I though I would take the opportunity to attempt to piece together some of the thoughts invoked from today’s discussion of E.M. Forster’s Howards End in relation to the Bloomsbury group. Bear with me here, this might not be very articulate and will most likely be comprised of many (perhaps unanswerable) questions.
I’ve been ruminating on the last passage we looked at on p.13, where Forster chronicles what I interpret as a metaphorical transition to modernity; Mrs. Munt’s train journey from the countryside to the city. It got me thinking about how Howards End, a novel unanimously understood as a work emblematic of this transitional period in British modernity, grapples with understanding this cosmopolitan space through a new appropriately modernist perspective. This new historical moment calls for a new way of understanding and articulating that moment – one without a moral commentary on society. This is why Forster is considered to be bordering both Victorian and more modernist literary conventions in his novel.
As the correlative to modernity, Forster represents the city as a neither positive or negative; its ephemerality and constant state of flux makes our understanding of it ultimately incomprehensible.The instability and fluidity of the modern world is the only thing we have to hang our hats on. Rather, it is the journey or movement, as a form within itself, that becomes the focus of modern literary conventions.
For the annotated bibliography and lit review assignment, I read an article by Regina Martin who maps the financial shift from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism onto a geographic opposition between country and city. Briefly put, Martin reads Howards End as representative of intrinsic “use value”, whereas London represents the new “exchange value” of finance capitalism. I found this idea supporting some of the things we discusses in class about the modernist focus on form in an ephemeral world. Similar to how modern literary conventions emphasize the process, the new mode of finance capitalism revolves around exchange – a equally fluid movement characteristic of modernity.
Did I understand everything properly? Is this what you gathered from the lecture? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I’ll cite below the Regina Martin article, in case you want to include it in your own research.
Works Cited
Martin, Regina. “Finance Capitalism and the Creeping London of Howards End and Tono-Bungay.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 55.3 (2013): 447-469. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 28 February 2016.
Yeah, I agree with your understanding of the connections between modernism and Forster. What I find interesting between this novel and other emergent forms of art during the early 20th century is this ubiquitous focus on attempting to represent a rapidly modernizing world. It is very much a world in flux, and one going through many transitions: new century, new technology replacing the old, new governments, industrial wars, etc.
For example, in class we covered the impressionists, but there was also the emergence of other abstract art forms like, cubism, surrealism, dadaism, and futurist art. There were various artistic methods that emerged during the modernist period that attempted to tackle this issue of representation, and you’ll notice that many of them focus on the themes of transition and change, or depict something going through a type of process. Similar to how Forster tries to represent the abstract idea of exchange value within the form of his novel, this art attempts to represent the abstract rapid changes of the modernizing world through the form or technique of the art.