The E.M. Forster Project: Where Angels Fear to Tread
I’ve been considering reading all of E.M. Forster’s (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) novels in chronological order for quite some time. For one thing, I think it’s an entirely achievable project (in the future I might regret this statement, but not just yet). Like Jane Austen, Forster wrote only six novels in his lifetime, all of modest length - if not by scope. But that’s one of the things I love about Forster: his taste, his modesty prevented him from writing novels that are moribund by excess, and so they remain (in my mind), exquisitely figured, and just so.
It’s a reflection of his famous modesty that his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is a mere 140 pages, but this is not to say that the novel itself is trivial or insubstantial. When you read the novel, you are impressed that E.M. Forster could write at 26, with such confidence, and such assurance, the elements that would make his later novels so admired: his empathy, his detailed character studies, his profound understanding of Victorian mores in all its contradictions and an abiding passion for art (architecture, painting, music and—the most beautiful of all—the natural world) itself. Some of these elements are more incipient than present, or emerge in inchoate forms: he would perfect these in later, greater novels. Still, I do think it’s hard not to read the book and not be a little dazzled by Forster’s accomplishments at age 26.
But what is Where Angels Fear to Tread all about? A young widow, Lila Herriton travels to Tuscany so that she may escape the oppressive social confines set by her late husband’s family. To her in-laws’ extreme dismay, Lila impulsively marries a young, ostensibly insignificant, entirely unsuitable Italian named Gino. After a tragedy occurs, the Herriton siblings (Philip and Harriet) and another young woman, Caroline Abbott, return to Italy for a reckoning, only to inadvertently induce events that auger further tragic consequences.
The novel, like much of Forster’s work is about the clash of cultures and like his later novel, A Room with a View, it is a novel about Italy, or at least Italy as it was conceived for middle-class Victorians. Forster makes clear how his English characters can only conceptualise the country - and its people - within the frame of their Baedeker-shaped* world-view. That is, Italy and its countrymen are merely the backdrop for which the novel’s English characters will perform their own (more important) dramas. Only at the end will the English characters begin to understand the folly of such beliefs. It is the most fatalistic aspect of Lila’s narrative, to situate herself in Italy, so blindly confident that her Englishness and her relative wealth will ensure that she is unceasingly worshipped and feted by her young husband and his fellow Italians. The chasm between that belief and reality, and Lila’s gradual awareness of it, are among the saddest parts of the novel - and Forster is rather unsparing in his portrayal of this ill-fated marriage. Yet Forster is already flexing his inimitable powers of empathy in this first novel. As he makes clear, Lila and her husband Gino are not necessarily bad people—they are, in moments, sympathetic characters in their own way—it is merely that her inculcated sense of English superiority, her own Victorian pre-occupation on class and status is so drastically, implacably incompatible with Gino’s own limited conception of gender and of the roles relegated to wives in his world.
Though Forster would have likely never conceived it to be so, I cannot help but apply a clear colonialist reading to the latter half of the book. The Herritons’ imperative to remove by any means from Italy an object they have no right to (in this case Lila and Gino’s baby son), despite the fact that the baby is intensely loved by his own father, is a classic colonialist act of entrenched racism. The Herriton’s belief that a child would be better off raised by an English family—despite the fact that the Herritons have no physical or legal claims to the child and are entirely indifferent to the his personhood—evokes, to this Australian reader at least, the Stolen Generation and other such violations in Australia’s shameful history.
There are limitations to this reading certainly. Even though you can see Forster attempting towards a more fulsome world view, Where Angels Fear to Tread fully positions the Italian characters as other, Gino is a character who more than brushes with brutish stereotypes. Indeed the true heart of the novel is the character I imagine closest to Forster himself, that of Lila’s brother-in-law Philip Herriton. A moderately educated lawyer, Philip Herriton imagines himself above the petty, small-minded hypocrisies and middle class affectations of Yorkshire town that his family resides, and from which Lila dares to escape from. In fact it is his love for Italy that inspires Lila to seek it. But Philip has been inculcated with his own brand of narrowness and repression as the others, and it is only through tragedy that he comes to realise his understanding of Italy has been one of aesthetic outsider, and hopelessly limited. Like Lila, he falls in love by the end of the book (with who it is a subject of debate among critics, many have read Philip as a sublimation of Forster’s own alienation as a gay man in a heterosexual world). Yet it is that burgeoning knowledge, that discovery and Philip’s new willingness to, as Forster would intone in a later, greater book to “only connect”, which will make you feel that by the end of the novel perhaps Philip will be better served by this love, and perhaps even permanently transfigured by it.
(June 2020)
*Baedeker Guides were travel guide books published by the Karl Baedeker firm of Germany beginning in the 1830s. They were widely used by British tourists in the 19th and early 20th century.