Every age, every place and every situation has its prigs who try to develop and maintain distances between people. E.M. Forster’s books take on the mission of showing how these prigs can be vanquished and the distances bridged. ‘A Room With a View’ is about connecting the classes, or rather, the sub-classes of the middle class.
When Lucy Honeychurch (an upper middle-class English heiress) and her chaperon Charlotte Bartlett meet the Emersons (a working class father-son duo) while on a trip to Florence, the result is a clash of civilizations. While Lucy’s world stands for propriety, the Emersons’ stands for beauty,
love and plain-talk.
Their very first meeting sets the tone for their relationship. Lucy and Charlotte have just arrived at a pension in Florence and are disappointed that their
rooms have no view. The Emersons, however, do have rooms with a view, but are not too keen to keep them. The elder Mr. Emerson thinks it only natural that he should offer his rooms to the two ladies. But when he does, his offer is met with shock and wrath by Charlotte and the rest of the old ladies in the pension.
Their objection: it is not good manners to strike up a conversation at this level of intimacy, when one has just met and it is inappropriate for a young lady to be under obligation to two uncouth men, one of whom is young and good-looking.
But the setting is hot-blooded Italy and the season is spring and Lucy and George, the younger Emerson, end up falling in love. A stolen kiss among violets in the countryside sets the wheels in motion.
The hitch is that Lucy refuses to acknowledge that she is in love with George. The rest of the book deals with Lucy trying to run away from this fact, first by leaving Florence in a rush, then by getting engaged to one Cecil Vyse, whose attraction is difficult to perceive, and later by trying to get away to Greece with a couple of aged spinsters.
But the love gods pursue Lucy right down to her safe haven — her home, Windy Corner — with George and his father renting a cottage in its neighbourhood, partly by accident and partly because Vyse tries to punish the owner of the cottage by loading him with a couple of ‘uncultured’ tenants. Lucy’s subconscious desires struggle to surface once again and her attempts to drown them in music, art and the promise of a cultured existence as Vyse’s wife fail when George steals a second kiss.
Then begin the lies and finally realization and the much-desired Forsterian connection of the classes. This does not mean that all the
characters fall in line. It’s just Lucy who does. Her mother and brother accuse her of deceiving them all along and most of the other characters, all lovable ones, are disappointed. After all even a romantic novel needs a touch of realism.
Forster treats Lucy’s foibles tenderly, as he does all the other characters’. Even Miss Bartlett, who puts a spoke in every piece of Cupid’s work, has her redeeming moments. The characters are all human in that they are an idiosyncratic mix of sense and folly, beauty and wickedness, decision and fickleness.
A Room With a
View must be read for its tender romance; Forster’s insights about human nature that rival those of Jane Austen’s, the queen of observation; and his lively, but not racy, narrative.
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