? If both are of age and avoid public indecency, certainly.”

“Will law ever be that in England?”

‘I doubt it. England has always been disinclined to accept human nature.”

Maurice understood. He was an Englishman himself, and only his troubles had kept him awake. He smiled sadly. “It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.”

“That is so, Mr.Hall; or, as psychiatry prefers to put it, there has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person. And you must remember that your type was once put to death in England.” Forster 196).

            Though Maurice is a pathological novel about the homosexuals, it becomes a wedge between the two predominant directions: Culture and Nature. It is not a problem of homosexual to have a mutual relationship with the society; on the hand, it is a problem of society to have a cordial relationship with the homosexual.

            During the period of Forster, most of the novels end with the tragic flaw. So, he wants to be a different pole and ends this novel with happy ending. Because, he wants the homosexual to be happy at least in his novel. It is expressed: “If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well, for there is no pornography or seduction of minors” (236).

            Forster suggests, in due course, that perhaps the shears need to unravel the knot of (hetero) normativity are not found through death, solitude, and pain, but rather, through life, union, and happiness. Maurice, rather than basking in solitude, finds strength through Alec, and assures him that they “shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished” (225). Hence the researcher concludes that E.M.Forster leaves a page for homosexuals in Maurice, a novelty novel, whereas the society declined a place for them.

Work Cited:

Forster. E.M. Maurice. Toronto: Macmillian of Canada,1971.