In the deepening twilight a sombre figure walked away thus ending a new story of incomprehension and solitude, of discrimination
and hypocrisy. Maurice was saved and Clive knew there was nothing else he could do but accept his friend’s truth. In his intellectual vagueness, he was not able to see further and his idea of Platonic love vanished at the stunning revelation, which he judged grotesque and revolting. Maurice did not care. He had finally fought for his condition of
homosexual to be accepted, at least by his friend, whom he had adored and expected for so long. The time had come for him to commit himself to the idea that homosexual love was good. The sense of sin that had accompanied him throughout his life came to an end – together with his friendship. The happy ending that Forster had forecast while writing Maurice unfolded with bravery and energy.
Homosexual critical reading may be approached by analyzing the “lesbian/gay” vision of the story , which Forster emphasized by including intertextual elements of Greek mythology and their influence on the young characters of the story.
Maurice is a novel that also allows us to combine different binary elements of deconstruction to understand the text. The emergence of Maurice’s real self opposed to the hostile and hypocritical society of his time is carried out in the novel, in the first place, by means of a pattern of images of light and
darkness , through which stereotyped males and females interact in both closed and open environments feeling either a sense of salvation or a feeling of guilt.
The author presents Maurice as a typical representative of his class who does not come to terms with his reality, as Forster himself states in his
Terminal note. Maurice is not the intellectual aesthete; he is an average young man who looks for his inner light, his deep self with the same conviction that he rejects and confronts middle-class England. His search plunges him into a confusion that prevails throughout the novel.
Darkness and light are the main opposite elements that are found in the construction line of the story. Light is the aim that Maurice wants to reach. The idea of light appears in the first chapters in different forms. For example, his homosexual school mate, Risley, calls him “child of light”. The light of knowledge, represented by Plato’s Symposium and its revelation about sex, also appears in the first part of the book although the school does not give him light but darkness. Thus darkness is, at the beginning of the novel, a symbol of sexual ignorance, and as the story develops it is also the symbol of social hypocrisy, repression and hostility. He fights against it and at the end of the novel his inner light triumphs over the external darkness of social oppression. In the final chapters, when his infatuation towards Clive and his lust for the young houseguest turn into love for Alec Scudder, Maurice finds that this insight and his conviction make him free and happy. On the other hand, Clive, whose platonic idea of love does not allow him to understand his friend, gets stuck in the darkness of an unsatisfactory heterosexual relationship. Within their house, Clive and Anne live a conventional, constricted life.
People take risks when rejecting the stereotypes imposed by society and undoubtedly Forster took one when he wrote this novel. Daring the repressive attitudes of British society of the beginning of the 20th century must not have been easy. “
I am an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”, confesses Maurice, thus showing the apparent incompatible relation between literacy and homosexuality. The battle of wills that Forster seems to have triggered by confronting these two concepts has been rewarded by wide readership and public recognition.