E.M. Forster, John Ruskin and the 'pernicious charm' of Italy

Abstract

E.M. Forster's Italy before the time of his writing a Room with a View (1908) was Italy seen and experienced in 1901 in the not so pleasant company of his mother and old ladies full of solicitous advice. For the young Cambridge graduate it was the Italy of spontaneity where the do lee 'si' sounded everywhere, utterly distinct and remote from dull English provincial life (represented by dreary Sawston in Where Angels Fear To Tread (1905)), where the dominant sound, in Forster's view, was 'naou.' It was the Italy where the predisposed traveller, mainly female, could break away from the rigidity of convention and propriety and abandon herself to the sensations of the moment or immersion into the spontaneous elemental forces of life. It was that Italy where repressed young English women could submit to the enthralling lure of the unknown, where spirited women like Lucy Honeychurch, Lilia Herriton and, later, D.H. Lawrence's Alvina Houghton (in The Lost Girl) could discover their inner selves. Both Forster's Lilia and Lawrence's Alvina will eventually become disillusioned when they experience marriage to an Italian and are consequently exposed to Italy's gender conventions. Lilia enclosed in decent and safe security is unable to visit friends or to have tea parties and Lawrence's rebellious Alvina is eventually transformed or transmogrified into a submissively docile wife, smothered in the embrace of the remote village of Pescocalascio in the Abruzzi, happily doing the washing up in the kitchen - an ending to The Lost Girl which infuriated Katherine Mansfield who called it a 'disgrace.' [excerpt]