8 - Forster and women

Summary

'I prayed you might not be a woman'

(LJ, p. 73)

'You can't drag in a woman'

(M, p. 109)

What is the status and relevance of the word 'woman' in Forster's writing? The first quotation above is spoken by a man to the woman he disastrously marries in a novel that takes its title from Shelley's epithet for marriage but which is dedicated to brotherhood. The second is spoken, ironically enough, by a man opting for marriage and forsaking (platonic) love between men, to a sexually braver man, in a novel that openly explores homosexual relationships in a regime of compulsory heterosexuality. Is the word 'woman' functioning differently in each case? This chapter considers Forster's representations of women and, more broadly, the changing understanding of what such representation might involve.

Most of Forster's novels and many of his short stories include strongly realised women protagonists or characters. George Watson finds Margaret Schlegel, for example, 'the most fully realised Englishwoman in the fiction of her century', while Rose Macaulay finds all Forster's women characters, old and young, 'alive with [. . .] imaginative actuality', and there is a rich and continuing seam of criticism exploring Forster's typology of women. Moreover, 'Forster and Women' may in some ways appear a limited if not obsolete topic, suggesting (1970s) vintage feminist criticism and ignoring its unspoken (and, for many, the now more relevant) topic of 'Forster and Men'. But the sense of obsolescence may not be due merely (and somewhat crudely) to the acknowledgement of biographical information concerning Forster's homosexuality.