Masculine Identity in E. M. Forster’s Maurice: Ascending to Max Stirner’s “Embodied Self”
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Abstract
E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971) has often been seen as a work apart from Forster’s other oeuvre, due to its overt homosexual themes and protagonist. This article compares the development of Maurice’s eponymous protagonist to Max Stirner’s dialectic of egoist development, which he described in his book The Ego and His Own (1844) in order to broaden the understanding of masculine development staged in Maurice. Stirner’s ideas have been co-opted by other modernist movements which are politically far removed from Forster, the structure of Maurice parallels Max Stirner’s dialectic of development towards a “unique” and “embodied” self that transcends social ideals step by step. This comparison opens up both Maurice and Stirner’s ideas to broader and more inclusive readings. Tracking Stirnerian ideas in Maurice, and concluding with a comparison between chapter 43 of the 1913-14 manuscript of the novel and its published version, I aim to highlight the difficulty of ascending to the unique self Stirner envisioned. Maurice’s ability to move beyond Stirner’s second phase of egoist development by leaving society altogether makes Maurice unique among Forster’s novels, in which the tension between conforming to social ideals or re-imagining such ideals is often left unresolved or is resolved only by death.
Keywords: Forster / Stirner / Maurice / Egoism / Masculinity
In 1932, William Plomer wrote as follows to E. M. Forster about the latter’s manuscript for Maurice (which would not be published until 1971): “If I had read it when I was seventeen I should have made a better job of my life in the succeeding ten years or bust in the attempt. It would have been something to steer by” (qtd. in Alexander 185-86). Clearly, Plomer valued the development of the eponymous protagonist, who struggles to find authenticity under the yoke of bourgeois ideals, and he saw it as an example of what his younger, developing, self lacked. The masculine ideal presented in Maurice advocates for freedom from bourgeois social standards and a healthy connection to the body, correcting an Edwardian bourgeois ideal that denied the corporeal aspects of masculine identity.
The road to Maurice becoming a published novel was long, and its masculine ideal was developed across different manuscripts. The oldest surviving manuscript dates from 1913-14 and multiple readers from the period, including Edward Carpenter, Leonard Greenwood, Lytton Strachey, and Christopher Isherwood, influenced the composition. Forster started the novel in 1912 after a visit to Edward Carpenter. In the terminal note to the 1959 manuscript Forster spoke of the novel as a “direct result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe” that “made a profound impression” and inspired Forster to begin composing. In 1915 Forster wrote to his friend E. J. Dent:1 “I wrote it neither for my friends or the public – but because it was weighing on me” (Forster, Selected Letters 222). The novel started as an outlet for Forster, who knew that he could not publish without risking litigation, as there were laws prohibiting the positive portrayal of homosexual characters. When Forster met authors from the generation known as the “Auden generation,” such as W. H. Auden himself, Christopher Isherwood, and J. R. Ackerley, in the early 1930s, he resumed work on the novel, at which point the manuscript evolved into a form very close to what was eventually published after his death. In the 1959 terminal note Forster hints at his worry that the novel might have become too dated to ever be published at all (Maurice 223). And in Forster: A Life (1978), biographer P. N. Furbank writes that “[Forster] had no intention of publishing Maurice during his lifetime and now he was not certain that it ought to be published at all” (304). Forster seems to have been very anxious about how the novel would be received, an anxiety that became worse when people with whom he shared the novel reacted coolly (304). When the novel was published in 1971, after Forster’s death in 1970, it shocked many critics who had previously been ignorant about Forster’s homosexuality. Unfortunately, this initial reaction caused Maurice to become a work that critics have viewed as a work apart from Forster’s other oeuvre, as a specifically homosexual novel.
Those who read Maurice before its publication were predominantly homosexual men, and the novel was published at a time when queer liberation gained new territory. At that time Maurice, with its masculine protagonist, showed how masculinity and homosexuality could be mutually inclusive, rather than exclusive. In a way, Maurice was a character who one could point to as an example as queer respectability. However, Maurice has more to say about masculine subjectivity under bourgeois Englishness generally than many critics have allowed. The development of the protagonists Maurice and Alec rests not solely on their sexual development in conflict with bourgeois mores but on their development as people. Now that we have moved further away from a time when homosexuality was criminalized, we can see this novel for what it is: a story about imperial, patriarchal, bourgeois masculinity as a trap for all men. In seeking new pathways for masculine development, Forster was not alone. The novel’s structure parallels psychological models of healthy development proposed by Max Stirner. Stirner’s dialectic of development towards a “unique” self that transcends social ideals step by step (7), placed in conversation with Forster’s novel, highlights the ways Forster’s model of masculinity applies across a spectrum of masculine experience. Max Stirner’s The Ego and His Own—published in German in 1844 and first translated into English in 190—was “all but forgotten soon after its publication,” but “enjoyed an unlikely revival of interest at the turn of the century right across Europe” (Ashford xiii). In Britain, figures such as Dora Marsden, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis promoted his ideas, but also people in Forster’s more immediate circle, such as Herbert Read.
In The Ego and His Own, Stirner identifies three phases of development toward the “unique” self. First, in the early years, “childhood liberation takes the direction of trying to get to the bottom of things” (13). Children start as instinctual creatures who wish to understand the material world. Second, youth becomes transfixed by the mind or the spirit, but loses “himself again in the general spirit,” by which Stirner means social ideals such as “the complete, holy spirit, man, mankind” (17). In Maurice, these two first stages are reflected in parts I, II, and III, during which Maurice learns about different (socially accepted) ways of being a man from his teachers, family friends, and Clive. After Clive breaks up with Maurice, he tries to conform to society’s expectations of him, stifling his mind and body in the process. In the third and final state, a man reaches the “unique” self of Stirner’s dialectic by transcending ideals and by falling “in love with his corporeal self,” through which “the man finds himself as embodied spirit” (17). Once Maurice stops trying to conform to his oppressive surroundings after he sleeps with Alec, he and Alec reach this stage by leaving English bourgeois society altogether. Key elements of the masculine ideal represented by Maurice and Alec are the connection between mind and body and the acceptance of physical desire, regardless of what that desire looks like.
Although Stirner mostly refers to man as a generalized term, the egoist literary movement, particularly through Dora Marsden and her journals The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, and The Egoist, used Stirner’s ideas to further feminist discourse in which she promoted the new “Superwoman,” who was an individualist, egoist woman, not a complement to men, but her own creative spirit.2 Reasonably, it can be said that Stirner’s ideas may therefore also be applied to men as males. However, in Maurice, Maurice and Alec leave English society altogether instead of trying to create their own ‘superman’ within society. Paul Peppis argues that while Maurice “elaborates [Forster’s] critique of English masculinity” (57), “Maurice […] appears less ‘happy’ than Forster’s ‘Terminal Note’ insists. The union of Hall and Scudder requires, after all, their total withdrawal from English society” (59). While Peppis sees the withdrawal from society as something to mourn, measuring Maurice’s development against Stirner’s dialectic indicates that social withdrawal is an understandable outcome when social norms clash with his ability to reach his “embodied spirit.” Forster hints at, but never achieves, such an outcome in other novels such as The Longest Journey (1907) and Howards End (1910).
Despite the striking parallels in the models of development in Stirner’s dialectic and Maurice, they have never been compared before, likely because of Stirner’s subsequent association with fascist ideas retain. . Stirner’s ideas are often associated with other modernist movements such as Vorticism, the English equivalent of Futurism, a movement that has much in common with fascism because of its promotion of hyper-masculinity, misogyny, racism, and violence. Forster was not a Vorticist, nor did he endorse fascism as some of Vorticism’s key proponents did. It is understandable that we may not want to compare the ideas of authors we like to ideas that hold such associations. Stirner is also often seen as an extreme nihilist, which seems counter to Forster’s epigraph to Howards End: “Only Connect”. However, Wayne Bradshaw argues: “Such charges of extreme nihilism ignored Stirner’s troubled efforts to provide an egoistic foundation for love, generosity, and artistic creation” (4). Reading Stirner through Forster’s work both recovers value in Stirner’s work, allowing us to read his ideas more broadly, and broadens the types of masculinity that are associated with Stirner’s ideas. The comparison to Maurice shows an egoist masculinity based on love for oneself, instead of violence and hyper-masculine ideas. Similarly, recognizing Stirner in Maurice allows us to place Maurice more firmly amongst Forster’s other oeuvre, instead of apart from it. As mentioned before, Maurice has often been read as unique amongst Forster’s other works because of its overt homosexual themes. However, as I will show, reading Forster through Stirner’s dialectic makes it easier to see the similarities between Maurice’s development and the development of other, heterosexual, Forster protagonists.
While Forster may not have come into direct contact with Stirner’s work,3 recent scholarship proposes that Stirner’s dialectic had an impact on modernist literature as a whole. David Medalie calls Forster’s modernism “reluctant” (1), but he also argues that Forster’s work “emphasises the revisionary projects that lie at the heart of certain versions of modernism” (1). David Ashford ties egoism to modernist thought and points out that new research has shown a “clear pattern” in the use of “references to egoism in classics of literary Modernism” (xvi). He argues that “Modernist individualism is […] a dialectical egoism that employs procedures derived from Hegel, which serves to set writing in this tradition apart from the near-contemporary vogue for Romantic egoism (reimagined by F. W. Nietzsche),” and that later engagement with “this preliminary Modernism” “reflects the extent to which Modernism pre-empts much that is often said to differentiate, from this earlier movement, post-modernist theory and practice” (xviii-xix). An analysis of the parallels between Stirner’s dialectic and E. M. Forster’s Maurice continues the under-explored line of thought, which highlights the influence of egoist thought on modernist literature.
As scholarship stands, Stirner has only once been referenced in relation to Forster. David Holbrook sees a touch of Stirner’s “creative frivolity” in Mrs Fielding’s collapse in A Passage to India (1924), as she has a “collapse of meaning” (123). In his analysis of Maurice, Howard J. Booth approaches the argument I intend when he states, “The novel does not fully resolve the tension between the thoughtful and cultural, and the instinctual and new” (178). Maurice posits a struggle to imagine new models of being when generalized ideals are considered absolute truth. In Stirner’s terms, language can obstruct individual thought: according to Rachel Potter, Stirner argues that “the most sinister way in which the external world infiltrates the ego is through words” (22). To Stirner, neither the State, nor its institutions such as education and the family, nor its ideas of ideal “masculinity” or “femininity” can adequately describe the unique self:
People would like to give every man an affluence of all good, merely because he has the title “man”. But I put the accent on me, not on my being man. [. . .] What is one to think of a woman who should want only to be perfectly “woman”? That is not given to all, and many a one would therein be fixing for herself an unattainable goal. [. . .] I am a man just as the earth is a star. As ridiculous as it would be to set the earth the task of being a “thorough star”, so ridiculous it is to burden me with the call to be a “thorough man”. (162-63)
Stirner sees ideas of masculinity and femininity as ridiculous and oppressive as they force people to strive for something most cannot reach, rather than encouraging them to find their own identity.
The analysis of Stirner’s three-part dialectic as it occurs in the plot of Maurice also challenges ideas such as Robert K. Martin’s important “Double Structure” argument, in which the “views expressed by Clive in the first half of the book may be taken to represent the author’s” (35). I would argue that Clive represents the second phase of Stirner’s dialectic, a phase the novel then moves past (albeit with some difficulty), and that examining manuscript differences in chapter 43 across Forster’s revisions demonstrate his intent. The 1913-14 manuscript of Maurice features a more moralizing narrator and a protagonist who fears his physical and sexual desires, but Forster resolved these tensions in subsequent versions of the novel, suggesting that Forster needed time to formulate the current outcome of the novel. Further, Martin’s oft-cited article focuses on homosexual masculinity, as opposed to what the character Maurice says about masculine development in a more general sense. This perspective is understandable given the work’s cultural status, but, as Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai write, knowledge of Forster’s homosexuality has colored scholarship about Forster’s works and has caused Maurice to be “regarded as ‘simple’ and relegated to a lesser status,” because homosexuality is an explicit part of the text, rather than part of a perceived subtextual layer (4). By placing Maurice in the context of Stirner’s theory, I seek not to dismiss homosexuality as essential to the discussion but rather to reframe Forster’s critique of English bourgeois ideas of masculinity.
Throughout this study, a step-by-step comparison between Maurice’s personal development in the novel and Stirner’s dialectic will newly reveal how the self to which Maurice must ascend applies beyond specifically homosexual masculinity. Furthermore, the analysis of key differences in chapter 43 of the 1913-14 manuscript of Maurice compared to the published version will emphasize the conflict between assimilating to communal ideals and becoming what Stirner would call one’s “unique” self or “embodied spirit.” Recognizing the indirect influence of Stirner’s thinking in Forster’s novels places Forster more firmly within a recently highlighted tradition of “modernist individualism.” Finally, Maurice’s ability to move beyond Stirner’s second phase of egoist development by leaving society altogether makes Maurice unique among Forster’s novels, in which the tension between conforming to social ideals or re-imagining such ideals is often left unresolved or is resolved only by death.
All Spirit: Commonalty and Hellenism
In Maurice, Forster’s eponymous protagonist must grow past two masculine ideals that are presented to him by bourgeois society in order to reach a more authentic, even heroic, identity. Maurice grows up with an English bourgeois ideal of masculinity and at university he is introduced to a “Hellenic” ideal (221). This Hellenic ideal is supposed to function as an alternative to what he learned as a child, but in reality it similarly represses physical desire and is therefore unsustainable. For Maurice, both masculine ideals are societal fantasies to which he cannot conform. To Stirner, these societal fantasies are “spooks” (40), reified commonplaces that alienate people from their “unique” selves. Stirner argues that, far from offering a progressive model of individualism, “Liberalism simply brought other concepts on the carpet; human instead of divine, political instead of ecclesiastical, ‘scientific’ instead of doctrinal” (88). According to Stirner, modern man only believes in “humanity” (liberal humanism) as a concept: “as people separated the ‘essence of man’ from the real man, and judged the latter by the former, so they also separate his action from him, and appraise it by ‘human value’. Concepts are to decide everywhere, concepts to regulate life, concepts to rule” (87-8). In modernity, ideas promulgated as universal truth by the state alienate people from themselves. John F. Welsch argues that “In Stirner’s dialectical egoism, the specific content of reification may vary by society and historical period, but it always entails alien, fixed ideas and the renunciation of the ability of individuals to create mind, self, and society” (68). According to Martin, Forster shows “the unreliability of school and university as guides to conduct in the sexual [and masculine] realm” under the conditions of modernity in the first part and the beginning of the second part of the novel (Martin 38). For Maurice, Hellenic ideals positioned as liberating thus reify his prior cultural experience rather than offering him a new path for understanding himself.
Although he does not reference Stirner, Forster shares the view that these ideals of the new rules of society are propagated by institutions such as school and the (extended) family. In his 1920 essay “Notes on the English Character,” Forster writes:
[young men] go forth [into the world] with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts. [. . .] [I]t is not that the Englishman can’t feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks. (15)
Maurice, to an extent, suffers from this “undeveloped heart.” He is described as having “a slow nature,” needing “time to even feel” (Forster, Maurice 49) and these characteristics come from his educational experiences. Maurice’s childhood exemplars of and instructors about masculinity are Mr Ducie and Dr Barry, his teachers. Mr Ducie tells Maurice to “copy [his] father” and to “never […] do anything [he] should be ashamed to have [his] mother see [him] do” (7). On Maurice’s last day at preparatory school, Mr Ducie situates “the mystery of sex” (8) in religion, making it sacred, shrouding it in shame, and rendering it—in Stirner’s terms—a communal spook. Mr Ducie advises Maurice that the “ideal man” must be “chaste with asceticism,” an attitude which again limits sexual expression (10). What we learn from this explanation is that men should live their lives in the service of the liberal institution of the family, ignoring their physical urges. When Maurice is later sent down from Cambridge, Dr Barry scolds him for being a “disgrace to chivalry” because he refuses to apologize to the dean and is uncourteous to his mother and sisters (73). Barry reaffirms the ideal that a good, English, bourgeois man, serves women as a function of compulsory heterosexuality and respects paternal authority rather than serving and respecting himself. The teachings of Mr Ducie and Dr Barry are part of what Stirner calls “commonalty” (90):
The commonalty is nothing else than the thought that the state is all in all, the true man, and that the individual’s human value consists in being a citizen of the state. In being a good citizen he seeks his highest honour; beyond that he knows nothing higher than at most the antiquated—“being a good Christian”. (90)
Commonalty teaches people to behave as the politically liberal state would have them do and to consider that to be the ideal to strive for, rather than finding one’s own unique ideas of self. The “good Christian” ideal Stirner despises, which Forster presents as the bourgeois norm in the novel, is unsustainable for Maurice.
Nevertheless, a Hellenic masculine ideal initially spurs Maurice to critique his prior experiences of masculinity. Under the tutelage of Clive Durham, Maurice enters Stirner’s second developmental stage of fixation on the mind or spirit. However, rather than a true attempt at re-imagining the spooks of English bourgeois society, Hellenism is another false ideal. In the novel, Durham explains that he “was obliged [. . .] to throw over Christianity” and its accompanying masculine ideals due to its “incompatibility with his sense of himself” (Maurice 60). Clive mistakenly thinks that because Hellenism suits him because of its spiritual nature, it could suit Maurice as well. He tells Maurice: “Every man has somewhere about him some belief for which he’d die. Only isn’t it improbable your parents and guardians told it to you? If there is one won’t it be part of your own flesh and spirit?” (41). In this instance, however, Clive becomes a sort of “guardian” to Maurice and eventually judges him for abandoning the Hellenic ideal.
“Hellenism” or “Platonism” played an important role in Oxbridge society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Linda C. Dowling writes, “At Oxford such liberal reformers as Jowett and Arthur Stanley, Mark Pattison, and Goldwin Smith would [. . .] seek in the study of Greek culture nothing less than a surety for England’s future life as a nation” (xiv). However, because Hellenism is sanctioned by educators such as Jowett, Stanley, Pattison and Smith, it becomes another tool of the liberal state, not a release from it, as Forster shows in Maurice. Hellenist thought as promoted at Oxbridge drew on Pausanias’s distinction between two types of masculine love in his speech in Plato’s Symposium: “Heavenly” and “Common” love (13). Pausanians explains: “Common Love is genuinely ‘common’ and undiscriminating in its effects [. . .]. People like this are attracted to . . .] bodies rather than minds” (13). In “Heavenly Love,” “those inspired with this love are drawn towards the male, feeling affection for what is naturally more vigorous and intelligent” (13). “Heavenly Love” leads to masculine enlightenment because it encourages rationality and virtues such as courage. Maurice’s interest in those who represent Hellenist university culture is distinctly queer because Hellenism advocates for intimate relationships between men. However, it is also another limiting “given” thought in separating spirit and body, much like the ideals Maurice learned as a child. Stirner writes: “there is a great difference between the feelings and thoughts which are aroused in me by other things and those which are given to me” (61). Clive’s Hellenism, while accepting love between men on an intellectual basis, arouses Maurice’s interest yet it still denies Maurice’s sexual desire and would curtail his development just as much as the bourgeois ideals do.4
Although Clive believes that their clear boundaries against physical gratification bring about the “golden age” in his relationship with Maurice (Maurice 132), these boundaries drive Maurice away from his authentic desires. Like the heteronormative bourgeois ideal, Hellenism is all spirit, making it equally unsustainable to Maurice, who instinctively understands the importance of a connection to the body. The disconnect between Maurice’s desires and Clive’s spiritual idealism becomes most evident when Clive tells Maurice he is no longer in love with him. During the scene of their break-up (chapter 25), After a period of physical illness (a clear manifestation of his spiritual turmoil) Clive looks at Maurice and thinks, “The horror of masculinity had returned, and he wondered what would happen if Maurice tried to embrace him” (111). In their Platonic, sexless relationship, Maurice had gained a “beautiful expression” (61), but without their idealism to fall back on, Clive perceives the masculine body Maurice inhabits as a “horror” contrary to his Hellenistic ideals. Maurice believes he can heal Clive: “If you’d have told me, you would have been right by now. [. . .] Because I should have made you right” (111). When Clive asks him how, Maurice replies, “You’ll see,” while smiling, clearly hinting at sexual healing (111). Maurice believes sex could heal Clive because he subconsciously knows he does not need to be afraid of making their relationship physical. To Maurice there is nothing wrong with a desire for sex with men, which is to him what Stirner would call a naturally “aroused” thought and part of his authentic development into a man.
However, after the break-up, Maurice believes that he must conform to the bourgeois ideal in order to survive. This forced conformity causes spiritual death and makes Maurice so physically lonely that he almost assaults Dickie Barry, Dr Barry’s nephew. Maurice
grew more bitter, he wished that he had shouted while he had the strength and smashed down this front of lies. [. . .] His family, his position in society—they had been nothing to him for years. He was an outlaw in disguise. [. . .] as he was going up to town one morning it struck him that he really was dead. (118-19)
Maurice is past the point of being able to conform to the commonalty of his social surroundings, and without Clive he is unable to follow the given ideal of Hellenism. Maurice is not, however, past seeing his failure to conform as a moral failure, as he sees himself as an “outlaw.” Regarding bourgeois “morality” Stirner writes:
The web of the hypocrisy of today hangs on the frontiers of two domains, between which our time swings back and forth, attaching its fine threads of deception and self-deception. No longer vigorous enough to serve morality without doubt or weakening, not yet reckless enough to live wholly to egoism. (51)
The moral failure Maurice finds in himself is, according to Stirner, only moral failure within the rules set by his social context. Maurice recognizes that he is spiritually dead but is not yet “reckless enough to live wholly to egoism” (51).
Thus, in a section of Maurice that remained mostly unchanged since Forster first wrote it, Maurice seeks to conform to the givens of bourgeois English masculinity. Committing even more fully to his spiritual suicide, Maurice undergoes hypnotherapy in an attempt to cure himself of his homosexuality. The narrator explains that Maurice "wanted a woman to secure him socially and diminish his lust and bear children. [. . .] during the long struggle he had forgotten what Love is, and sought not happiness at the hands of Mr Lasker Jones, but repose" (159). Maurice believes that he will find peace when he can comply with heterosexual masculine norms. The extremity of his attempts, and their ultimate failure, tacitly endorse Stirner’s view that authenticity resists despite social pressure. When Maurice becomes insusceptible to hypnosis after he has sex with Alec for the first time, the hypnotherapist, Lasker Jones, realizes the futility of Maurice’s attempted conversion attempt as well. Jones advises Maurice to move to a country that “has adopted the Code Napoleon [sic]”—a code that decriminalized any sexual act between consenting adults—and remarks that “England has always been disinclined to accept human nature” (188).
In Stirner’s dialectic, authenticity is not something someone has to philosophize about for a long time. It is a subconsciously creative act. The way in which Maurice’s body seems to choose subconsciously to give in to his desires almost mirrors, and therefore counteracts, the hypnoses. In the depths of lonely despair while staying at Clive’s estate, Penge, it is Maurice’s subconscious, and a conveniently placed ladder, that finally intervenes and pushes Maurice towards an authentic existence by giving him a taste of what that it feels like to give in to what he truly wants, without muddying his physical desire with too much thought. Maurice must choose between conversion and authenticity. Maurice shouts “Come!” out of his open window while “he really was asleep,” something he did during his first night at Penge as well, but this time someone answers: Alec, Clive’s gamekeeper (170). In this moment, Maurice’s mind and spirit, united, move toward Stirner’s third stage of development: “Someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, ‘Sir, was you calling out for me? … Sir, I know… I know,’ and touched him” (170). After this first night together, which literally and symbolically starts the final part of the novel, Maurice feels that he is “resting utterly at last,” because he has escaped the limitations of his upbringing and Clive’s Hellenism (174). The narrator explains, “By pleasuring the body Maurice had confirmed […] his spirit in its perversion, and cut himself off from the congregation of normal man” (190). The language is pejorative, using the words of bourgeois society for those who violate rules, following Stirner’s emphasis on the role of language in promoting conformity. Having sex for pleasure, rather than reproduction, with a man is not an activity that befits a bourgeois man. Having had sex with another man, and knowing that he cannot deny himself sexual pleasure, Maurice feels that he has foregone any chance of existing in “normal” society, but he does not yet have positive language for his authentic self.
Class Differences: A Tool Against the Unique Self
Alec is the key to Maurice ascending to authentic masculinity because Maurice, as a bourgeois man, profits from his social status, while Alec, who belongs to the working class, does not. According to Stirner, bourgeois liberalism keeps class inequalities intact because only the bourgeoisie profits from them; the bourgeois citizen is “what he is through the protection of the state, state’s grace. He would necessarily be afraid of losing everything if the state’s power were broken,” which inspires loyalty (103-4). Stirner explains that “Under the regime of the commonalty the labourers always fall into the hands of the possessors [. . .]. The state pays well that its ‘good citizens’, the possessors, may be able to pay badly without danger” (104). The working-class (“labourers”) however, are unprotected and thus it “remains a power hostile to this state, this state of possessors, this ‘citizen kingship’.[. . .] The labourers have the most enormous power in their hands, and, if they [. . .] used it, nothing would withstand them” (104-5). Therefore, according to Stirner, Alec’s working-class status would allow him power to reject English bourgeois ideals and decide on his own worth. However, Alec is initially as beholden to English bourgeois ideas as Maurice, as he is planning to emigrate to Argentina with his brother and attempt to raise himself into the bourgeoisie (Maurice 192). This desire to raise oneself up to a higher class goes both against Stirner’s view of the power of the working class, and Forster’s frequent use of couples from different class backgrounds to create a new, invigorated modern society. Peppis recognizes this necessity of combining “different national types,” or different classes, to create “new national families” as a motif in Forster’s writing:5
These new national families redress England’s maladies by connecting—in love, marriage, blood—different national types: suburbanites, and farmers, intellectuals and clerks, gentlemen and gamekeepers. Offered as paradigms for a renewed England, Forster’s cross-bred families embody the hope of a nation converted from urban “progress” and capitalism, from suburban intolerance and repression, to rural decency, freedom, and truth. (48)
However, in Maurice the “hope of a nation converted” is not a hope but a necessary departure. At the end of the novel, Alec and Maurice leave England’s urbanized landscape for its woods, measuring their happiness and wellbeing by each other rather than navigating the waters of bourgeois society . Had they, for instance, emigrated to Argentina together they would have simply exchanged one social constraint for another.
As Stirner has demonstrated, class is another way in which people are alienated from themselves, and each other, by the state. Maurice and Alec must overcome their class differences and the social ideals on which those differences are based in order to become their unique selves together. According to Stirner, if two people are their unique selves with each other they “have nothing in common with the other any longer, and therefore nothing divisive or hostile either; you are not seeking to be in the right against him before a third party [. . .]. The opposition vanishes in complete—severance or singleness” (186). However, rather than creating loneliness, unique selves can achieve “real intercourse”: “Intercourse is mutuality, it is the action, the commercium [connection] of individuals; society is only community of the hall, and even the statues of a museum-hall are in society, they are ‘grouped’” (193-94). Only as individuals can people find real connection. Within liberal society as Stirner evaluates it, everything, even “connection’ between people, is stained by ideals that mediate between, and thus divide, people. Thus, two key chapters, 39 and 43, illustrate the divisive power of commonalty and subsequently the transcendence Alec and Maurice achieve. Chapter 39, featuring the “Park vs. Village” cricket match, forces Maurice and Alec back into their respective classes. Maurice and Alec both play for the “Park” team and Maurice feels that
all England were closing round the wickets. They played for the sake of each other and of their fragile relationship [. . .]. They intended no harm to the world, but so long as it attacked they must punish, they must stand wary, then hit with full strength, they must show that when two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph. (Maurice 178-79)
Maurice acknowledges that an open relationship would require a continuous battle against a society hostile, in morality and law, to their desires. Maurice’s thoughts echo Stirner’s strictures about the state: “For the state it is indispensable that nobody have an own will, if one had, the state would have to exclude (lock up, banish, etc.) this one; if all had, they would do away with the state” (174). This scene shows the strength of society in keeping Maurice and Alec imprisoned in inauthenticity through its many agents. However, Maurice still seems hopeful that together he and Alec can triumph in living a life authentic to them within the system that represses them, which is why he needs to confront Alec and their shared fears.
Forster’s setting for Maurice and Alec’s final, successful confrontation with the commonalty echoes Stirner’s analogy of the “museum-hall,” as they meet at the British Museum. There, they acknowledge fear and class difference, and jointly choose to give in to the desires of the body. At the beginning of the chapter, neither man can trust the other while they are fixed in their respective class and the society that controls them. It is Alec’s intention, following hackneyed scripts of inter-class sexual relations, to blackmail Maurice as he feels he has been treated unfairly after their night together and is worried about Maurice’s true intentions (192). Maurice and Alec approach their confrontation as a battle: “[Maurice] was [. . .] anxious to play the game, and, as an Englishman should, hoped that his opponent felt fit too,” while “[Alec] was waiting for signs of fear, that the menial in him might strike” (196). The ideals of the liberal state are a constant third party in any connection and promote hostility.
Forster revised this chapter many times, revealing that this conflict in the novel was not easily resolved by the author. In both versions of the novel, however, Forster maintained the setting, the British Museum, for the final confrontation between Maurice, Alec, and, arguably, English bourgeois society. The use of the British Museum as the setting, and its collection, which is “grouped” in order to reflect social ideals, adds to the tension between Maurice and Alec. The encounter with Mr Ducie amplifies the tension by reminding Maurice of his early training to be an ideal Englishman: “It was as if Mr Ducie had established some infuriating inequality between them, so that one struck as soon as his fellow tired of striking” (Maurice 100-1). In the 1913-14 manuscript, however, Forster also uses Mr Ducie to help Maurice identify with Alec by identifying himself as Alec. Mr Ducie sparks Maurice’s memory of his initial instinctive rejection of the social norm Mr Ducie represents: “They had not acknowledged that the crack in the floor
The ending of Chapter 43 was also changed fundamentally between the 1913-14 manuscript and subsequent versions, again revealing how difficult it was for Forster to imagine the outcome of the chapter as it is today. The older version almost fails to allow Maurice the bravery of choosing his body, but instead has Maurice use the same Hellenist rhetoric against sex he was taught by Clive to deny himself a second night with Alec. Maurice argues that to have an hour’s pleasure is “ugly somehow. It’s not harmonious. We shouldn’t give anything up for it” (Forster, “Textual Notes” 292). Maurice suggests that the exact thing Alec and he do in the published version (escaping to the “greenwood”) is only for “people in poetry”. The Maurice of 1913-14 is not yet ready to make the sacrifices needed, but tries to reason with his desires and calls doing so “harmony”: “How curious that all through the interview [Maurice] had profited by Clive! Harmony. That really did seem the guide to conduct. But his own harmony, not Clive’s, not Alec’s even” (208). However, I would argue that this version of “Harmony” is Clive’s harmony, precisely because Maurice and Alec have only addressed the intellectual sides of their fear and place in society, not the physical side. Reasoning against the body, with England and Clive looming in the background, is the opposite of the heroic ideal Maurice is meant to move towards.
Thus, it is not surprising that exiting the British Museum reduces the tension between the two men. When the conflict between Maurice and Alec almost comes to a head, it takes them leaving the building, in all versions of the novel, for them to become calmer (a clever foreshadowing of the retreat of the ending). Once outside, Maurice understands that it was their respective places in society that kept them apart and made them fearful of any unsanctioned action:
Maurice saw now how natural it was that their primitive abandonment at Penge should have led to peril. They knew too little about each other—and too much. Hence fear. Hence cruelty. And he rejoiced because he had understood Alec’s infamy through his own—glimpsing, not for the first time, the genius who hides in man’s tormented soul. (Maurice 201)
Through Alec, Maurice glimpses his unique, embodied self and in the end, it is not talk, but once again action led by Alec, which pushes Maurice and Alec away from false ideals and towards their respective embodied spirits. The novel recognizes Alec’s power as a working-class man when he takes control and asks Maurice to “stop” with him in the countryside: “It was Alec who ventured them” (201). Again, Maurice tries to make excuses based on his place in society, but finally he answers with a simple: “To Hell with it,” sealing both their fates in the eyes of Edwardian England (202).
Stirner understands the difficulty with evolving from common morals, and he recognizes that becoming one’s unique self it is a process that is in constant flux. The quotation given earlier in which Stirner says that he would cover his property with his shield (316) is followed by this reversal: “I shall look forward smilingly to the outcome of the battle, smilingly lay the shield on the corpses of my thoughts and my faith, smilingly triumph when I am beaten” (316). Stirner means that not only outside forces will constantly try to change his ideas, but also that he himself should do so as well. Welsch writes: “What mattered to the dialectical egoists was the person’s ownership of mind, self, and body so that they can freely choose their thoughts and behaviors” (271). These thoughts and behaviors should constantly be evaluated, lest they become new spooks. Maurice can only reach “ownership of mind, self, and body” by leaving society altogether to a place where he has the freedom to choose his thoughts and behaviors, but some bravery is necessary in order to make that decision. The “battle” between Maurice and Alec in the British museum was necessary for them to be able to let go of their class differences and fears. They were challenged by the environment of the museum itself, the encounter with Mr Ducie, and their pre-conceived notions of themselves and the other, but in the end the acknowledgement of fear allows Alec, but more importantly, Maurice, to follow through on the realization he has at the start of chapter 42, that society is worthless, and that he has no place in it.
Understanding the submerged influence of Stirner’s model casts light on the meaning of the ending of Maurice. There has been much speculation about the reason why Forster chose the final meeting between Maurice and Clive as the ending of the novel. For example, Booth speculates that ‘It perhaps constitutes the return of the possibility of love between those with similar class backgrounds’ (182), and John Fletcher argues that the “novel’s concluding return to the figure of Clive suggests a contradictory logic at work whereby the formation of the masculine couple requires the exclusion of the unmanly intellectual [. . .] only to repeat in displaced form the primordial experience of paternal loss and abandonment that the happy ending was designed to assuage” (90). Stirner’s point of view, however, gives the ending a different meaning.
Considering Stirner’s dialectic, the final chapters serve to show the reader how far removed Maurice now is from Clive, and Martin’s “Double Structure” argument. In the penultimate chapter Maurice enters Penge “through a gap in the hedge” (Maurice 213). At once it strikes him “how derelict [Penge] [is], how unfit to set standards or control the future” (213). Maurice’s blinders towards the ruling class and its controlling ideals have been taken off, and he recognizes Clive and his sort for what they are: agents of commonalty. Maurice describes himself as being “flesh and blood” (embodied spirit) and Clive describes himself in turn as “a frightful theorist” (all spirit) (216). After Maurice confesses what he has done Forster writes: “Clive turned to a generalization—it was part of the mental vagueness induced by his marriage” (216). In the context of Stirnerian thought, this ending shows that Clive’s marriage to a woman has more to do with a denial of his own authenticity. He has retreated back into Stirner’s first developmental phase. To Clive, Hellenism was an aroused, original thought, but because he has married a woman, Clive has completely abandoned any original thought and has instead given in completely to commonalty and its reified ideas of morality, inducing “mental vagueness”. And while Clive thinks of ways to “rescue” his friend, Maurice has already decided that he “could suffer no mixing of the old in the new. All compromise was perilous, because furtive, and, having finished his confession, he must disappear from the world that had brought him up” (217). Without society and its alienating ideals, Maurice can live an uncompromised life, authentic to himself and his desires. The ending is almost like a test for Maurice, to see if he can truly withstand society’s pull, even when it comes from his former lover.
Egoism or Death
As we have seen, Forster’s Maurice is often read solely as a homosexual novel, or as a novel that pitches homosexuality against heterosexuality. However, the parallels between the development of Maurice’s character, and the phases of development identified by Max Stirner’s dialectic, help to reframe Maurice’s dilemma as one common to men living in bourgeois modernity rather than just to men identifying as homosexual. This analysis of Maurice illuminates masculine distress as a result of what Stirner calls “commonalty,” specifically as represented by education and the family. Although Clive’s Hellenism has often been seen as an ideal that awakens Maurice, Stirner’s dialectic shows it to be another spook that reinforces bourgeois ideals such as chastity. Clive, and the heteronormative characters in the novel, are not underdeveloped specifically because of their sexuality, but because they exist only in the mind and disregard the body, especially with regards to desire. In E. M. Forster’s Maurice, men can escape class, and the masculine ideals placed upon them by society; they can be queer, without compromising their masculinity; and most importantly, moving towards an egoist self allows them to end the denial of the corporeal self.
Among Forster’s other novels, this ascension to the embodied self by the protagonist is unique to Maurice. Only in his posthumously published short stories such as “The Life to Come” (written 1922) and “Dr Woolacott” (written 1927) could it be argued that the protagonists also move beyond society, but in their case they can do so only in death. Paul Peppis claims, “The endings of a number of Forster’s later homosexual stories refuse Hall and Scudder’s refuge of pastoral fantasy and intensify the pessimistic implications lurking in Maurice’s conclusion” (58). In the novels before Maurice, male characters such as Leonard Bast of Howards End and Rickie Elliot of The Longest Journey never make it past the second phase of Stirner’s developmental dialectic, or die for trying to do so. Rather than being able to escape the alienating nature of bourgeois English ideals, Leonard Bast is killed by them. Instead of seeking a life away from commonalty, Leonard is convinced that he can raise himself enough to profit from it by reading the correct books and knowing the correct people. And Rickie Elliott, already bourgeois, learns to understand that his rough, working-class half-brother Stephen is “a hero. [. . .] a law to himself” (Longest Journey 278), but before he can attain his brother’s authenticity, he dies. While Peppis’s interpretation is arguable, characterizing the ending of Maurice a “pastoral fantasy” oversimplifies the complexity of Forster’s effort.
Only in Maurice do Maurice and Alec reach their embodied selves by escaping English bourgeois society before it kills them, spiritually or physically. In the context of the other novels, and Stirner’s dialectic, their solution does not read as a pastoral fantasy but as a necessary reality. As Stirner wrote, the working class has great power in challenging the liberal state and its alienating ideals, which is why Alec plays such a pivotal role in Maurice’s ascendency to his unique, heroic self. In Forster’s other novels his protagonists are unable to either recognize their own working-class power, or unable to ascend to their unique self with the help of a working-class partner.
Amid the recently revived interest in individualist modernism in literary scholarship, which has focused on authors such as Dora Marsden, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, Forster’s liberal humanist philosophies have meant that the influence of egoist thinking in his work has been almost completely overlooked. This is no surprise, as Forster never mentions Stirner in any of his writing, and any knowledge he may have had of his ideas was likely second-hand. Yet the striking parallels between Stirner’s dialectic and the individual development in Maurice reveal that Forster, like his more modernist contemporaries, contemplated the state of modern masculinity and the ways in which it could be revived from its mental and physical torpidity. Although Stirner’s ideas are often seen as anarchist, nihilist, and were read by authors who also promoted Vorticism, seeing them reflected in Maurice shows that even authors who we do not consider revolutionaries or anarchists, like Forster, had more modern, and society-defying ideas than we give them credit for. Reading Stirner in Maurice also shows us that Stirner’s ideas do not inevitably lead to a hyper-masculine, or even violent, form of authenticity. In Maurice Forster posits, much like Stirner does in The Ego and His Own, that true authenticity is rooted in love, which is impossible to ascend to as long one remains in the English bourgeois society of his time.
Notes
1. Professor of Music at Cambridge between 1926 and 1941 and a close friend of Forster.
1. Professor of Music at Cambridge between 1926 and 1941 and a close friend of Forster.
2. See, for example, The Freewoman, vol.1, no. 1 (1911).
3. While there is no direct evidence that Forster read Stirner, Forster might have picked these ideas up indirectly or heard about them second-hand from authors such as Edward Carpenter or D. H. Lawrence, who were in his circle and wrote for Dora Marsden’s egoist journals The New Freewoman and The Egoist. Further, silence and disavowal are characteristics of the literature upon which Stirner had his most marked influence. Stirner himself wrote that “Every higher essence above me [. . .] weakens the feeling of my uniqueness” (324), meaning that even his own ideas should not be taken on as a philosophy, as they are unique to him. For Stirner’s reception history as a sort of anti-tradition, see the third chapter of David Ashford’s Autarchies, pp. 89-117.
4. Hellenistic arguments were used to hide then-illegal activity by disguising it as the embodiment of classical superiority. Oscar Wilde invoked Plato and Socrates when on trial for alleged sodomy and alleged gross indecency to characterize Hellenist homosexuality as acceptable and even noble within the late Victorian context. Victorian Hellenism tried to paint homosexual identity as one that actually works against corruption and effeminacy and is in fact very virtuous. However, this desire to paint Hellenist homosexuality as something that has its place in English society turns it into another agent of respectability and conformity, a spook. This makes Wilde’s prevarication very different from Maurice’s efforts to inhabit an authentic self.
5.This is not only a motif in Forster’s writing, but one that very much mirrored homosexual relationships in Forster’s social circles, as well as in his own life. These relationships had little to do with invigorating a nation, and stem more from a desire to have a hyper-masculine partner or to have a strong paternalistic/Hellenistic aspect. An autobiographical example of this phenomenon is J. R. Ackerley’s memoir My Father and Myself (1968). Matt Houlbrook, among others, describes the prevalence of the motif in “Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys.”
6. Underlined script signifies Leonard Greenwood’s writing. Greenwood was the owner of the only surviving 1913-14 manuscript. He was a classical scholar at Cambridge, Forster’s long-time friend, and one of the first people who Forster showed the then-unfinished manuscript.
Works Cited
Alexander, Peter F. William Plomer: A Biography. Oxford UP, 1989.
Ashford, David. Autarchies. Bloomsbury, 2017.
Booth, Howard J. “Maurice.” The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, edited by David Bradshaw, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 173-87.
Bradshaw, Wayne. The Ego Made Manifest: Max Stirner, Egoism, and the Modern Manifesto. Bloomsbury, 2023.
Dowling, Linda C. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Cornell UP, 2014.
Fletcher, John. "Forster's Self-Erasure: Maurice and the Scene of Masculine Love." Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, edited by Joseph Bristow, Routledge, 1992, pp. 64-90.
Forster, E. M. “Dr Woolacott.” The Life to Come and Other Stories. 1972. Edited by Oliver Stallybrass, Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 113-27.
---. Howards End. 1910. Penguin Books, 2000.
---. The Journals and Diaries of E. M. Forster. Edited by Philip Gardner. Vol. 2, Pickering & Chatto, 2011.---. Maurice. 1971. Penguin Books, 2005.
---. “The Life to Come.” The Life to Come and Other Stories. 1972. Edited by Oliver Stallybrass, Penguin Books, 1989, pp. 94-112.
---. The Longest Journey. 1907. Penguin Books, 1960.
---. “Notes on the English Character.” Abinger Harvest. 1936. Penguin Books, 1967, pp. 13-26.
---. Selected Letters of E. M. Forster Volume One (1879-1920). Edited by P. N. Furbank and Mary Lago. Arrow Books Limited, 1983.
---. “Textual Notes.” Maurice. Abinger Edition 5, edited by Philip Gardner. Andre Deutsch, 1999.
Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life, Volume Two: Polycrates' Ring (1914-1970). Secker and Walberg, 1978.
Holbrook, David. The Novel and Authenticity. Vision, 1987.
Houlbrook, Matt. “Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities, and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards, circa 1900–1960.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 42, no. 8, (2003), pp. 351-88.
Martin, Robert K. “Edward Carpenter and the Double Structure of Maurice.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 8, no. 3-4, 1983, pp. 35-46.
Medalie, David. E. M. Forster’s Modernism. Palgrave, 2002.
Peppis, Paul. “Forster and England.” The Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, edited by David Bradshaw, Cambridge UP, 2007, pp. 47-61.
Plato. The Symposium. Translated by Christopher Gill. Penguin Books, 1999.
Potter, Rachel. Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900-1930. Oxford UP, 2006.
Stirner, Max. The Ego and His Own. Translated by Steven T. Byington, edited by David Leopold, Cambridge UP, 1995.
Sutton, Emma, and Tsung-Han Tsai. “Introduction: Maurice through Time.” Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster’s Maurice, edited by Emma Sutton and Tsung-Han Tsai, Liverpool UP, 2020, pp. 1-21.
Welsch, John F. Max Stirner’s Dialectical Egoism: A New Interpretation. Lexington, 2010.