Seminar One: EM Forster – Howards End (1910)

Bridging Unit One – Late nineteenth century & early twentieth century prose

Seminar One: E M Forster – Howards End (1910)

E M Forster is one of England’s great novelists of the twentieth century yet he only had five novels published during his lifetime. Since his death in 1970, a further two novels have been published including Maurice the theme of which made it unsuitable to publish, certainly before 1967.

Forster acts as the link between Jane Austen at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Zadie Smith at the beginning of this century. Indeed, Zadie Smith has written her own version of Howards End called On Beauty.

The first seminar will be focused on the first two chapters of Howards End. [Clearly, if you wish, please read the whole novel.]

For this seminar, please complete the following reading. You will find everything you need to read in this document or in the references supplied. Feel free to read more widely if you wish!

• The summary of Howards End • Chapters 1 & 2 of Howards End

In your reading of the first two chapters, please focus on the following:

1. Attitudes to Howards End, especially the description of the garden 2. Attitudes to gender 3. Attitudes to recent inventions, eg the motor car 4. The character of Tibby

• The book has been made into an excellent Merchant-Ivory production film from the 1990s and was also an equally excellent BBC series from a year or so back.

1. Trailer (BBC) - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05mq0t0 2. Trailer (Merchant-Ivory) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nycvzzWxP0

• To help develop your discussion of the novel, there are also the following texts:

1. Women’s Suffrage 2. Late C19/early C20 inventions 3. The clash of urban and rural 4. Hay fever!

Howards End Summary Margaret Schlegel reads a series of letters from her sister, Helen, who is visiting the Wilcox family at their home, an old farmhouse called Howards End. Helen writes that she has fallen in love with Paul Wilcox, despite the great differences between their families—the Schlegels are liberal intellectuals, while the Wilcoxes are materialistic and conservative. When Margaret’s aunt Juley hears about Helen’s attachment to Paul, she goes down to the Wilcox house. After she leaves, Margaret receives a telegram from Helen saying that the infatuation is over. Juley bungles her first encounter with the Wilcoxes and Helen is badly embarrassed, but Ruth Wilcox steps in and skilfully settles the crisis. The Schlegels attend a concert. Helen leaves early and accidentally takes an umbrella that belongs to Leonard Bast, a working class man. Margaret invites Leonard to retrieve his umbrella from their house. He envies her superior grasp of art and culture. Margaret and Helen pity his hardship. Leonard refuses tea with the Schlegels and returns home to his cramped basement apartment, where he lives with Jacky, a ‘fallen woman’ whom he has promised to support and marry. The Schlegels discover that the Wilcoxes have moved to London after the wedding of Charles and Dolly Wilcox. Margaret gradually befriends Ruth, despite their different ages and ideas about life. Ruth suddenly passes away and leaves a handwritten note bequeathing Howards End to Margaret. Ruth’s husband, Henry, and their children disregard her note and say nothing to Margaret about her inheritance. Two years later, the Schlegels are forced to look for a new house in London. Leonard reenters their lives when he impulsively stays out all night walking and Jacky calls on the Schlegels to look for him. Margaret and Helen are impressed by Leonard’s journey into nature and wish they could do more for him. The next time they run into Henry Wilcox, he tells them that the insurance company where Leonard works may go out of business. The Schlegels invite Leonard over and tell him the news, encouraging him to move companies before he loses his job. Leonard is embarrassed but takes their advice. Henry offers to help Margaret find a new house. Spending more time together, they develop romantic feelings and become engaged. When Henry takes Margaret to see Howards End for the first time, she admires its simplicity and proximity to nature, but Henry considers the house too small and doesn’t intend to move back. He buys a country house in Oniton where his daughter, Evie, will soon have her wedding. If you want to find out what happens, read the rest of the novel!

Chapters 1 & 2 of Howards End

Chapter 1

One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.

Howards End, Tuesday. Dearest Meg, It isn't going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether delightful--red brick. We can scarcely pack in as it is, and the dear knows what will happen when Paul (younger son) arrives tomorrow. From hall you go right or left into dining-room or drawing-room. Hall itself is practically a room. You open another door in it, and there are the stairs going up in a sort of tunnel to the first-floor. Three bedrooms in a row there, and three attics in a row above. That isn't all the house really, but it's all that one notices--nine windows as you look up from the front garden.

Then there's a very big wych-elm--to the left as you look up--leaning a little over the house, and standing on the boundary between the garden and meadow. I quite love that tree already. Also ordinary elms, oaks--no nastier than ordinary oaks--pear-trees, apple- trees, and a vine. No silver birches, though. However, I must get on to my host and hostess. I only wanted to show that it isn't the least what we expected. Why did we settle that their house would be all gables and wiggles, and their garden all gamboge-coloured paths? I believe simply because we associate them with expensive hotels--Mrs. Wilcox trailing in beautiful dresses down long corridors, Mr. Wilcox bullying porters, etc. We females are that unjust.

I shall be back Saturday; will let you know train later. They are as angry as I am that you did not come too; really Tibby is too tiresome, he starts a new mortal disease every month. How could he have got hay fever in London? and even if he could, it seems hard that you should give up a visit to hear a schoolboy sneeze. Tell him that Charles Wilcox (the son who is here) has hay fever too, but he's brave, and gets quite cross when we inquire after it. Men like the Wilcoxes would do Tibby a power of good. But you won't agree, and I'd better change the subject.

This long letter is because I'm writing before breakfast. Oh, the beautiful vine leaves! The house is covered with a vine. I looked out earlier, and Mrs. Wilcox was already in the garden. She evidently loves it. No wonder she sometimes looks tired. She was watching the large red poppies come out. Then she walked off the lawn to the meadow, whose corner to the right I can just see. Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday--I suppose for rabbits or something, as she kept on smelling it. The air here is delicious. Later on I heard the noise of croquet balls, and looked out again, and it was Charles Wilcox practising; they are keen on all games. Presently he started sneezing and had to stop. Then I hear more clicketing, and it is Mr. Wilcox practising, and then, 'a- tissue, a-tissue': he has to stop too. Then Evie comes out, and does some calisthenic exercises on a machine that is tacked on to a greengage-tree--they put everything to use-- and then she says 'a-tissue,' and in she goes. And finally Mrs. Wilcox reappears, trail, trail, still smelling hay and looking at the flowers. I inflict all this on you because once you said that life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which, and up to now I have always put that down as 'Meg's clever nonsense.' But this morning, it really does seem not life but a play, and it did amuse me enormously to watch the W's. Now Mrs. Wilcox has come in.

I am going to wear [omission]. Last night Mrs. Wilcox wore an [omission], and Evie [omission]. So it isn't exactly a go-as-you-please place, and if you shut your eyes it still seems the wiggly hotel that we expected. Not if you open them. The dog-roses are too sweet. There is a great hedge of them over the lawn--magnificently tall, so that they fall down in garlands, and nice and thin at the bottom, so that you can see ducks through it and a cow. These belong to the farm, which is the only house near us. There goes the breakfast gong. Much love. Modified love to Tibby. Love to Aunt Juley; how good of her to come and keep you company, but what a bore. Burn this. Will write again Thursday.

Helen

Howards End, Friday.

Dearest Meg,

I am having a glorious time. I like them all. Mrs. Wilcox, if quieter than in Germany, is sweeter than ever, and I never saw anything like her steady unselfishness, and the best of it is that the others do not take advantage of her. They are the very happiest, jolliest family that you can imagine. I do really feel that we are making friends. The fun of it is that they think me a noodle, and say so--at least Mr. Wilcox does--and when that happens, and one doesn't mind, it's a pretty sure test, isn't it? He says the most horrid things about women's suffrage so nicely, and when I said I believed in equality he just folded his arms and gave me such a setting down as I've never had. Meg, shall we ever learn to talk less? I never felt so ashamed of myself in my life. I couldn't point to a time when men had been equal, nor even to a time when the wish to be equal had made them happier in other ways. I couldn't say a word. I had just picked up the notion that equality is good from some book-- probably from poetry, or you. Anyhow, it's been knocked into pieces, and, like all people who are really strong, Mr. Wilcox did it without hurting me. On the other hand, I laugh at them for catching hay fever. We live like fighting-cocks, and Charles takes us out every day in the motor--a tomb with trees in it, a hermit's house, a wonderful road that was made by the Kings of Mercia--tennis--a cricket match--bridge--and at night we squeeze up in this lovely house. The whole clan's here now--it's like a rabbit warren. Evie is a dear. They want me to stop over Sunday--I suppose it won't matter if I do. Marvellous weather and the view's marvellous--views westward to the high ground. Thank you for your letter. Burn this.

Your affectionate Helen Howards End, Sunday.

Dearest, dearest Meg,--I do not know what you will say: Paul and I are in love--the younger son who only came here Wednesday.

Chapter 2

Margaret glanced at her sister's note and pushed it over the breakfast-table to her aunt. There was a moment's hush, and then the flood-gates opened. "I can tell you nothing, Aunt Juley. I know no more than you do. We met--we only met the father and mother abroad last spring. I know so little that I didn't even know their son's name. It's all so--" She waved her hand and laughed a little. "In that case it is far too sudden." "Who knows, Aunt Juley, who knows?" "But, Margaret dear, I mean we mustn't be unpractical now that we've come to facts. It is too sudden, surely." "Who knows!" "But Margaret dear--" "I'll go for her other letters," said Margaret. "No, I won't, I'll finish my breakfast. In fact, I haven't them. We met the Wilcoxes on an awful expedition that we made from Heidelberg to Speyer. Helen and I had got it into our heads that there was a grand old cathedral at Speyer-- the Archbishop of Speyer was one of the seven electors--you know--'Speyer, Maintz, and Köln.' Those three sees once commanded the Rhine Valley and got it the name of Priest Street." "I still feel quite uneasy about this business, Margaret." "The train crossed by a bridge of boats, and at first sight it looked quite fine. But oh, in five minutes we had seen the whole thing. The cathedral had been ruined, absolutely ruined, by restoration; not an inch left of the original structure. We wasted a whole day, and came across the Wilcoxes as we were eating our sandwiches in the public gardens. They too, poor things, had been taken in--they were actually stopping at Speyer--and they rather liked Helen insisting that they must fly with us to Heidelberg. As a matter of fact, they did come on next day. We all took some drives together. They knew us well enough to ask Helen to come and see them--at least, I was asked too, but Tibby's illness prevented me, so last Monday she went alone. That's all. You know as much as I do now. It's a young man out the unknown. She was to have come back Saturday, but put off till Monday, perhaps on account of--I don't know. She broke off, and listened to the sounds of a London morning. Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of buildings separated it from the main thoroughfare. One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating. Though the promontory consisted of flats--expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierges and palms--it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace. These, too, would be swept away in time, and another promontory would rise upon their site, as humanity piled itself higher and higher on the precious soil of London. Mrs. Munt had her own method of interpreting her nieces. She decided that Margaret was a little hysterical, and was trying to gain time by a torrent of talk. Feeling very diplomatic, she lamented the fate of Speyer, and declared that never, never should she be so misguided as to visit it, and added of her own accord that the principles of restoration were ill understood in Germany. "The Germans," she said, "are too thorough, and this is all very well sometimes, but at other times it does not do." "Exactly," said Margaret; "Germans are too thorough." And her eyes began to shine. "Of course I regard you Schlegels as English," said Mrs. Munt hastily--"English to the backbone." Margaret leaned forward and stroked her hand. "And that reminds me--Helen's letter--" "Oh, yes, Aunt Juley, I am thinking all right about Helen's letter. I know--I must go down and see her. I am thinking about her all right. I am meaning to go down" "But go with some plan," said Mrs. Munt, admitting into her kindly voice a note of exasperation. "Margaret, if I may interfere, don't be taken by surprise. What do you think of the Wilcoxes? Are they our sort? Are they likely people? Could they appreciate Helen, who is to my mind a very special sort of person? Do they care about Literature and Art? That is most important when you come to think of it. Literature and Art. Most important. How old would the son be? She says 'younger son.' Would he be in a position to marry? Is he likely to make Helen happy? Did you gather--" "I gathered nothing." They began to talk at once. "Then in that case--" "In that case I can make no plans, don't you see." "On the contrary--" "I hate plans. I hate lines of action. Helen isn't a baby." "Then in that case, my dear, why go down?" Margaret was silent. If her aunt could not see why she must go down, she was not going to tell her. She was not going to say "I love my dear sister; I must be near her at this crisis of her life." The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle. If she herself should ever fall in love with a man, she, like Helen, would proclaim it from the house-tops, but as she only loved a sister she used the voiceless language of sympathy. "I consider you odd girls," continued Mrs. Munt, "and very wonderful girls, and in many ways far older than your years. But--you won't be offended? --frankly I feel you are not up to this business. It requires an older person. Dear, I have nothing to call me back to Swanage." She spread out her plump arms. "I am all at your disposal. Let me go down to this house whose name I forget instead of you." "Aunt Juley"--she jumped up and kissed her--"I must, must go to Howards End myself. You don't exactly understand, though I can never thank you properly for offering." "I do understand," retorted Mrs. Munt, with immense confidence. "I go down in no spirit of interference, but to make inquiries. Inquiries are necessary. Now, I am going to be rude. You would say the wrong thing; to a certainty you would. In your anxiety for Helen's happiness you would offend the whole of these Wilcoxes by asking one of your impetuous questions--not that one minds offending them." "I shall ask no questions. I have it in Helen's writing that she and a man are in love. There is no question to ask as long as she keeps to that. All the rest isn't worth a straw. A long engagement if you like, but inquiries, questions, plans, lines of action--no, Aunt Juley, no." Away she hurried, not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities--something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life. "If Helen had written the same to me about a shop-assistant or a penniless clerk--" "Dear Margaret, do come into the library and shut the door. Your good maids are dusting the banisters." "--or if she had wanted to marry the man who calls for Carter Paterson, I should have said the same." Then, with one of those turns that convinced her aunt that she was not mad really and convinced observers of another type that she was not a barren theorist, she added: "Though in the case of Carter Paterson I should want it to be a very long engagement indeed, I must say." "I should think so," said Mrs. Munt; "and, indeed, I can scarcely follow you. Now, just imagine if you said anything of that sort to the Wilcoxes. I understand it, but most good people would think you mad. Imagine how disconcerting for Helen! What is wanted is a person who will go slowly, slowly in this business, and see how things are and where they are likely to lead to." Margaret was down on this. "But you implied just now that the engagement must be broken off." "I think probably it must; but slowly." "Can you break an engagement off slowly?" Her eyes lit up. "What's an engagement made of, do you suppose? I think it's made of some hard stuff, that may snap, but can't break. It is different to the other ties of life. They stretch or bend. They admit of degree. They're different." "Exactly so. But won't you let me just run down to Howards House, and save you all the discomfort? I will really not interfere, but I do so thoroughly understand the kind of thing you Schlegels want that one quiet look round will be enough for me." Margaret again thanked her, again kissed her, and then ran upstairs to see her brother. He was not so well. The hay fever had worried him a good deal all night. His head ached, his eyes were wet, his mucous membrane, he informed her, was in a most unsatisfactory condition. The only thing that made life worth living was the thought of Walter Savage Landor, from whose Imaginary Conversations she had promised to read at frequent intervals during the day. It was rather difficult. Something must be done about Helen. She must be assured that it is not a criminal offence to love at first sight. A telegram to this effect would be cold and cryptic, a personal visit seemed each moment more impossible. Now the doctor arrived, and said that Tibby was quite bad. Might it really be best to accept Aunt Juley's kind offer, and to send her down to Howards End with a note? Certainly Margaret was impulsive. She did swing rapidly from one decision to another. Running downstairs into the library, she cried--"Yes, I have changed my mind; I do wish that you would go." There was a train from King's Cross at eleven. At half-past ten Tibby, with rare self- effacement, fell asleep, and Margaret was able to drive her aunt to the station. "You will remember, Aunt Juley, not to be drawn into discussing the engagement. Give my letter to Helen, and say whatever you feel yourself, but do keep clear of the relatives. We have scarcely got their names straight yet, and besides, that sort of thing is so uncivilized and wrong. "So uncivilized?" queried Mrs. Munt, fearing that she was losing the point of some brilliant remark. "Oh, I used an affected word. I only meant would you please only talk the thing over with Helen." "Only with Helen." "Because--" But it was no moment to expound the personal nature of love. Even Margaret shrank from it, and contented herself with stroking her good aunt's hand, and with meditating, half sensibly and half poetically, on the journey that was about to begin from King's Cross. Like many others who have lived long in a great capital, she had strong feelings about the various railway termini. They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie fenlands and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo. Italians realize this, as is natural; those of them who are so unfortunate as to serve as waiters in Berlin call the Anhalt Bahnhof the Stazione d'Italia, because by it they must return to their homes. And he is a chilly Londoner who does not endow his stations with some personality, and extend to them, however shyly, the emotions of fear and love. To Margaret--I hope that it will not set the reader against her--the station of King's Cross had always suggested Infinity. Its very situation--withdrawn a little behind the facile splendours of St. Pancras--implied a comment on the materialism of life. Those two great arches, colourless, indifferent, shouldering between them an unlovely clock, were fit portals for some eternal adventure, whose issue might be prosperous, but would certainly not be expressed in the ordinary language of prosperity. If you think this ridiculous, remember that it is not Margaret who is telling you about it; and let me hasten to add that they were in plenty of time for the train; that Mrs. Munt, though she took a second-class ticket, was put by the guard into a first (only two seconds on the train, one smoking and the other babies--one cannot be expected to travel with babies); and that Margaret, on her return to Wickham Place, was confronted with the following telegram:

All over. Wish I had never written. Tell no one. --Helen

But Aunt Juley was gone--gone irrevocably, and no power on earth could stop her.

Document 1 - Women’s Suffrage

The Campaign for the Vote The campaign to achieve women's suffrage went back many years. Its origins were said to lie in 1832. In that year there was a Parliamentary Reform Act, which extended the vote to a larger number of men (though still not very many, and you had to own a certain amount of property to qualify to vote). A woman called Mary Smith handed in a petition to Parliament asking that women who qualified for the vote should also be given the vote.

The campaign developed through the 19th and into the 20th century. Many different groups and organisations supported women's suffrage. There were political parties, especially the Labour Party, which committed itself to full equality in 1912. There were also many individual politicians within the three main political parties (Liberal, Conservative and Labour). There were organisations of women workers, especially in the textile mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire. There were also many women's suffrage groups like the Women's Freedom League, which worked with other female suffrage groups. However, the best-known campaigners were:

• The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), formed in 1897 and led by Milicent Fawcett • The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed in 1903 and led by Emmeline Pankhurst.

The Case for Women's Suffrage Many women's suffrage campaigners pointed out that wealthy, educated women were unable to vote while poor, uneducated workmen could vote. To them, this seemed to be unfair and unreasonable.

Other supporters of women's suffrage wanted the measure because they believed that all adults should have the vote. Groups like the Labour Party supported giving the vote to all men and women over 21 whether they owned property or not. This sometimes brought disagreements with some of the women's suffrage groups. Critics claimed they wanted 'Votes For Ladies' and not 'Votes For Women'.

There were many other arguments in favour of women's suffrage. One of the points made most often was that working conditions and laws in Britain discriminated against women. For example, women worked long hours in factories, especially in Northern England. By the early 1900s men could vote in order to change this, but women could not. In 1901 Selina Cooper, a Lancashire textile worker, led a delegation of women workers to Parliament with a huge petition demanding the vote. Another complaint was that government measures helped sick or unemployed working men, but left women and children without protection.

Female suffrage campaigners also pointed out that laws relating to marriage were often unfair to women. Many women suffered domestic violence but sentences for men were usually very light. When a marriage broke down, it was generally assumed that the woman was to blame. There were also many laws relating to child welfare that were unsatisfactory. For example, there was very little protection for young working class girls from sexual abuse or being forced into prostitution.

Women pointed out that men were supposed to look after them, but the laws in Britain proved that they had failed to do so. This meant that they should be given the vote so that they could get laws passed which would protect them properly.

The Case against Women's Suffrage The arguments against female suffrage were not simply about men denying women the vote. There is no doubt that this was a factor. Many of the opponents of female suffrage believed that men and women belonged in different 'spheres'. The men's sphere was politics, government, work, war, trade and business. The role of the woman was as wife and mother and in running the home. It was felt that getting involved in politics was not right for women. For one reason, it would put too much strain on them! Second, men saw politics as a hard and dirty business, and they genuinely wanted to keep women out of this arena.

It is important to remember that many women felt this way. Opponents claimed that the majority of women were opposed to women's suffrage, though it is virtually impossible to know whether this was true. There certainly were many female opponents of women's suffrage.

Some of the opposition to women's suffrage was political. The Liberal Party feared that giving votes to women would be politically disastrous for them. Most of the women who would get the vote would be from wealthier families. They were most likely to vote Conservative. Labour wanted completely equal voting, rather than simply giving the vote to some better off ladies.

Another reason for opposition was that the issue was simply not seen as important. In the early 1900s Britain was facing many challenges. Relations between trade unions and employers were very bad and there were many bitter and violent strikes. There was conflict in Ireland that looked as though it might turn into a civil war. The Liberal government was busy with welfare reforms to help the unemployed, the old and children. Finally, the situation in Europe was very worrying, with the possibility that Britain might end up at war with Germany. Compared to these issues, many people felt that female suffrage was simply not an important issue.

Wider Issues Relating to Women It is important to remember that women were involved in many other issues apart from the vote. By 1900 women could vote in local council elections and serve as councillors. They often served on School Boards, helping to run schools. Organisations like the Salvation Army did a lot of work with the poor in Britain's cities. The Women's Temperance League campaigned to reduce or even ban the drinking of alcohol. The Women's Labour League campaigned for better working conditions for women and also better health care and sanitation.

Women were very active in areas other than politics. For many, this was enough and they had no interest in the vote. However, many women felt that they should be involved in charitable and social work and they should campaign for the vote. They felt that the work of the Salvation Army helped the worst off people in society. They also felt that if they had the vote they could stop the worst off people getting into hard times in the first place.

Document 2 - Late Nineteenth Century/Early Twentieth Century Innovations

1880—1889

1881—David Houston patents camera film in roll format.

1884—L. A. Thompson built and opened the first roller coaster in the United States at a site on Coney Island, New York.

1884—James Ritty invents a functional mechanical cash register.

1884—Charles Parson patents the steam turbine.

1885—Karl Benz invents the first practical automobile powered by an internal- combustion engine.

1885—Gottlieb Daimler invents the first gas-engine motorcycle.

1886—John Pemberton introduces Coca-Cola.

1886—Gottlieb Daimler designs and builds the world's first four- wheeled automobile.

1888—Nikola Tesla invents the alternating current motor and transformer.

1890—1899

1891—Jesse W. Reno invents the escalator.

1892—Rudolf Diesel invents the diesel-fueled internal combustion engine, which he patents six years later.

1893—W.L. Judson invents the zipper. 1895—Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invent a portable motion-picture camera that doubles as a film-processing unit and projector. The invention is called the Cinematographe and using it, the Lumières project the motion picture for an audience.

1899—J.S. Thurman patents the motor-driven vacuum cleaner.

1900-1910

1900 - The zeppelin invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.

1900 - Charles Seeberger redesigned Jesse Reno's escalator and invented the modern escalator.

1901 - The first radio receiver successfully received a radio transmission.

1901 - Hubert Booth invents a compact and modern vacuum cleaner.

1902 - Willis Carrier invents the air conditioner.

1902 - George Claude invented neon light.

1903 - The Wright brothers invent the first gas motored and manned airplane.

1903 - William Coolidge invents ductile tungsten used in lightbulbs.

1905 - Albert Einstein published the Theory of Relativity and made famous the equation, E = mc2.

1905 - Mary Anderson receives a patent for windshield wipers.

1907 - Colour photography invented by Auguste and Louis Lumiere.

1907 - The very first piloted helicopter was invented by Paul Cornu.

1908 - Model T Ford first sold.

1910 - Thomas Edison demonstrated the first talking motion picture.

1910 - Georges Claude displayed the first neon lamp to the public on December 11, 1910, in Paris. Representations of the Countryside in E.M. Forster’s Howards End

In the early 1900s many artists and writers revelled in the city. Others, recalling earlier traditions, still looked to the countryside for inspiration. Helena Bonett inspects the country idyll in E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End. Last Monday a man – named Farman – flew a ¾ mile circuit in 1½ minutes. It is coming quickly, and if I live to be old I shall see the sky as pestilential as the roads. It really is a new civilization. I have been born at the end of the age of peace and can’t expect to feel anything but despair. Science, instead of freeing man ... is enslaving him to machines ... God what a prospect! The little houses that I am used to will be swept away, the fields will stink of petrol, and the air ships will shatter the stars. Man may get a new and perhaps a greater soul for the new conditions. But such a soul as mine will be crushed out.

Writing in his diary in 1908, E.M. Forster lamented the new mechanised world that was rapidly rendering centuries of tradition outmoded. Forster was drawn to the countryside. In this essay I look at Forster’s Howards End (1910), exploring how the writer conveyed their particular perception of the countryside and rural life. *

Alice Clara 'Lily' Forster and Herbert Whichelo leaning on the fence at Rooksnest, Stevenage undated, Photographic print, 156 x 108 mm, King's College Library, Cambridge.

Forster was brought up in the Home Counties countryside in Hertfordshire in a house called Rooksnest, later the inspiration for the house, Howards End. In the mid-1950s he remembered Rooksnest as ‘a lovable little house, and still is, though it now stands just outside a twentieth-century hub and almost within sound of a twentieth-century hum’. The ‘hum’ was from electricity pylons and the ‘hub’ was Stevenage, which was built up as part of the post-war housing boom in the late 1940s; today Rooksnest sits on the outskirts of the town. Forster fictionalised this encroachment at the end of Howards End when Helen Schlegel tells her sister, Margaret, that: ‘London’s creeping.’

She pointed over the meadow – over eight or nine meadows, but at the end of them was a red rust. ‘You see that in Surrey and even Hampshire now,’ she continued. ‘I can see it from the Purbeck downs. And London is only part of something else, I’m afraid. Life’s going to be melted down, all over the world.’ Margaret knew her sister spoke truly.

In the novel Margaret voices Forster’s own private fears about modernisation. Looking to the future she muses, ‘This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years’ hoping that ‘It may be followed by a civilization that won’t be a movement, because it will rest on the earth’.

This anti-modern longing for a rural idyll was felt by many in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It inspired numerous utopian outpourings that envisioned a future golden age in which the city would be replaced by the countryside, most famously in William Morris’s novel News from Nowhere (1890). It also motivated the development of the Garden Cities and Garden Suburbs, such as Letchworth (just north of Rooksnest) and Hampstead, both of which were home to members of the Camden Town Group. In this period it was common for artists and writers to work during the summer in rented country cottages. Some even fostered a ‘simple life’ rural persona, such as the painter Augustus John as a gypsy, while others, such as the tramp poet W.H. Davies, were admired for their ‘authentic’ way of life. Similarly, members of the Bloomsbury Group, with whom Forster was affiliated, spent long periods working in the countryside.

Sketch map showing the layout of rooms and design of the garden in the autograph manuscript memoir of Rooksnest, Stevenage 1894–1947 King's College Library, Cambridge.

Photograph of Rooksnest from the front, showing the wych-elm undated Inscribed on the back by E.M. Forster, 'Only record of wych-elm (in Howards End)', Photographic print, 197 x 148 mm, King's College Library, Cambridge.

Forster was never completely happy in the city and always felt nostalgic for his idyllic childhood at Rooksnest, where from 1883 until 1893 he had lived a leisured existence with his mother, Lily, in ‘an attractive, gabled house with four acres of farm and gardens’. Unlike the new-build detached and semi-detached properties in local Stevenage, which to him were ‘ugly new houses’ that ‘much disfigured the road’, Rooksnest was proudly described in his earliest known writing at the age of fifteen to be ‘very old. Some said 200 years and some 500.’ A key symbol in Howards End is the wych-elm in the garden, which evokes the spirituality and sense of ancient inheritance that Ruth Wilcox wishes to pass on to Margaret. A wych-elm likewise stood in the garden at Rooksnest; the young Forster found pigs’ teeth in it one day and then learnt of the local custom of embedding teeth in the bark to cure toothache, a tale recounted by Ruth in Howards End.

For Forster, Rooksnest was an ancient, almost mystical house, its history ingrained in its very fabric. Yet his mother’s pragmatic attitude towards the house was quite different. Lily had responded to the following advertisement in the Hertfordshire Express on 17 June 1882:

TO BE LET – on lease or otherwise – a SMALL HOUSE, at Rooksnest, Stevenage (unfurnished) containing drawing room, dining room, hall, kitchen, scullery, pantry and larder on ground floor, 4 bedrooms on first floor, good attics, wc etc; excellent cellars. Beautifully situated with extensive views over some of the prettiest parts of Herts. ¼ mile from Stevenage church and 1 ¼ miles from Stevenage station. Rent £45 or with 4 acres of excellent Pasture £55. Stabling if required. For further particulars inquire of Mr Warren, Jun., Builder, Stevenage.

The cheap rent appealed to Lily, as did the refurbishments to the house, as she wrote to her cousin, Maimie Synnot: it is a very old gabled house and yet it is perfectly new, it has been refurbished, the inside scooped out – everything nice & pretty as possible – good sanitary arrangements.

Importantly, it was close to the local train station, and consequently not at all isolated from modern life in London:

‘Stevenage is in Herts., about ¾ hour from Kings Cross, trains run frequently, second class fare 3/7’.

Rooksnest, therefore, was a rural idyll with modern conveniences (although it did lack running water).

In this next section I explore how Forster viewed the city, which serves to illuminate his representations of the country.

Forster was born in London in 1879, at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, which was knocked down in the 1890s to make way for the development of Marylebone Station, its hotel and surrounding flats. Forster lived intermittently in London throughout his life. While his childhood years at Rooksnest formed the basis for the idyllic country house in Howards End, Forster’s experience of teaching at the Working Men’s College on Crowndale Road, Camden Town and his friendship with one of the students, a printer called Alexander Hepburn, inspired the creation of the character Leonard Bast.

In Howards End we are confronted with a gritty urban interior when Leonard, who ‘stood at the extreme verge of gentility’, arrives home to his flat, one of a number of new blocks ‘constructed with extreme cheapness’ near Vauxhall, after rescuing his ‘stolen’ umbrella from the West End residence of the upper class Schlegel family. Forster’s description of Leonard emphasises that his physical degeneracy is the result of urban living:

One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tailcoat and a couple of ideas.

Leonard’s soon-to-be wife Jacky is described as ‘all strings and bell-pulls – ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clinked and caught – and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends uneven’, resembling a music hall performer. In her precarious social position, she is standing with Leonard close to the ‘abyss’ of poverty.

Forster’s experience of the nomadic and fluctuating nature of London is echoed in Margaret Schlegel’s experience in Howards End. Margaret is caught up in a style of urban living – visiting concerts and exhibitions, attending meetings and debates – metaphorically likened to a fast-flowing river. It is, however, shown to be shallow and without substance when she becomes friends with Ruth Wilcox. Ruth tells Margaret ‘there is nothing to get up for in London’, to which Margaret objects: ‘Nothing to get up for? ... When there are all the autumn exhibitions, and Ysaye playing in the afternoon! Not to mention people.’ The ‘clever talk’ of Margaret and her friends is, for Ruth, ‘the social counterpart of a motor-car, all jerks’, while Ruth ‘was a wisp of hay, a flower’. Margaret begins to realise that she and her friends ‘lead the lives of gibbering monkeys’, but appeals to Ruth saying ‘we have something quiet and stable at the bottom. We really have.’

Margaret initially feels safe from the modernisation surrounding her, as her family continues to live in her childhood home at Wickham Place, likened to ‘an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating’. But the narrator later notes that ‘The Londoner seldom understands his city until it sweeps him, too, away from his moorings, and Margaret’s eyes were not opened until the lease of Wickham Place expired’. London then changes for her:

In the streets of the city she noted for the first time the architecture of hurry, and heard the language of hurry on the mouths of its inhabitants – clipped words, formless sentences, potted expressions of approval or disgust. Month by month things were stepping livelier, but to what goal?

She realises that ‘It is impossible to see modern life steadily and see it whole, and she had chosen to see it whole’. Urban living, equated with ‘modern life’, then, has created an existence for Margaret that is without stability, tradition or calmness, all of which she craves.

On walking to Howards End, Margaret finds that ‘At the church the scenery changed. The chestnut avenue opened into a road, smooth but narrow, which led into the untouched country.’ The land is ‘neither aristocratic nor suburban’ and ‘Though its contours were slight, there was a touch of freedom in their sweep’. The sense of freedom engendered by ‘untouched country’ is crucial to Forster’s vision: it is in the countryside where the individual is liberated. This is primarily demonstrated by Helen Schlegel’s move to Howards End following her pregnancy. To have brought up a child as an unmarried woman in London would have been difficult, and would have made her a social outcast. In the country, on the other hand, she is free to bring up her child as she desires. Forster’s implication therefore is that the countryside is the natural place for child-rearing, equating Helen’s fertility with the fecundity of nature. It is also a place of sexual freedom more generally. Forster experienced this in his own life when visiting Edward Carpenter who, unlike Forster, lived in an openly homosexual relationship out in the countryside. Freedom from stringent social constraints is therefore intimately linked, for Forster, with rural life.

But this was not a universal experience. As Ford Madox Ford wrote in 1906, the common yearning for a ‘return to the land’ was only really felt by the comparatively well-to-do. For the poor and the working-classes of the towns never really go back. One in five hundred may be attracted by a ‘good job’, but perhaps not one in a hundred goes seeking, however unconsciously, a country spirit.

Leonard Bast is ‘one in a hundred’ in his desire to ‘get back to the earth’. But he does not do so in order to connect with his rural past; in fact it is a ‘shameful’ secret that his grandparents ‘were just nothing at all ... agricultural labourers and that sort’. Rather he has read books that evoke the individual’s freedom when walking in the countryside and desires the romantic escape of fiction, thinking ‘What’s the good – I mean, the good of living in a room for ever? There one goes on day after day, same old game, same up and down to town, until you forget there is any other game.’ But Leonard’s freedom only lasts one night, as he later says after losing his job, ‘Walking is well enough when a man’s in work’ but now ‘I see one must have money’. His poverty ties him to the city and to his responsibilities, and the countryside ultimately renders him hungry, tired and bored.

Margaret finds dignity in the rural working classes. The charwoman for Howards End, Miss Avery, is belittled by the Wilcoxes, but Margaret realises that ‘Here was no maundering old woman. Her wrinkles were shrewd and humorous. She looked capable of scathing wit and also of high and unostentatious nobility.’ Miss Avery, as representative of rural folk, is noble because of her straightforwardness, in keeping with Margaret’s view of the unmannered and uncluttered rural existence as opposed to the modern urban way of life. However, this view contrasts quite sharply with her poor perception of the Basts as representatives of the aspiring urban working classes.

When Margaret first meets Leonard she finds ‘his class was near enough her own for its manners to vex her’. Upon meeting him again, she finds this clerk ‘uneasily familiar’ and muses that ‘She knew this type very well – the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outside of books. She knew the very tones in which he would address her.’ Leonard’s pretensions to culture and class aspiration are what repel Margaret; he does not fit in with the cultured life of the city or the ‘simple life’ of the country, as perceived and lived by the upper classes.

On each occasion that the Basts enter the countryside they are out of place. When first visiting her fiancé Henry Wilcox’s ‘genuine country house’, Oniton Grange, Margaret proclaims ‘I love Shropshire. I hate London. I am glad that this will be my home ... what a comfort to have arrived!’ When the Basts appear there, having been ferried up from London by Helen because Leonard has lost his job, Margaret realises that she finds Jacky ‘repellent’ and ‘had felt, when shaking her hand, an overpowering shame’, smelling ‘odours from the abyss’. Leonard’s final visit to the countryside – to Howards End – ends in his death. The night before, Margaret had felt that ‘The peace of the country was entering into her’, and even after Leonard’s murder by Charles Wilcox, she and her sister are able to ‘Let squalor be turned into tragedy’ as she ‘could not shake her belief in the eternity of beauty’ as given to her by the rural spirit. Margaret wants to help Leonard, but she cannot help being repelled by the ‘odour’ of his urban poverty, the product of his family’s migration from the country to the city. * After the Second World War, Forster himself was torn between his love of the country and its persistent sense of continuity and the needs of the mass of humanity when bombing had made many homeless and new towns needed to be built. Describing the neighbourhood of Rooksnest, he said ‘It must always have looked much the same. I have kept in touch with it, going back to it as to an abiding city and still visiting the house which was once my home, for it is occupied by friends.’ But the satellite town has finished the local people off ‘as completely as it will obliterate the ancient and delicate scenery’. Although he realises that people need to be housed:

I cannot free myself from the conviction that something irreplaceable has been destroyed, and that a little piece of England has died as surely as if a bomb had hit it. I wonder what compensation there is in the world of the spirit for the destruction of the life here, the life of tradition.

In weighing up his desire for an unspoilt countryside alongside his acknowledgment of housing needs, Forster concludes that ‘I cannot equate the problem. It is a collision of loyalties.’

The narrator in Howards End comments that in the Georgian period:

To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town.

Forster laments that the country is no longer of interest. The characters in Howards End could not find a happy medium between the rural and the urban.

Hay Fever

By the end of the 19th Century hay fever became popularly known as the "aristocratic disease", following John Bostock's observation that it mainly affected the upper classes. [Bostock was the first to write about hay fever.] Only those of a delicate disposition were deemed to be potential sufferers. Seaside and mountain resorts advertised themselves as places to escape its effects. But in the US hay fever became fashionable, such were its high-society connections. Sufferers were known as "Hayfeverites", a mocking description of wealthy young people eager to make heavy weather of their symptoms. Bostock and his successors had no understanding of allergies, the concept not even being devised until the start of the 20th Century. Nowadays hay fever is known to be such a reaction to tree, grass and weed pollen. Various theories are presented to account for the growth in known cases since the early 19th Century. One blames excessive hygiene, which is said to make the body more vulnerable to allergies. Another blames the increase in air pollution since the industrial revolution.

Seminar Two: The Garden Party and Other Stories – Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was born in New Zealand in 1888 and moved to England as a teenager. She wrote short stories and poetry and was friends with many famous writers of the time such as D H Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. The major literary movement at the time Mansfield was writing was modernism – modernist writers tended to break with convention in terms of plot, writing style and use of language. Additionally, after the First World War, many of them were interested in writing about the fractured state of society and the world. Mansfield is widely regarded as a pioneer of the short story form and ‘The Garden Party’ is one of her most famous short stories. It is a classic example of her writing style and themes. Mansfield focuses on capturing the psychology and inner lives of characters through free indirect discourse and ‘epiphanies’ (sudden moments of realisation and insight). Unlike traditional narratives, the stories typically begin in the heart of a moment and end abruptly. Mansfield strove for absolute precision and distillation, writing in a letter that, ideally, ‘there mustn’t be one single word out of place, or one word that can be taken out’. From contemporaries, including Woolf, to later writers such as Alice Munro and Philip Larkin, Mansfield’s influence and contribution to literary modernism extends throughout the 20th century. Many of the stories in ‘The Garden Party’ collection were written between 1920 and 1921 when Mansfield was seriously ill with tuberculosis. Her determination to continue working was upheld throughout the last weeks of her life when she began to learn Russian. She died in January 1923 at the age of 34. 1

1 https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-garden-party-and-other-stories-by-katherine-mansfield In this unit of work, you are going to do the following: • Find out more about Katherine Mansfield (video and audio links attached) • Read ‘The Garden Party’ (link attached) – there are questions to guide your reading. If you want to, you can also read more of Mansfield’s stories from the same, or other, collections. • Read an article about Mansfield, modernism and three of her short stories (including ‘The Garden Party’) – (link to the article attached)

Katherine Mansfield – Further Background

• Watch the following short video (5 minutes) from the Open University Women Writers: Voices In Transition series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX1qojYZW-I

• Listen to the following discussion (30 minutes) with the children’s author Jacqueline Wilson who nominates Katherine Mansfield as part of the BBC Radio 4 Great Lives series: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008pzg6

Reading

• Read ‘The Garden Party’ at the link below: http://katherinemansfieldsociety.org/assets/KM-Stories/THE-GARDEN-PARTY1921.pdf You can listen to the story if you prefer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07dtnnx

• As you read, think about the following questions:

How is the character of Laura presented at the beginning of the story? How does she change over the course of it? What is the effect of the detailed description of setting? How does it add to your impressions of the characters? What themes do you think Mansfield might be highlighting through this description? What do you think about the different characters’ reactions to what happens in the story? Do you sympathise with any of these reactions? What themes do you think Mansfield is highlighting here?

• If you want to, read more short stories from the same collection (http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-ManGard.html) or Mansfield's other collections (freely available online).

Critical Reading

• Read the following critical article which begins with an introduction to Mansfield’s style and explains a bit more about modernism, including the ‘epiphany’ element, and continues with a close reading of three of Mansfield’s short stories (the one about ‘The Garden Party’ is at the end of the article): https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-katherine-mansfields-short- stories

Seminar Three: Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Heart of Darkness is a significant text in the annals of English Literature: for many people, it remains an essential starting point for discussions of imperialism, the hypocrisies and glories of the West, and the ambiguities of ‘civilization’. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe believes that Heart of Darkness is a racist book. Joseph Conrad was born in czarist-occupied Poland - though he heard English spoken as a boy (and his father translated Shakespeare), it was his third language! He had been a master seaman who had worked as a colonial employee, working for a Belgian company in 1890, making his own trip up the Congo. He had lived within the consciousness of colonial expansion.

In this unit of work, you are going to do the following: • Read a summary of the novel • Read some historical background to the Congo • Read two extracts from the novel: there are questions to guide your reading. [NB. Feel free to read the whole novella: there is a link attached.] • Read a blog comparing Heart of Darkness with Francis Ford Coppola’s movie, Apocalypse Now! • Read an article on the ‘racism’ in Tintin books and look at some examples from the book, Tintin in the Congo Heart of Darkness Summary

Written in a little more than two months, the last of 1898 and the first of 1899, “Heart of Darkness” is both the story of a journey and a kind of morbid fairy tale. Marlow, Conrad’s narrator and familiar alter ego, a British merchant seaman of the eighteen-nineties, travels up the Congo in the service of a rapacious Belgian trading company, hoping to retrieve the company’s brilliant representative and ivory trader, Mr. Kurtz, who has mysteriously grown silent. The great Mr. Kurtz! In Africa, everyone gossips about him, envies him, and, with rare exception, loathes him. The flower of European civilization (“all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”), exemplar of light and compassion, journalist, artist, humanist, Kurtz has gone way upriver and at times well into the jungle, abandoning himself to certain . . . practices. Rifle in hand, he has set himself up as god or devil in ascendancy over the Africans. Conrad is notoriously vague about what Kurtz actually does, but if you said “kills some people, has sex with others, steals all the ivory,” you would not, I believe, be far wrong. In Kurtz, the alleged benevolence of colonialism has flowered into criminality. Marlow’s voyage from Europe to Africa and then upriver to Kurtz’s Inner Station is a revelation of the squalors and disasters of the colonial “mission”; it is also, in Marlow’s mind, a journey back to the beginning of creation, when nature reigned exuberant and unrestrained, and a trip figuratively down as well, through the levels of the self to repressed and unlawful desires. At death’s door, Marlow and Kurtz find each other.

Belgium's Heart of Darkness King Leopold II’s personal rule of the vast Congo Free State anticipated the horrors of the 20th century, argues Tim Stanley.

Tim Stanley | Published in History Today Volume 62 Issue 10 October 2012

When I was a boy we used to play a car game called Name Five Famous Belgians. The game speaks to a lazy stereotype among Britons that Belgium is a country without history or character, lost somewhere between France and Germany. How extraordinary it was to discover, then, that one of this small state’s kings was also one of history’s greatest mass murderers. Leopold II (1835-1909) wanted his country to join the league of European empires, but the Belgian state refused to finance its part in western Europe’s expensive scramble for Africa. So they outsourced the task to Leopold, who used personal diplomacy to convince the European powers to grant him control of a large portion of the Congo basin. He promised to bring civilisation to the so-called dark continent.

Christened the Congo Free State in 1885, Leopold’s playground was an astonishing 76 times the size of Belgium. Comprised largely of unmapped jungle, it was initially a huge financial burden. But when worldwide demand for rubber boomed, Leopold cashed in. Congolese workers were sent out into the jungle to slash down vines and layer their bodies with rubber latex. Later they would scrape it off their skin – often taking flesh and hair with it. The work was labour-intensive and injurious to health; the only economical way to collect it was via the forced mobilisation of Congolese society. The Congo Free State evolved from a vanity possession into a slave plantation.

Leopold’s hell operated by an insane logic. Villages were set quotas of rubber and the gendarmerie were sent in to collect it – a process that was sped up by looting, arson and rape. If a village failed to reach its quota hostages would be taken and shot. To ensure that the gendarmerie didn’t waste their bullets hunting for food, they were required to produce the severed hands of victims. As a consequence a trade in severed hands developed among the villagers and those police that couldn’t reach their quotas.

The most famous account of Leopold’s Congo is Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899). With its grisly, bloody imagery, one might imagine that Conrad exaggerated the awfulness of the regime. In fact the cold details of missionary journals make even more horrifying reading. William Henry Sheppard, a Presbyterian missionary, recalled in his diary passing by more than a dozen burned villages. He was taken to the headquarters of a gendarmerie recruit called Mlumba Nkusa, described by Sheppard as ‘a most repulsive looking man’ because his teeth were filed into sharp points, his eyebrows were shaven and his eyelashes plucked out. Leopold had demanded that Mlumba collect 60 slaves and a huge amount of rubber, but only eight slaves and 2,500 balls of rubber had been gathered. ‘I think we killed between 80 and 90,’ said Mlumba of the local workers. He took Sheppard to a hut reserved for the rape of hostages and to another for the preservation of collected hands. Sheppard counted 81 hands hanging over the fire.

The Congolese horror ended when international outrage compelled the Belgian state to take control of the colony in 1908. Estimates for the number of people killed range between two and 15 million, easily putting Leopold in the top ten of history’s mass murderers. When he died in 1909 the king’s funeral cortege was booed.

Conceptually Leopold’s reign of terror was a bridge between the imperialism of the 19th century and the totalitarianism of the 20th. Like most other empires it began as an exercise in piracy. But the sheer scale of the terror, the role of bureaucracy and the near-genocidal numbers of dead draw comparisons with Hitler’s Lebensraum and Stalin’s war on the Kulaks. The motive was greed rather than ideology, but the organised slaughter and the racist assumptions behind it make it recognisable to those old enough to remember the siege of Sarajevo or the Rwandan genocide. It is a reminder of the many forgotten horrors that lace the narrative of imperialism. The problems that African nations have endured since independence should be contextualised by the lingering trauma of colonisation at its most exploitative. Perhaps its greatest evil was that it concentrated power over so many into the hands of so few – allowing one wretched Belgian to ravage a continent.

Tim Stanley is associate fellow of the Rothermere American Institute, Oxford University.

Extract One

Marlow arrives at one of the trading company’s stations, a disastrous ramshackle settlement of wrecked machinery and rusting rails, and there encounters, under the trees, dozens of exhausted African workers who have been left to die.

‘Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. Another mine on the cliff went off, followed by a slight shudder of the soil under my feet. The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die.

‘They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now— nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air—and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young— almost a boy—but you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held—there was no other movement and no other glance. He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck— Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge—an ornament—a charm— a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas.

‘Near the same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up. One, with his chin propped on his knees, stared at nothing, in an intolerable and appalling manner: his brother phantom rested its forehead, as if overcome with a great weariness; and all about others were scattered in every pose of contorted collapse, as in some picture of a massacre or a pestilence. While I stood horror-struck, one of these creatures rose to his hands and knees, and went off on all-fours towards the river to drink. He lapped out of his hand, then sat up in the sunlight, crossing his shins in front of him, and after a time let his woolly head fall on his breastbone.

‘I didn’t want any more loitering in the shade, and I made haste towards the station. When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green- lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear. p25-26, https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/heart-of-darkness.pdf

Remember that Marlow is telling the story. Use the following questions to guide your thinking:

• What impression of the Congolese are we given? • What impression of the White Man (including Marlow) are we given? • What would you say about Conrad himself? What does the reader understand about the writer?

Extract Two

‘We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign— and no memories.

‘The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there— there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity— like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. p57-58 https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/heart-of-darkness.pdf

This is one of the sections that Achebe found racist.

• What impression does Conrad give us of the Congolese and where they lived? • Do you agree with Achebe? Blog comparing Heart of Darkness with Apocalypse Now!

• Apocalypse Now! Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l-ViOOFH-s

Literature and Film have always been entwined. From the many literary references in films such as the Seventh Seal, to the portrayal in cinema of such figures as Shakespeare and Truman Capote, to the countless films inspired by or adapted from works in literature, films have always been interested in expressing in images what books do with words. Since their medium is very different, filmmakers have to find a way to convey to the audience their message, often with very little or no words. Books and films often complement each other; films provoke a more immediate emotional effect, while books are often more cerebral. In some cases, changes have to be made in a film adaptation of a book, to fit better with more contemporary and relatable issues.

The novel Heart of Darkness and the film based on it, Apocalypse Now, are similar in that they both share a nightmarish quality, an ambiguous and elusive message, and both portray a journey into the darkest corners of the human soul, showing that the horrors of the Vietnam War compare well with the horrors of Colonialism in the 19th century.

Heart of Darkness is, as the title suggests, a very dark book. Vague narration for much of it contrasted with short bursts of heightened descriptions are unsettling for the reader. Similarly, the film Apocalypse Now is very uneven, with extremely long shots of the characters pondering mixed with fast-paced, exciting battle scenes of an epic scope.

Heart of Darkness starts out conventionally enough, as Marlow is assigned his task and starts out on his journey. Apocalypse Now also starts out like a standard war movie, (though very artistically shot) with the Captain being told about Kurtz. But once the journey is underway, in both the book and the film, the events rapidly turn nightmarish. When Marlow arrives at the station, and sees the heads on the spikes, it is clear that there is not much left of western civilization. When the Captain sees the heads, he is not even that surprised, for he has grown used to the death and destruction that the war entailed. A trancelike state is described several times in the book, as well as allusions to the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty. In especially the later part of the film, there is a sleepy quality that affects the characters. They seem to be in some sort of daze. In the book, the climax is when Kurtz is taken ill and dies. This is the darkest part of the book and the movie. The absurdity and horror of the last part of Heart of Darkness are captured in the last thirty minutes of Apocalypse Now in some of the most unsettling shots in film history. In one unforgettable scene, the Captain, covered in muck, has to sneak past a pagan ritual, where natives dance around a fire and slaughter sacred animals. The weird lighting and noises give the scene a ghoulish quality. The last part of both the book and the film are graphic in their nightmarish rendering of the events that take place.

The most obvious change from the book to the film is that they take place during different time periods. Heart of Darkness takes place during the Colonial period in Africa, while Apocalypse Now happens during the Vietnam War. The two periods are similar for several reasons. Firstly, there were many atrocities committed during both times. Heart of Darkness recounts the corruption of the colonizers, and the savagery that the natives were subjected to, and also partook in. The book spoke about death being dealt out absurdly, and with a complete loss of morals for those individuals unfortunate enough to be living in the conditions they were living in. Apocalypse Now also brings up issues of the native Vietnamese being mistreated. In one scene, innocent peasants are brutally slaughtered for concealing a puppy on their boat, and this arbitrariness of who lives and who dies is clear throughout both the book and the movie. Modernizing the story for the film adaptation also led for some interesting changes in terms of characters. Marlow became Willard, a Captain in the U.S Military, and the crazy Russian Harlequin became a hippy journalist. Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now both examine the dehumanizing aspects of colonialism on the colonizers, with Kurtz serving as an epitome for this.

Both the film and the book delve into the darkest part of the human soul. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow loses his way and the events he experiences shake him to his core. After Kurtz dies he does not even bother to get up from his dinner to check for himself. This lethargy and apathy are the only way Marlow can cope with the horror of what he has witnessed and become a part of. In Apocalypse Now, this is even more evident, for after Kurtz is killed, Marlow covers his ears with his hands and rocks back and forth. Heart of Darkness has an ambiguous message that is slowly built upon throughout the book. Not much is said outright, and the reader is allowed to form their own opinions. Similarly, Apocalypse Now does not attempt to preach to the audience, instead using impressions and emotions to convey its themes.

Herge's 'racist' adventures of Tintin? Not so, court decides

Congolese campaigner battling to ban book since 2007 plans to appeal against decision Jonathan Brown, Tuesday 14 February 2012, The Independent

Armed with little more than the faithful support of his dog Snowy, Tintin's journalistic exploits have seen him tackle ruthless drug smugglers, wild animals and even take a rocket to the moon.

Yet the reputation of the intrepid boy reporter and that of his creator Hergé have long been besmirched by allegations of racism over the story of his exploits in colonial Africa.

Yesterday, however, both moved a step towards rehabilitation when a Belgian court ruled that a 1946 edition of Tintin in the Congo did not break the country's anti-hate laws. It found the second of his adventures was a product of the attitudes of the day and not a deliberate attempt to incite racism.

"It is clear that neither the story, nor the fact that it has been put on sale, has a goal to... create an intimidating, hostile, degrading or humiliating environment," the court said in its judgement.

The decision was a setback for Congolese campaigner Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, who since 2007 has been seeking a ban on the book claiming the portrayal of Africans was "a justification of white supremacy". His lawyer said he plans to appeal against the decision.

During earlier hearings, the French publisher Casterman and Belgian rights holders to the 24 books in the Tintin series denied it was racist but merely an example of "kind paternalism". Lawyers likened the proposed ban to "taking a knife" to "Dickens on the Jews, Jules Verne on the black population or the Bible's attitude towards women".

The row over the book, first serialised in 1930 when Hergé was 23 and had never left his native land, has simmered relentlessly in the intervening decades.

The artist himself was said to be unhappy with some of the depictions, which include Africans bowing to the young boy and removed some of the references in a later working. It was only published in English in 1991 but the racism row was rekindled last year following the release of Steven Spielberg's film The Adventures of Tintin, when it emerged that the book was being sold in a sealed wrapper.

Publishers Egmont UK included the warning: "In his portrayal of the Belgian Congo, the young Hergé reflects the colonial attitudes of the time... he depicted the African people according to the bourgeois, paternalistic stereotypes of the period – an interpretation that some of today's readers may find offensive."

Tintin has long been emblematic of the era of exploitation in Africa. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) was a Belgian colony between 1908 and 1960. In 2004 a DRC spokesman hit back at Belgian ministerial criticism describing it as: "Tintin in the Congo all over again."

Tintin on trial: Offending article

In 2007 the UK equality watchdog, the Commission for Racial Equality described the book as containing "imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the 'savage natives' look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles." The key image which has upset campaigners is one in which a black woman bows to Tintin saying: "White man very great... White mister is big juju man!"

There are two illustrations from Tintin in the Congo below.

Bridging Unit Two

1. Read the story ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The text can be accessed here: https://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/texts/fitzgerald_fs_bbhh/full/index.html

2. Write a summary of the story. Use no more than 50 words. (AO1)

Main tasks: write responses to the questions below.

1. Analyse how Fitzgerald uses imagery of nature, colour, dark and light in the text. (AO2)

2. The critic Julian Cowley has written in York Notes Advanced: The Great Gatsby (York Press, 1998) that ‘Fitzgerald’s short stories provide an entertaining picture of youthful hedonism and especially the antics of those liberated young women known as ‘flappers’, affronting conventional values with their short skirts, short hair and makeup.’

How is this shown in ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’? (AO3)

Finally, complete either of the tasks below.

1. The critic Julian Cowley has written in York Notes Advanced: The Great Gatsby (York Press, 1998) that ‘The central issue is whether it is better to live a cautious and disciplined existence or to indulge in a passionate unruly life.’

How far is this true of Bernice Bobs Her Hair? (AO5)

2. Write a paragraph to explain the significance of the title of the story. (AO2)

Marking Criteria / Assessment Method

We will be looking for you to show the quality of your analysis of the author’s use of imagery (AO2), your appreciation of the importance of context (AO3), your ability to engage with critical opinion (AO5) and your ability to apply literary concepts using appropriate terminology (AO1).