Relational Possibilities in Forster’s The Longest Journey and Howards End

Mainstream discourses have long positioned friendship as a lesser relational network than that of the traditional patriarchal family, relegating friend ship to an inferior bond in the same move that holds the married couple to be the nexus of domestic and social life. E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey and Howards End serve as early-twentieth-century apologiae for recognition of nonnormative kinships through their explorations of inheritance between friends. Each novel ends with an optimistic vision of friends creating, curating, and caring for the posthumous legacy of a loved one. Key sites of analysis are Rickie Elliot’s vision of a “friendship office” and the posthumous curation of his stories in The Longest Journey, and Ruth Wilcox’s bequest of her family home to Margaret Schlegel in Howards End. Taken together, they expose tensions between legal protections and the encroachment of relational possibilities by institutional codification. Forster thus prefigures contemporary concerns about the privileges accrued by the married couple: from queer cultural anxieties emerging out of the AIDS crisis and the gay marriage movement, to advocacy for friends to be granted the same rights as the legally recognized couple—a movement gaining mainstream traction since COVID-19’s exacerbation of the care crisis. This paper ties its textual analyses to Michel Foucault’s philosophy of friendship and references to queer studies and disability studies to argue that Forster imagines and advocates for alternative social models in The Longest Journey and Howards End. Ultimately, the novels offer optimistic narratives of posthumous legacies carried and cared for by the bonds of friendship, thereby problematizing the normative idea that a posthumous legacy is fundamentally situated within sexual reproduction and bio-heredity.