Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage Catherine Lanone Laurent Mellet www.cned.fr www.belin-education.com ISBN: 979-10-358-0888-4 ISSN: 4100-1258 Dépôt légal – 1re édition : 2019, octobre © Éditions Belin/Humensis, 2019 170 bis, boulevard du Montparnasse 75680 Paris cedex 14 CONTENTS Introduction................................................................................... 9 Howards End, a novel and a film............................................................ 9 Context ................................................................................................ 10 A critical success................................................................................... 11 Biography ............................................................................................. 13 Heritage and the novel .......................................................................... 15 PARTONE BEYONDLEGALANDLITERARYLEGACY: THEETHICSOFCAREINTHENOVEL 1. THRESHOLDS AND LITERARY INHERITANCE...................... 19 A | Revisiting the epistolary novel ...................................................... 19 1. “Amusing letters home”, 20 • 2. Significant polarities, 24 • 3. A proleptic montage, 30 B | The comedy of manners .............................................................. 33 C | Tragedy....................................................................................... 43 D | Intertextuality and musical ekphrasis ............................................ 46 E | Twisting the legacy of the omniscient narrator.............................. 50 2. CAPITALISM AND CULTURAL CAPITAL............................... 62 A | Social class and social accountability ............................................ 62 B | The symptoms of social difference................................................ 69 1. Food for thought, 69 • 2. Contemporary social geographies, 70 • 3. Commodities: objects and cars, 72 • 4. Blubber and rubber, 75 • 5. The sword and the umbrella, 76 6 | Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage C | Musical experience and cultural capital ........................................ 78 D | Books and cultural capital ............................................................ 83 3. CONNECTION AND TRANSMISSION...................................... 88 A | Only connect ............................................................................... 88 B | Mrs Wilcox’s will......................................................................... 93 C | The hunt for a home.................................................................... 97 D | Beyond gendered territories.......................................................... 108 E | Queering the conclusion............................................................... 116 PARTTWO CONNECTINGTHEMERCHANT-IVORY ADAPTATIONTOTHENOVEL 1. MERCHANT-IVORY ET HERITAGE FILM............................... 121 A | Merchant-Ivory et l’œuvre romanesque de Forster........................ 121 B | Heritage film : premières convergences critiques et théoriques........ 126 2. LE FILM EN TANT QU’ADAPTATION : ENTRE ACCÉLÉRATION ET EXPLICITATION...................................... 136 A | Rappels méthodologiques et théoriques ........................................ 136 B | Différentes stratégies scénaristiques et esthétiques pour adapter Howards End................................................................................ 139 3. BEYOND HERITAGE 1—DEL’ÉTALAGE À LA FORME SIGNIFIANTE.............................................................................. 148 A | Oppositions visuelles et formelles ................................................. 148 B | Quels matérialismes à l’écran?...................................................... 151 4. BEYOND HERITAGE 2— FILMING“CHARACTER’S LIVES” (J. IVORY)..................................................................... 158 A | From connected plots to connecting characters ............................ 158 Contents|7 B | Individual and narrative voices on screen...................................... 160 C | L’exemple de Margaret ................................................................ 163 5. BEYOND HERITAGE 3—“THE LIFE OF THE BODY” (P. 98, P. 186): RECONCILING THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN ...................................................................................... 167 A | Seeing the novel steadily and seeing it whole?............................... 167 B | Forsterian symbolism on screen: spatializing individuals and families........................................................................................ 173 C | Connexions sensorielles et corporelles .......................................... 178 Bibliography ................................................................................... 181 Introduction Matthew Lopez’s play 2018 The Inheritance 1 begins with a young man who is reading Howards End; Edward Morgan Forster (or Morgan, as he was known to his friends) enters, and wonders how we may relate to the novel today: Young Man 1: I keep returning to this book again and again. Morgan: Tell me: what is it about the novel that speaks to you? What do you find in its pages? (Lopez, p. 9) Like Zadie Smith’s 2005 campus novel On Beauty, which recycles citations and elements from Howards End, Lopez’s play reclaims Howards End as a novel that must be engaged with today, mocking the tendency to dismiss Forster’s and Ivory’s works as mere period pieces: (To the Lads.) […] You’re just books on a shelf gathering dust. You’re a Mer- chant Ivory film. Young Man 3: I like Merchant Ivory Films. (Lopez, p. 147) HOWARDS END, A NOVEL AND A FILM Thus the legacy of Howards End is alive and well, and is now entwined with the film’s. James Ivory’s 1992 film was the first cinema adaptation of Howards End. This may seem surprising for a novel which was published in 1910, but Forster feared film adaptations; he even refused to grant the rights of A Passage to India to Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. While he was alive, he only allowed other kinds of per- formances; for instance, Lance Sieveking adapted the novel for BBC radio in 1964, and a stage version (written by Sieveking and Richard 1. A tribute to Forster, the play is a gay modern transposition of Howards End, set in New York, which premiered in London in 2018. The play has met with public and critical acclaim in London and it is scheduled to open on Broadway in the fall of 2019. 10 | Howards End (E. M. Forster, J. Ivory): Beyond Heritage Cottrell) was performed in London in 1967. There was also a BBC TV production in 1970, the year of Forster’s death. Both the stage and the early TV adaptation boiled down the plot. Since then, there have been other radio and theatre performances, and a new television adap- tation, written by Kenneth Lonergan and directed by Hettie MacDo- nald, was broadcast on BBC One in 2017. This time, the script closely followed the novel. The production was praised for its choice of loca- tions, for the actors and for engaging with today’s England by introduc- ing non-white actors (Jacky, the Schlegels’ maid and the doctor who visits Mrs Wilcox in London were played by black actors). But it could not compete with the simultaneous release of a remastered version of Ivory’s film. For the audience, the characters have become identified with the main actors, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter and Anthony Hopkins. When the film was re-released, positive reviews sug- gested that it differed from other nostalgic period pieces of the 90’s and from the later TV series Downton Abbey, because of its social concerns: “screenwriter and frequent Merchant Ivory collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala create the sense that with the advent of suffrage, England’s class structures” were “more elastic for both women and the working class.” 1 The renewed interest in Howards End in 2017 may suggest that, as Lucy Mangan puts it, the question “at the core of E.M. Forster’s work of who will inherit England has perhaps never been as relevant since he first posed it” 2, implying that the novel and its adaptation resonate with a country on the brink of Brexit. CONTEXT Howards End was published in 1910, an eventful year which was marked, among other things, by the death of King Edward VII and the accession of King George V. There were two general elections; in 1909, the Liberal government had tried to pass the “People’s Budget”, that introduced taxes on the wealthy and a social welfare programme, 1. Simran Hans, “A Welcome Return to the Big Screen”, https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2017/jul/30/howards-end-review-restoration-merchant-ivory-emma-thompson-anth ony-hopkins Accessed July 15, 2019. 2. Lucy Mangan, “Timely, Careful Remake Explores Class and Race”, Sunday 12 Nov. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/12/howards-end-review-timely-car eful-remake-class-race Accessed July 15, 2019. Introduction| 11 but it was blocked and a general election was called in January 1910; the “People’s Budget” became law in April 1910. When Prime Minis- ter Herbert Henry Asquith called for another general election, on November 18, 1910, three hundred women marched towards Parlia- ment demanding voting rights for women. The repression was violent and 115 women were arrested; for the Suffragettes this became known as “Black Friday”. This was also the year which Virginia Woolf later singled out as an aesthetic turning point: “On or about December 1910, the human character changed”. (Woolf 1950, p. 96) Her provoc- ative formula