A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [8]
She watched the singular creature pace up and down the chapel. For a young man his face was rugged, and—until the shadows fell upon it—hard. Enshadowed, it sprang into tenderness. She saw him once again at Rome, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, carrying a burden of acorns (p. 28).
If Lucy is viewed as a work of art (as the title of chapter 9 proclaims), then so is George, and so, for that matter is Cecil, whom the narrator introduces to us as “mediaeval. Like a Gothic statue” (p. 85). Thus even the reader is made complicit in the mode of art appreciation; we are instructed to see Cecil that way, even as Forster points out the potential dangers of doing so.
This continuity of outlook encouraged by Forster is just one of the elements that unites the two halves of A Room with a View. The scene change that occurs midway through the novel from Florence to Surrey is dramatic in terms of the mileage, and it is tempting to think that substantively different attitudes or ideas will emerge with the new landscape. Traveling with Lucy, we have been in a foreign country, and now we are back on familiar territory. But where character and narrative are concerned, setting can be moot, however picturesque. Lucy herself suggests as much with her assertion on that first, disappointing day at the Pension Bertolini, that with no Arno view and a hostess with a Cockney accent, she and Charlotte might just as well be in London. They are trapped in a little tourist bubble, not surprising when one seeks out the comforts of home abroad—an English tea and convivial, unthreatening English company. Just as equally, though, could Lucy say on returning to Summer Street that she might as well be in Italy, because it turns out she is just as easily perplexed in her family home, surrounded by familiar flora and fauna, as at the Bertolini dinner table or in the dim light of Santa Croce. In fact, we might argue that in England Lucy is at a distinct disadvantage. Abroad, as a tourist, one can be excused for conversational slips, for losing one’s way, for placing one’s trust too quickly in a fellow foreigner or a kindly Italian. There are guidebooks published expressly to tell you where to find the best view, which fresco not to miss in the church, how long to stay in Florence and how long in Rome. At home there is no guidebook (or if there were, you would look a fool consulting it). If you are inarticulate it is your own failing, and you must decide on your own whether one view is better than another. Or, in Lucy’s case, whether one suitor is better than another. Reviewing the novel in 1908, The Outlook described Lucy as “one of those uncomfortable girls who cannot make up their minds” (quoted in Gardner, p. 116), but really, it is easy to see how she gets into trouble on that count. In Florence, she experiences the luxury of having numerous other people help make it up for her—not only Charlotte, Miss Lavish, the Miss Alans, Mr. Eager, and Mr. Beebe, but also cultural heavyweights such as John Ruskin, the preeminent Victorian art critic (much quoted in Baedeker), and of course Karl Baedeker himself, publisher of the illustrious travel guides, whose life purpose it was to direct tourist traffic. In Surrey, Lucy lacks these authorities, and so it is there, not in Italy, that she must struggle