Maurice

“[T]here were so many boys of his type—they formed the backbone of the school and we cannot notice each vertebra. He did the usual things—was kept in, once caned, rose from form to form on the classical side till he clung precariously to the sixth, and he became a house prefect, and later a school prefect and member of the first fifteen. […] Having been bullied as a new boy, he bullied others when they seemed unhappy or weak, not because he was cruel but because it was the proper thing to do. In a word, he was a mediocre member of a mediocre school, and left a faint and favourable impression behind.” 

Maurice is by design an unremarkable character whose only real distinguishing feature is his sexual orientation. Since Maurice only realizes that he’s gay while at Cambridge, he’s especially unremarkable in the novel’s early chapters, where he’s indistinguishable from any other Sunnington student. The passage therefore strikes a cautionary note on the societal pressure to conform, and the unresisting way in which most people do conform, even when it hurts themselves or others; it’s only Maurice’s inability to conform that ultimately shakes him out of his complacency, and most people lack that incentive.

“Maurice walked to and fro on the hallowed grass, himself noiseless, his heart glowing. The rest of him fell asleep, bit by bit, and first of all his brain, his weakest organ. His body followed, then his feet carried him upstairs to escape the dawn. But his heart had lit never to be quenched again, and one thing in him at last was real.” 

Maurice’s agitated response to meeting Clive is one of many early indications of his sexuality. Although Maurice doesn’t realize it consciously, his excitement flows from attraction, and perhaps an intuition that Clive is also gay. The passage uses the sleep motif to further explore this state of half-knowledge; Maurice’s “brain” falls asleep relatively easily, but the more instinctive and unconscious aspects of himself—his body and heart—remain alert and aware.

“Belief’s all right. […] It’s all right and it’s unmistakable. Every man has somewhere about him some belief for which he’d die. Only isn’t it improbable that your parents and guardians told it to you? If there is one won’t it be part of your own flesh and spirit? Show me that. Don’t go hawking out tags like ‘The Redemption’ or ‘The Trinity.’” 

Maurice and Clive’s religious debate illustrates the novel’s ideas about individuality in a conformist society. Clive’s objection to Maurice’s beliefs isn’t an objection to religion itself, but rather to insincere religiosity, which mainly serves to stifle personal expression and preserve the status quo; Maurice dislikes criticisms of Christianity not because he truly believes it but because he’s “accustomed” to it (45)—that is, it reflects and reinforces his broader traditionalism. Developing beliefs and ideas that instead reflect his authentic self is an important part of Maurice’s growth over the course of the novel. 

“He had yet to realize that they [his family] were stronger than he and influenced him incalculably. Three weeks in their company left him untidy, sloppy, victorious in every item, yet defeated on the whole.” 

The “influence” Maurice’s family has over him is all the more noteworthy given the role he is increasingly playing at home: the male head of household. For all the authority he has over the servants and his female relatives, he has no authority over the middle-class family as an institution; in fact, he’s conforming to its expectations when he exercises power over women and the lower classes. This immersion in middle-class, heteronormative ideology also helps explain his reflexive rejection of Clive later in the chapter: “Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul” (59).

“The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the obscurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.” 

The moment when Maurice recognizes that he’s gay encapsulates the novel’s depiction of unconscious experience. Maurice’s realization seems sudden even to him, but it is in fact the culmination of a mental process that’s been unfolding for years, even though he didn’t perceive it at the time. This echoes the Freudian idea that children pass through a “latency period” during which their sexual desires, though not consciously accessible, are assuming the form they’ll take in adulthood.

“He could not believe his good fortune at first—thought there must be some misunderstanding and that he and Plato were thinking of different things. Then he saw that the temperate pagan really did comprehend him, and, slipping past the Bible rather than opposing it, was offering a new guide for life. ‘To make the most of what I have.’ Not to crush it down, not vainly to wish that it was something else, but to cultivate it in such ways as will not vex either God or Man.”

Given turn-of-the-century England’s anti-gay stance, Maurice suggests that there’s an urgent need for positive depictions of love between men; in fact, the novel itself is just such a depiction. It’s therefore understandable that Clive latches on to classical Greece as a way to understand his identity; Plato’s Phaedrus discusses erotic love in the context of a relationship between two men. However, the text also contrasts love that primarily gratifies the sexual appetite and other “base” impulses with chaste love that orients the lovers towards the virtuous and divine. This dovetails with Clive’s internalized anti-gay attitude and contributes to his belief that any romantic relationship between men should remain celibate—one of several reasons the novel ultimately rejects Classical Greece as a model for gay love. 

“[H]e and Maurice would never meet in Cambridge again. Their love belonged to it, and particularly to their rooms, so that he could not conceive of their meeting anywhere else.” 

Maurice ultimately does apologize to the Dean and return to college, so Clive’s belief that they “would never meet in Cambridge again” is mistaken. Nevertheless, it’s significant that Clive can’t imagine a relationship with Maurice outside of Cambridge, given how intertwined the school is with English tradition and society; Clive accepts his desire for Maurice only to the extent that it can coincide with this world. The passage also underscores the “academic” nature of Clive’s sexuality, which he rationalizes in terms of classical philosophy and literature.

“And their love scene drew out, having the inestimable gain of a new language. No tradition overawed the boys. No convention settled what was poetic, what absurd. They were concerned with a passion that few English minds have admitted, and so created untrammelled.” 

Although society’s condemnation of being gay certainly poses problems for the novel’s characters, Maurice’s own vision of gay relationships in some sense requires this condemnation (or at least marginalization). Here, for example, it’s precisely the fact that their relationship exists outside of societal approval—and therefore “tradition” and “convention”—that allows Maurice and Clive to invent it for themselves. Of course, Clive does impose certain social conventions on the relationship, and ultimately bows to societal pressure by ending it. However, the fact that Clive and Maurice’s relationship is an imperfect realization of the novel’s ideal doesn’t change that ideal itself, which counters the notion that love between men is necessarily “sterile”; it’s in fact creative, Forster suggests, because it requires the invention of “a new language.” 

“He had established his power at home, and his mother began to speak of him in the tones she had reserved for her husband. He was not only the son of the house, but more of a personage than had been expected. He kept the servants in order, understood the car, subscribed to this and not to that, tabooed certain of the girls’ acquaintances. By twenty-three he was a promising suburban tyrant, whose rule was the stronger because it was fairly just and mild.” 

The idea that Maurice is or will be like his father recurs throughout the novel, and it illustrates just how little room society offers for individual difference; Maurice is in some sense expected to become his father by filling exactly the same social role his father once did. Maurice has so far managed to do this, to the extent that his mother now regards him as the ultimate authority at home. Nevertheless, there are hints that Maurice is behaving as he thinks he should rather than as he truly wants; the descriptions of him “subscribing to this and not to that” or “tabooing certain acquaintances” have an arbitrary quality, as though Maurice’s preferences are simply matters of convention.

“[I]n these latter days Greece had cropped up again. Maurice hated the very word, and by a curious inversion connected it with morbidity and death. Whenever he wanted to plan, to play tennis, to talk nonsense, Greece intervened.” 

Like Maurice, the novel itself associates Greece with death. More specifically, it associates Greece with obsolescence and extinction, which Maurice fears also await him as a gay man; Classical Greece is of course long gone by the time the novel takes place, and its philosophical and literary depictions of gay love are too dry to “substitute for life” (111). Clive’s trip to Greece is therefore doomed to fail. He takes it in an attempt to rediscover his feelings for Maurice, but his efforts to “think himself back into the old state [being gay]” have already failed (120), and that kind of intellectualism is all that Greece has to offer in Maurice.

“The change had been so shocking that sometimes he thought Maurice was right, and that it was the finish of his illness. It humiliated him, for he had understood his soul, or, as he said, himself, ever since he was fifteen. But the body is deeper than the soul and its secrets inscrutable. There had been no warning—just a blind alteration of the life spirit, just an announcement, ‘You who have loved men, will henceforward love women. Understand or not, it’s the same to me.’” 

Clive’s sudden change in orientation likely strikes many modern readers as improbable. The event is ambiguous enough to support different interpretations, but this particular passage implies Clive’s change isn’t simply the product of societal pressure; if it were, he would presumably be relieved rather than “humiliated” to discover an attraction to women. The suggestion that the change originated in Clive’s “body” rather than his “soul” offers one clue to its nature. Clive’s understanding of his orientation has always been heavily intellectual; in fact, he has outright suppressed its physical aspect. However, Maurice suggests that this chastity isn’t compatible with the “life spirit”—the instinct to create, and often to reproduce. This desire ultimately becomes too powerful for Clive to resist, but rather than consummate his relationship with Maurice, Clive instead turns to women.   

“The girls had been incited by Dr Barry to join an ambulance class, and after dinner Clive submitted his body to be bound.”

Clive’s willingness to let Kitty and Ada practice bandaging him hints at the possible origins of his turn to heterosexuality. The scene is sexually charged, especially once he and Ada are left alone together: “Now Ada bent over him. […] He lay looking into her eyes, where some of his hope lay reflected” (124). However, part of what Clive finds erotic about the moment is the feeling of being constrained or “bound.” This suggests that, while his desire for women may not be entirely fabricated, it’s influenced by a desire to conform—that is, to allow society to similarly constrain him.

“It left him with the conviction that his grandfather was convinced. One more human being had come alive. He had accomplished an act of creation, and as he did so Death turned her head away.”

Maurice’s conversation with his dying grandfather underscores that there are forms of “creation” other than reproduction. After his breakup with Clive, Maurice feels as though “he really was dead” (135); he can’t marry and have children, and his work is unfulfilling “money-grubbing” (135). However, the exchange with his grandfather awakens Maurice to the reality of the man’s inner life, and even this minor “act of creation”—reconstructing another person’s thoughts and feelings—makes Maurice himself feel more alive. This is an important discovery, since the kind of gay love the novel ultimately endorses is “creative” in a similar sense; Alec, for example, “comes alive” in Maurice’s imagination after their night together. 

“For he sees the flesh educating the spirit, as his has never been educated, and developing the sluggish heart and the slack mind against their will.”

The above passage, which imagines Maurice’s deceased father watching his son’s development, summarizes the relationship between Maurice’s sexual orientation and his character arc. Maurice isn’t naturally imaginative, rebellious, or daring; if he weren’t gay, he would most likely follow a path similar to his father’s—i.e. a very conventional middle-class life. However, the fact that he is gay forces him to develop traits his father never did: bravery, self-reflection, etc. 

“At last judgment came. He could scarcely believe his ears. It was ‘Rubbish, rubbish!’ He had expected many things, but not this; for if his words were rubbish his life was a dream.”

When Maurice approaches Dr. Barry about a “cure” for his desires, he probably believes he’ll be condemned, offered a solution, or both. Dr. Barry’s refusal to even entertain his claim is therefore doubly distressing. It doesn’t provide him with the cure he’d wanted, and it also denies a central facet of Maurice’s existence: his sexual orientation, and the difficulties he’s experienced because of it. The passage therefore reflects the idea—arguably relatively new when Forster was writing—that sexuality involves personal identity rather than simply behavior. 

“One must give them a leg up for the sake of the country generally, that’s all. They haven’t our feelings. They don’t suffer as we should in their place.’ Anne looked disapproval, but she felt she had entrusted her hundred pounds to the right sort of stock broker.” 

Maurice’s words, though deliberately provocative, are basically representative of middle- and upper-class attitudes towards the working class. Anne’s reaction underscores this; she “disapproves” of Maurice’s bluntness, but tacitly endorses (and participates in) an economic system that treats the lower classes as subhuman. Maurice shares this prejudice at the time and is therefore initially unable to regard Alec as human in the same sense he himself is, assuming that all Alec’s actions are financially motivated rather than the result of, for example, fear or confusion.

“With the world as it is, one must marry or decay.”

The idea that “one must marry or decay” recurs throughout the novel; the implication is that societal attitudes and punishments aside, being gay is inextricably linked to death because it does not produce children. The novel ultimately rejects this idea by (among other things) depicting Maurice and Alec as reborn through their relationship. Nevertheless, Maurice’s fear of “decay” is powerful enough that it here motivates him to seek a “cure” from Lasker-Jones.

“There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend...”

The above passage takes place just before Alec climbs into Maurice’s room; in fact, it’s while having these dreams that Maurice cries out for someone. The scene is thus the culmination of all Maurice’s unconscious thoughts and feelings. His dream of a “friend,” which he has had since early adolescence, grows increasingly distinct as his meeting with Alec approaches, and eventually facilitates it; Maurice at this point would never consciously acknowledge the possibility of cross-class sexual relations (let alone relationships), so he can only extend his “invitation” to Alec while sleeping. The passage also recalls the greenwood motif—Maurice's fantasy of escaping society’s rules and conventions. It therefore foreshadows the novel’s conclusion, in which Maurice and Alec figuratively escape to this place together.

“But all that night his body yearned for Alec’s, despite him. He called it lustful, a word easily uttered, and opposed to it his work, his family, his friends, his position in society. In that coalition must surely be included his will. For if the will can overleap class, civilization as we have made it will go to pieces.” 

Although Maurice and Alec ultimately choose to “live outside class” rather than directly confront it (239), Maurice does depict cross-class relationships as a serious threat to the class system. The above passage suggests that this is precisely why the middle and upper classes frame any attraction to the lower classes as “lust”; anything deeper or more conscious would by definition recognize the lower classes’ humanity, and therefore challenge the supposed naturalness and inevitability of the class hierarchy.

“I feel I might go off now I’ve told you. I’d hoped to get cured without giving myself away. Are there such things as men getting anyone in their power through dreams?”

After telling Lasker-Jones that he’s slept with Alec, Maurice asks him to try hypnotizing him one final time; his hope is that he’ll now be more vulnerable to suggestion. This proves not to be the case, but Maurice’s explanation for why he didn’t tell Lasker-Jones everything from the start is nevertheless significant. Maurice feels that by giving Lasker-Jones access to all his secrets he would be placing himself in his “power.” This is of course the entire aim of hypnosis, so Maurice’s reluctance to “give himself away” reveals his fundamental suspicion of the process; deep down, Maurice sees his sexuality as part of who he is, so he doesn’t truly want Lasker-Jones to tamper with it. The idea that someone could “get Maurice in their power” through his dreams also hints that the unconscious mind may have mystical or supernatural properties—for instance, that Alec has somehow placed a spell on Maurice while he was sleeping.

“It was as if the barrier that kept him from his fellows had taken another aspect. He was not afraid or ashamed anymore. After all, the forests and the night were on his side, not theirs; they, not he, were inside a ring fence. He had acted wrongly, and was still being punished—but wrongly because he had tried to get the best of both worlds. ‘But I must belong to my class, that’s fixed,’ he persisted.” 

Following the “failure” of his hypnosis sessions, Maurice accepts his sexual orientation fully. What was “wrong,” he now believes, was trying to “get the best of both worlds”—e.g. denying the sexual component of his desire as Clive did, maintaining a façade of “respectability” even after sleeping with Alec, etc. However, he hasn’t yet extended this critique of societal norms to class; he believes that nature is “on his side” where sexuality is concerned, but he continues to feel that he “must belong to his class.” This of course just underscores how deeply entrenched class ideology is, but Maurice ultimately comes to see it as another “ring fence” he can and should reject.

“He sprang, as he had boasted, of a respectable family—publicans, small tradesmen—and it was only by accident that he had appeared as an untamed son of the woods. Indeed, he liked the woods and the fresh air and water, he liked them better than anything and he liked to protect or destroy life, but woods contain no ‘openings’, and young men who want to get on must leave them.” 

Alec’s position as gamekeeper is symbolically significant in a novel that juxtaposes society and its pressures with the greenwood—an idealized natural world that society hasn‘t managed to “tame.” Alec’s work aligns him with the outdoors and therefore with this ideal. However, Alec isn’t simply a symbolic figure, but rather a character in his own right; as this passage notes, his association with nature is “accidental” and does not represent his ambitions in life. This makes the novel’s ending more meaningful; when Alec joins Maurice “in the greenwood,” he’s doing so not because the novel’s symbolism requires it, but because he, like Maurice, is choosing to reject social norms, including those surrounding class. 

“The belief grew that the actual situation was a blind—a practical joke almost—and concealed something real, that either desired.” 

As Alec and Maurice stroll through the British Museum, Alec continues to insinuate that he’ll expose Maurice if Maurice doesn’t offer him some kind of payment. Maurice no longer takes these threats at face value, however; instead, he senses that Alec is making them because he’s in some sense expected to make them, as a lower-class man with leverage over someone with more money. The passage therefore underscores how powerfully societal norms influence behavior and suppress people’s natural “desires.” In this sense, society acts similarly to the conscious mind, which often “conceals” thoughts and feelings that could prove disruptive.