A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [9]
The next question on that list, given the way most novels had traditionally ended, might well be where she will live. (Fictional unions tended to come packaged with property, or at least a well-marked path toward inheriting it.) Lucy’s personal struggle is indeed set in the context of the novel’s recurring anxieties about real estate. The initial trade of accommodations at the Pension Bertolini bears the most thematic weight—centering, as it does, on the eponymous room with a view—but it is mirrored in the novel’s second half by another switch of lodgings. This one, however, is not brought about by a gesture of kindness, but staged by Cecil to score off the neighborhood snob: He convinces Sir Harry Otway, landlord of Cissie Villa, that he ought to have the Emersons as tenants rather than the genteel Miss Alans, and misrepresents the Emersons as more refined than they actually are in order to set his trap. No sooner has Mr. Emerson moved in than he discovers the muddle (to use Forster’s trademark word) and takes it to heart, though not on his own account: “We find, though,” he says, “that the Miss Alans were coming, and that we have turned them out. Women mind such a thing. I am very much upset about it” (p. 144). It is no accident that his words echo Charlotte’s to Lucy back in Italy, on the subject of the desired south rooms—“If you wish me to turn these gentlemen out of their rooms, I will do it” (p. 15)—and that the repetition proves Mr. Emerson as capable of refined feeling as Charlotte herself (though she would never own it). Thus Forster shows us a cycle at work—a kind of musical chairs for living quarters—but it is a game that, if played cruelly, can cause the participants to suffer.
It is the rooms and the flats and the houses, and the muddles that take place around them, that set A Room with a View firmly in the Forster canon. Nicola Beauman, in the preface to her biography of Forster, argues that the theme of “disappearing houses” is a constant in his work, in part because his own birthplace was sacrificed for the sake of railway expansion, and in part because that was simply, as he saw it, the ethos of the era (E. M. Forster: A Biography, p. 4). The family home in which one spent the better part of one’s childhood, or if lucky, one’s life, would soon become a relic of bygone days; modern man was growing itinerant, rootless—more and more like a tourist, even in his own homeland. Much of our contemporary fiction in English, especially fiction from former British colonies, has picked up on this theme of displacement, exploring the condition of living in a newly globalized world, of being a citizen of everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Years after he himself had stopped writing fiction, Forster recognized the trend in his own work. In an essay he wrote in 1958 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Room with a View—an essay titled “A View Without a Room”—he describes how Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson, after their marriage, began to “want a real home—somewhere in the country where they could take root and unobtrusively found a dynasty. But civilization was not moving that way. The characters in my other novels were experiencing similar troubles. Howards End is a hunt for a home. India is a Passage for Indians as well as English. No resting place.” At the end of A Room with a View, we have come full circle; the Bertolini must suffice as a final refuge. It seems that Forster was determined that George Emerson and Lucy Honeychurch should always remain what they were when we first met them: travelers.
Forster himself traveled to Italy in the fall of 1901. His companion was his mother, with whom he was always very close. He had finished his studies at Cambridge that spring, and, though he planned to choose an occupation, no suitable opportunity had yet presented itself. He had the luxury of a small income (an inheritance from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton, which he