Chapter 5 - Amateurism, Musicology, and Gender

Summary

The fifth chapter examines Forster’s ironic representations of musical scholarship in its institutional form, analysing his negative portrayals of two rarely discussed women characters, Vashti in ‘The Machine Stops’ and Dorothea in Arctic Summer, as his championing of musical amateurism and his criticism of the professionalization of musicology. The chapter analyses Forster’s satirizing of early twentieth-century academia’s antiquarian interest in folk revival. What problematizes his satire, the chapter argues, is Forster’s conception of gender: on the one hand, Forster exposes that professionalism is often constructed by gendered discourses that depend on the conventionalism mind–body dualism of patriarchal culture; but on the other, he casts professional women in roles against which his narratives rebel. Asking whether the portrayals of the two women hide his misogyny, the chapter explores how Forster’s advocacy of musical amateurism is at the same time an attempt to negotiate women’s place in his often homoerotically charged envisioning of companionship.