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"Only connecting" with the family: class, culture, and narrative therapy in E.M. Forster's 'Howards End.' - Family Systems Psychotherapy and Literature/Literary Criticism
Style, Summer, 1997 by Kenneth Womack
3 Despite what appears to be Forster's obvious affinity for Moore's teachings, the novelist's critics and biographers continue to debate the extent of his knowledge of Principia Ethica. While K. W. Gransden attributes the moral philosophies of Forster and other members of the Bloomsbury Group to Moore's influence (4), his biographer P. N. Furbank flatly concludes that Forster "never read Moore" (1: 49). Although Mary Lago also confirms Furbank's assertion, she notes that Forster admitted to aligning himself with Moore's belief "in the possibility of an ideal affection" (58). Claude J. Summers maintains, however, that Forster "imbibed" the Cambridge philosophies of Moore, whose teachings likely justified Forster's own "belief that personal relations and the contemplation of beauty yield life's most valuable states of mind" (6).
4 For additional discussion regarding literature as a means of narrative therapy, as well as a vehicle for the interdisciplinary study of family systems psychotherapy, see Barbara A. Kaufman's "Training Tales in Family Therapy: Exploring The Alexandria Quartet." Kaufman argues that "inclusion of novels in didactic contexts encourages trainees to search their own experiences, thereby maximizing the opportunity for positive therapeutic interaction and highlighting the variety of treatment approaches in the field" (70). See also Janine Roberts's Tales and Transformations: Stories in Families and Family Therapy (1994), which features an appendix that enumerates a host of existing "family systems novels."
5 Charles P. Barnard and Ramon Garrido Corrales define homeostasis as a family's tendency - no matter how detrimental it may be - to preserve constancy. "There is no question," they write, "that families devote considerable energy to maintain a certain amount of order and stability. Security," they add, "seems to be tied with a certain amount of stability and predictability" (13). William C. Nichols and Craig E. Everett explain morphogenesis as the process through which families effect radical, meaningful change. Morphogenesis, then, "involves altering the nature of the system itself so that new levels of functioning are achieved" (130).
6 Richard C. Schwartz usefully defines the notion of the self or selfhood as "a state of mind to be achieved - a place of nonjudgmental, clear perspective" (4-5). In The Stories We Are: An Essay in Self-Creation, however, William Lowell Randall says that the stories "we tell ourselves [are] not at all neutral" (42). Indeed, he adds, an "interesting sort of feedback loop is at work: what I tell myself about myself affects how I present myself to others; how I present myself to others affects the options they make available to me; and what options they make available to me reinforce or challenge what I tell myself about myself thereafter" (43). In her valuable essay "Sisters," Monica McGoldrick discusses the peculiar difficulties that sisters encounter while pursuing selfhood outside of their family's systemic boundaries, an issue of obvious significance to any study of the Schlegel sisters and their individual quests for personal growth and development. McGoldrick ascribes such difficulties to "the fact that women have not been raised to have an individual identity; their identity has been seen more as a receptacle for the needs of others. This perhaps influences the special fusion," she adds, "that may exist in the relationship of sisters," as well as in their subsequent quests for selfhood beyond the sibling subsystem (244-45).
