Love, manners, religion, (Ralph Waldo) Emerson: E.M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908)

‘Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them. By understanding George you may learn to understand yourself. It will be good for both of you.’ (27-28; emphasis mine)

Instead of following the path of Modernism, like some of his friends and contemporaries¹, E.M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) follows stylistic conventions, while still defying societal ones, challenging the very notions of propriety, morality, and religion. The book’s moral centre is embodied in the character of Mr Emerson, a philosopher-Englishman staying at the same Florentine pension as Lucy Honeychurch, the young protagonist. Up until their meeting, she has only been familiar with the rather conservative milieu of her relatives and acquaintances and “the world of rapid talk” (26); she is unsettled by the kind, direct manners of Mr Emerson and his son George, who seem to live according to a set of rules and beliefs entirely foreign to her. Lucy thinks Mr Emerson “a very foolish old man, […] very irreligious,” (27) and the narrator later notes that she “could not see that Mr Emerson was profoundly religious” (210); but the Emersonian reader would have known immediately that the Forsterian philosopher largely serves as a mouthpiece for the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Conclusive evidence of this, if any more were needed, can be found in a small detail, easily missed: the Emersons decorate their wardrobe with a maxim from another Transcendentalist philosopher, Henry David Thoreau.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American philosopher, founder of the Transcendentalist movement, essayist, lecturer, abolition activist, and a renowed public figure even in his time. His doctrine was based on the importance of individual perception, independence of thought, and personal relationship to Nature and Divinity. He wrote,

All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt. […] For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose. (Essays I: Spiritual Laws 172; emphasis mine)
The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations that our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of hands and the gnashing of teeth; that we miscreate our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature… (Essays I: Spiritual Laws 174; emphasis mine)

and similarly Forster’s Mr Emerson tells Lucy,

‘George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. But why should this make us unhappy? Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don’t believe in this world-sorrow.’
Miss Honeychurch assented.
‘Then make my boy think like us. Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes – a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.’ (28; emphasis mine)

To a young girl who has scarcely set foot outside of her mother’s drawing room, these words may sound foolish; but they are the philosophical foundation upon which this “novel of ideas” contained within the bildungsroman and the romance² is built. Mr Emerson is the true philosopher who lives according to his creed; who has reared his only son correspondingly, and seeks to awaken others, if he can. His words and his example, coupled with the influence of George’s love, lead Lucy to a spiritual growth that culminates in the final chapter. The novel of ideas, the bildungsroman, and the romance are all intertwined: the ideas lead to growth, love is part of the creed, romance is both the key to growth and its reward.

In order to advise a fellow guest, Mr Emerson does not refrain from mentioning “stomac acidity” only because it was considered the height of impoliteness to mention any organ or bodily function to a lady; he may be impolite and indelicate, but he is always kind. Learning this distinction between politeness and kindness is a first step towards Lucy’s reconfiguration of her world—of what “manners” really are and how they distract from a simpler, truer mode of life, how they stifle and constrict. Mr Emerson’s philosophy, his plain words, freely offered, awake a rebellion in Lucy (“For the first time Lucy’s rebellious thoughts swept out – for the first time in her life” p. 55), which, after being punished for it, she represses again for a time. Her instinct, however, that innate passion which allows her to play the piano with such great feeling, allows her also—in spite of her overbearing cousin’s influence and that of the Reverend Mr Eager—to see in the Emersons the mirror of a spiritual freedom she has unknowingly longed for. Their alternative way of life frightens her at first; the values she was raised to hold true are upset, put on unstable ground by the contrasting example of the Emersons. Lucy struggles greatly, and for a long time, before her final triumph and realisation. Society—even the society of her loving family—demands from her a sacrifice which, finally, she comes to see as intolerable: being untrue to herself, acting contrary to her desires, living an apparently comfortable, but stifled life within the strict boundaries of social acceptability. When she had lost all hope for herself, when she was still in a fight against her own desires, “Lucy was silent. […] She disliked confidences, for they might lead to self-knowledge and to that king of terrors – Light. Ever since that last evening at Florence she had deemed it unwise to reveal her soul” (201-202).

Alongside love, freedom, and beauty, one of the tenets of Mr Emerson’s philosophy is the rejection of the doctrine of sin—in this too his words are undistinguishable from those of Emerson’s Essays: “Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination and the like. These never presented a practical difficulty to any man—never darkened across any man’s road who did not go out of his way to seek them” (Essays I: Spiritual Laws 173)³. From this very disease—a disease of which his wife ultimately dies—Mr Emerson shields his son with all his might. Lucy herself has been infected, but recovers quickly; and it is her choice to not go to church that ultimately leads her to happiness, because she meets Mr Emerson while she is waiting for her mother.

In A Room with a View, Lucy Honeychurch must find her true self by learning to read the depths of her soul and then must strive to make that true self a lived reality, shedding her false self. There is a deep, obscure self to be read, interpreted, brought to the surface and lived, but reading, interpreting and becoming that self are quite difficult. As Forster depicts it, other events, characters and texts are needed to help Lucy “convert,” but in the end, she succeeds. (Walhout Hinojosa 73)

In the last chapter, Lucy tells George, “if we act the truth, the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run” (218). She, like George and his father, has finally learnt to act her truth.

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Works cited

Forster, E.M. A Room with a View [1908], Penguin English Library, 2012.

Scherer Herz, Judith. “A Room with a View”, in A Cambridge Companion to E.M. Forster. Edited by David Bradshaw, 2007.

Waldo Emerson, Ralph. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Brooks Atkinson, Modern Library Edition, 2000.

—. Essays I: Spiritual Laws, in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

—. Essays I: Love, in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Walhout Hinojosa, Lynne. “Religion and Puritan Typology in A Room with a View”, in Journal of Modern Literature, Summer 2010, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Summer 2010), pp. 72-94.

1. “Yet neither instance moves A Room with a View beyond conventional social comedy – not, at any rate, in the direction of modernism.” (Stevenson 218)

2. Emerson wrote about romances: “What books in the circulating library circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.” (Essays I: Love, 191)

3. Emerson held a firmly negative view of indoctrination: “And why drag this dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole Christendom? It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will” (Essays I: Spiritual Laws 175). The repetition of “against their will” reinforces the Emersonian (and Forster-Emersonian) ideal of freedom.