This idea comes directly from Elizabeth Outka’s article “Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia” but I think it adds to some of the recent discussion on this blog as well as the Weihl article we have read. In her article, Outka explains that one of the popular trends that emerged out of England’s growing commercialism was the appeal of commodified nostalgia. At the turn of the century, there was a boom in the desirability for country houses that represented Englands’s agricultural past. These houses were aggressively marketed all throughout Forster’s time, so he would have been highly aware, while writing Howards End, about how England’s past was being commodified in the form of country houses. Although the houses represented history, they were inauthentic and merely a simulacrum of the English agricultural country house. According to Outka, the most popular architect at the turn of the century who built houses in this style was Edwin Lutyens. As you can see, his houses look like traditional country houses but were actually built around 1900, and also incorporate various different eras from the English past into one house.
How commodified nostalgia relates to the house Howards End is similar to the arguments in Weihl’s article criticizing Howards End’s authenticity. Howards End is merely an illusion of the purified past; its possession by the Schlegel sister’s at the end of the novel does not represent a triumph of the pastoral over the modern. As Outka states in her article, the appeal of commodified nostalgia is paradoxical: it is rooted in the public’s genuine desire for a purified past, while simultaneously the forces of commercialism heavily drive and sustain this desire. Oniton Grange represents commercialized commodified nostalgia; to Henry Wilcox there is a great novelty in owning a traditional English country home. The house also demonstrates the liquidity of commodities as he is able to sell it off quickly when its novelty wears off. Margaret Schlegel’s desire for Howards End is awakened by her experience at Oniton Grange; she starts to imagine more frequently how satisfying life in the country would be. She begins to desire Howards End, a desire sustained by the attraction of nostalgia. However, the nostalgia represented by Howards End does not belong to the half-German Schlegel’s; their history is not the same as Howards End’s history, they merely possess it as a commodity that represents, to them, the idealized English past. This possession is not a triumph, since the novel ends with the idea of a “creeping London”, a city which will eventually assimilate Howards End and the land around it. The possession of the house only delays the unstoppable march of modernization.
I hope that kind of made sense. I’m interested to hear what others think about the idea of commodified nostalgia and how it relates to the novel!
Citation:
Outka, Elizabeth. “Buying Time: Howards End and Commodified Nostalgia.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 36.3 (2003): 330-50. JSTOR. Web. 27 Feb. 2016.