“The battle against sameness”: Hospitality as Romantic Transcendence in Howards End

The present article presents a thematic analysis of hospitality in E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910). The article begins by suggesting the centrality of personal relations in Forster’s philosophy and in his reputation as a writer, and then proceeds to consider episodes of hospitality in Howards End in a variety of aspects. First, the argument addresses the ideological work performed by non-transformative situations of hospitality in the novel (what the author terms “conservative hospitality”), and details the spiritual discontent that they engender in the novel’s protagonists. Second, the article highlights the connection between hospitality and the romantic mode, chiefly as a result of the Schlegels’ interactions with Leonard Bast. This personal connection, however, ultimately fails to coalesce into a truly transformative hospitality due to Bast’s material circumstances and experiences, preventing him from overcoming the class difference that separates him from the Schlegels; this suggests the inherent difficulties that face those who attempt to engage in hospitality across lines of class. Third, there follows a con sideration of the association between hospitality and transcendence in the novel, which appears in connection to the figure of Ruth Wilcox and presents forms of spiritual desire for transcendence that take place in a secular, agnostic context. The article approaches Ruth Wilcox’s bequest of Howards End to Margaret Schlegel as a gesture of supreme or divine hospitality, which produces a spiritual inheritance that makes the guest into a permanent hostess of the Howards’ house. Finally, the article considers the status of Howards End as a house that inherits and refashions the literary tradition of country house hospitality at the symbolic level, while embracing privacy and isolation at the thematic level.