"Whose books once influenced mine": the relationship between E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and Virginia Woolf's 'The Waves.'

Just as the central voice of Howards End is that of Margaret Schlegel - whose moral values occupy the book's center and seem most like those of Forster - in The Waves, ostensibly written without a narrator in a version of the dramatized poetic novel, the voice of Bernard increasingly dominates, his sections becoming longer and longer, until we overhear the entire final section told in his own voice. By having Margaret Schlegel unaggressively tame the powers of patriarchal capitalism (even as she marries into and accepts its advantages), on the one hand, and by granting her both aesthetic principles and a rational consciousness on the other, Forster hails "feminine" qualities that have nothing to do with fertility, beauty, or youth. Woolf, in creating Bernard, grants him nurturing qualities more often associated with women, as for instance when he comforts Susan in a manner similar to Margaret's comforting of Helen. Both Bernard and Margaret, aside from speaking as the respective moral centers of their novels, also serve a similar, cohesive function in terms of their novels' plots.

Moreover, Bernard's attachment to the public role of the British male in the successful functioning of the British Empire (even at the expense of diminishing his private life) bears an uncanny resemblance to some of Forster's characterizations in Howards End. For instance, as an older man Bernard resembles not only Forster but Mr. Wilcox and his son Charles. When he receives a telephone call at breakfast, Bernard entertains the parodic notion that "it might be (one has these fancies) to assume command of the British Empire" (261). He identifies sanity, the entire body functioning properly, with breakfast time:

Opening, shutting; shutting, opening; eating, drinking; sometimes speaking - the whole mechanism seemed to expand, to contract, like the mainspring of a clock. Toast and butter, coffee and bacon, the Times and letters - suddenly the telephone rang with urgency. (260-61)

Readers will recall that it is during breakfast at Howards End, following her flirtation with Paul, that Helen Schlegel realizes she does not belong with the Wilcoxes, and it is also at a later breakfast that the Wilcoxes conspire to destroy Mrs. Wilcox's bequest of Howards End to Margaret.

When we examine other images we also find some provocative parallels. Procreation clearly stands in Bernard's consciousness as one's "surrender . . . to the stupidity of nature" (268). For this reason, among others, we find it difficult to believe in Bernard as a father. He is at the book's end a lonely person, unable and unwilling to connect. When he says "Let me be alone" (294), he reminds us of Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India, unable to translate the muddle of life as represented by "ou-boum" and asking to be left alone. In another sense Bernard also resembles Mr. Ramsay, with the Berkeleyan nihilism wherein he questions the existence of the Ding an sich and in his attempts to reestablish it as a basis for the continuity of experience. It may well be, however, that in 1910 Forster established the blueprint for all these characters when he has his narrator say of Margaret Schlegel that "she had outgrown stimulants, and was passing from words to things . . . Some closing of the gate is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power" (206).