Connection in Forster’s Howards End

The epigraph of E.M. Forster's novel Howards End is just two words: "only connect". As economical as this gesture seems, critics and interpreters have made much of this succinct epigraph and the theme of connection in Howards End. Stephen Land, for example, cites a:

demand for connection, in the sense of moving freely between the two Forsterian worlds - the two "sides of the hedge", the everyday world of social norms and the arcadian or paradisal world of individual self-realization - has its roots in earlier stories..." [1]

He goes on to say that "each [character] must reconcile or connect for himself the range of conceptual polarities exposed by the story - prose and passion, seen and unseen, masculine and feminine, new and old" (Land, 165). Land reads the novel as some sort of compromise between these two worlds - the realm of social justice and the realm of the individual. Other critics have made similar gestures. James McConkey, for one, feels that "Margaret will reconcile the human and transcendent realms so that she may live in harmony with the human; the voice senses the connection through its remove from both." [2] These critics seem to confuse "connection" with "reconciliation", seem to read the novel as a triumph for humanism and social justice. I feel this is a little bit of . . . fudging. True, the characters in Howards End experience reconciliation at the close of the novel - but reconciliation occurs only when love passes out of the novel, when the narrative ceases to be a bridge between two worlds. The meaning of the word "connect" diminishes as the novel progresses, gradually loses its mythic, transcendent meaning.

The "only connect" moment referenced in the epigraph comes wh...

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...any remnant of the bridge between the paradisal world and the world of manners and civic duty. The concept of connection is so degraded as to be unrecognizable. This is what happens after love fails. The celestial omnibus will not stop at Howards End again.

[1] Stephen Land. Challenge and Conventionality in the Fiction of E.M. Forster. New York: AMS Press, 1990 (165). Hereafter cited parenthetically.

[2] James McConkey. The Novels of E.M. Forster. New York: Cornell University Press, 1957 (79).

[3] E.M. Forster. Howards End. New York: Penguin, 1986 (154). Hereafter cited parenthetically.

[4] E.M. Forster. "The Celestial Omnibus". The Collected Tales of E.M. Forster. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952 (61). It seems prudent to note that this story was first published in 1911, one year after Howards End appeared.