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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
Margaret initially finds herself triangulated between Henry and Helen, for example, because of her husband's haphazard advice regarding Leonard's vocational fate. Although Henry generally evinces scant concern for the plight of the lower classes, Margaret and Helen seek his advice over Leonard's tenuous employment status at the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company. It is no surprise that Henry reveals little interest in the lives of the disenfranchised members of his larger human community:
A word of advice. Don't take that sentimental attitude over the poor. . . . The poor are poor, and one's sorry for them, but there it is. As civilization moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch in places, and it's absurd to pretend that anyone is responsible personally. . . . There are just rich and poor, as there always have been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal. (199-200)
In addition to his laissez-faire policy on the value of social reform, Henry believes that the lower classes should be kept at a discreet distance, a maneuver that he accomplishes himself through the art of gratuity. During lunch at Simpson's in the Strand with Margaret, for instance, Henry happily remarks to her that "tip everywhere's my motto. . . . Then the fellows know one again . . . They remember you from year's end to year's end" (159). For Henry, the act of tipping provides a kind of false-friendship - a human relationship, purchased rather than cultivated through genuine social intercourse.
After Henry's careless advice regarding the Porphyrion's financial prospects results in Leonard's unemployment and near-starvation, Helen - already suspicious of the "Great Wilcox Peril" (178) - an no longer fathom her new brother-in-law's mercantile and artificial system of human relations. At one juncture, Helen exclaims, "What a prosperous vulgarian Mr. Wilcox has grown! I have very little use for him in these days" (143). Henry simply has no purpose in Helen's world, a place where poetry matters and "personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever" (181). When Henry refuses to acknowledge his culpability in Leonard's unnecessary state of unemployment, Helen dismisses any notion of tolerating his fractured social views, her triangulation of Margaret and Henry now complete: "I mean to dislike your husband and tell him so," Helen explains to her sister, but "I mean to love you more than ever" (203). Confronted with her beloved sister and her new husband's utter inability to set aside their contradictory mores, Margaret attempts to decrease the stress on their family system by defending Henry's persona as a "type" necessary for advancing the English civilization into its present industrial and intellectual state. Margaret tries to dismiss - or scapegoat, if you will - Henry's social deficiencies as byproducts of what she defends as his essential role in England's ongoing process of nation-building, thereby removing him as a stressor on their triad. "If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut," Margaret pleads with Helen; "there would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in. . . . Just savagery" (183). Even Margaret allows, though, that "some day - in the millennium - there may be no need" for Henry's type (169). Despite Margaret's best efforts to diminish Helen and Henry's differences, their lack of any common ground makes it virtually impossible for them to establish the senses of belonging and acceptance necessary, according to family therapists Mala S. and Roger B. Butt, to develop and grow as members of a functional stepfamily (12).
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