The Reconciling of Two Forsters: Maurice and A Passage to India as Dynamic Dialogue

Abstract

In 1885, the British Parliament passed the Labouchere Amendment, which criminalized unspecified acts of “gross indecency” between men. This was the law that, when E.M. Forster was sixteen, sent Oscar Wilde to prison. This situation had a profound impact upon Forster, leading him to conceal his sexual orientation for the remainder of his life. So, although Forster wrote Maurice, a novel about a romantic relationship between two men, in 1913, he withheld its publication until after his death. After abandoning Maurice, Forster—previously a prolific novelist—lapsed into a decade-long silence that finally ended with the publication of his final novel, A Passage to India, in 1924. Critics conventionally discuss A Passage to India in relation to such central and recurring themes in Forster’s canon as the tension between social classes, racial conflict under British Colonialism, and the limitations of conventional gender roles. Yet, A Passage to India also specially reimagines, reconfigures, and sublimates the overtly homosexual novel that Forster could not publish in his lifetime. The ghost of Maurice haunts A Passage to India, determining such elements as its portrayals of relationships (platonic, romantic, or merely complicated) between men and its depictions of women as upholders of social conventions, catalysts to the breakdown of male relationships, and secret keepers. A Passage to India, then, is a palimpsest of Maurice, a story of colonial India written over the erasure of an openly gay love story but with subtle traces of the original remaining. Keywords: E.M. Forster, palimpsest, intertextuality, homosexuality