Finally: A Room with a View (the book)

A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved this book, even more than I thought I would. I've seen the film a half dozen times over the years; it was actually the first film Alison and I watched together. I think she had borrowed it from her father so I could see it. I can still see the kitchen/living room area in the on-campus BYU housing: Heritage Halls. Her building, Bowen Hall, was actually torn down this last year--many good memories at Bowen. And it was significant that Alison wanted me to see this film, a story about Lucy Honeychurch, a woman engaged to marry a man who did not know her, who saw her as a painting to adore. Yet a tall order to live up to George, the young man who continues to pursue Lucy even when she is engaged, proclaiming his belief in love and beauty.



So I already knew that I would enjoy the story, but didn't realize how much philosophical depth the book would convey. I should have known having read Forster's "A Passage to India" some years ago. The center of this depth is George's father, the aptly named Mr. Emerson.



When Freddy (Lucy's brother) and Mr. Beebe (the reverend) go to meet the Emerson's, Freddy impetuously asks them to have a "bathe" (i.e. swim in the pond) which leads to Mr. Beebe giving a dig to Mr. Emerson who has declared that the sexes are equal. To which Mr. Emerson replies, "I tell you that they shall be...I tell you they shall be comrades." Then Beebe asks if we are to raise them (women) to our level and Mr. Emerson continues his defense but raises it to a philosophical argument larger than gender: "The Garden of Eden which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies." In one fell swoop he undermines literal religious ideology, gender stereotypes and the western Cartesian dualism of mind and body.



Of course this exchange and others sets up George's critique of Lucy's engagement to Cecil Vyse as he declares that Cecil does not see her as a woman, in fact is incapable of knowing a woman. And then these words Lucy repurposes later in order to get out of the engagement. Near the end Mr. Emerson is the "saint" who understands Lucy's troubles and helps her follow truth (I can hear some of today's feminists disparaging how the Truth is brought to Lucy through the Emerson men--it was the turn of the century though) and finally admit to her love for George.



With a focus on Mr. Emerson the book is as much a love story as a philosophical declaration of the goodness of the body, of the fraud of the western duality of mind and body. As Mr. Emerson declares to Lucy in both the film and book, "You love the boy body and soul."



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