"Only connecting" with the family: class, culture, and narrative therapy in E.M. Forster's 'Howards End.' - Family Systems Psychotherapy and Literature/Literary Criticism

Forster's own narrative interest in highlighting the social inequities of Edwardian life and the aesthetic elevation of the national consciousness demonstrates the ways in which Howards End functions as work of narrative therapy.(4) In Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990), Michael White and David Epston augment the tenets of the family systems paradigm to account for the ways in which narrative experiences provide readers with a means for interpersonal development and growth. As White and Epston note, "In order to perceive change in one's life - to experience one's life as progressing - and in order to perceive oneself changing one's life, a person requires mechanisms that assist her to plot the events of her life within the context of coherent sequences across time - through the past, present, and future" (35). These mechanisms - works of narrative therapy - offer cogent methodologies that assist clients (or readers) in simultaneously identifying with and separating from the dilemmas that plague their lived experiences. Therapists such as White and Epston argue that the externalization of interpersonal problems through narrative therapy enables readers, then, to address their various issues via the liberating auspices of the imagination. Such stories encourage them "to explore possibilities for establishing the conditions that might facilitate performance and circulation of their preferred stories and knowledges" (76). In short, the telling and retelling of story furnishes readers with the capacity for usurping the pleasing equilibrium of homeostasis by effecting a kind of narratological morphogenesis, or the transformation of their lives through the therapeutic interpretation of their textual experiences.(5)

Howards End provides readers with a host of narrative exemplars that underscore Forster's agenda for the reinvigoration of the larger family system depicted in the novel. Populated by characters - and, of course, their families-from across the English class divide, Forster may be seen as offering a work of narrative therapy through his carefully drawn character studies and his insistence that his human creations be distinguished by their capacities for taking pleasure in aesthetic experiences and appreciating the interpersonal qualities of human interaction. As Jerome Bruner deftly observes, "There is widespread agreement that stories are about the vicissitudes of human intention" (18). In Howards End, Forster juxtaposes his characters' class standings in relation to their ability to enjoy friendship and recognize culture, as well as their intellectual movement - or, on occasion, their lack of it - toward self-sufficiency and differentiation from the larger family system. Forster suggests, then, that his characters, as they achieve selfhood beyond the homeostasis that the larger family system promises, only serve to rejuvenate that same system by virtue of their personal growth and self-enhancement.(6) The evaluation of the characters and their experiences in Howards End from the powerful, class-conscious Wilcoxes and the leisure-class intellectual Schlegels to the lowly aesthete Leonard Bast and Howards End itself - demonstrates Forster's particular interest in reforming the very heart of England's social conscience.