62 pages • 2-hour read
Maurice
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Part 2, Chapters 20-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 20 Summary
Clive has the flu shortly before qualifying as a barrister and is still recovering when he visits the Halls a few weeks later; he is irritable during the meal, and eventually grows dizzy and faints. Maurice unthinkingly kisses him while loosening his collar; after helping Clive to bed and calling for a doctor, Maurice asks his mother not to mention the kiss to anyone else.
The doctor examines Clive and assures the Halls that he’s only suffering a minor relapse, but Maurice is unconvinced, and annoyed by the doctor’s recommendation that they hire a nurse. He goes to Clive’s room, helping him to the chamber pot when he wakes. This upsets Clive; Maurice says he doesn’t mind, but Clive says he’d rather have a nurse. The two argue, and Clive falls back asleep.
Maurice tries to call for Ada but finds that she’s fallen asleep downstairs. He wakes her, and she says their mother told her to wait up for the nurse: “[T]he nurse mustn’t be let in by a man—it wouldn’t look well” (108). Maurice dismisses her concerns and returns upstairs.
Part 2, Chapter 21 Summary
Clive soon recovers enough to return to Penge, but whenever Maurice visits, he finds him listless, depressed, and even cruel. Nevertheless, Clive is determined to travel to Greece in September.
The night before Clive’s departure, he has dinner with the Halls. Afterwards, he tries to dissuade Maurice from spending the night at his apartment; when Maurice returns with him anyway, Clive says he’s going to bed. Maurice hands him a bottle of medicine to pack, and Clive complains about Maurice’s nagging while philosophizing about the pleasures of death: “To forget everything—even happiness. Happiness! A casual tickling of someone or something against oneself—that's all. Would that we had never been lovers! For then, Maurice, you and I should have lain still and been quiet” (113). Maurice views Clive’s agitation as lingering illness and refuses to engage when Clive goads him.
Maurice wakes later that night to the sound of Clive asking to join him. Maurice agrees, but Clive struggles to fall asleep, eventually returning to his own bed.
Part 2, Chapter 22 Summary
Clive visits the Theatre of Dionysus, which he finds as lifeless as the rest of Greece: “He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards” (116). He recalls the letter he just wrote informing Maurice that he has “become normal” despite himself (116), and it confirms his sense of life’s futility.
Part 2, Chapter 23 Summary
Maurice writes Clive begging him to return to England: “I am very anxious about you on account of your letter, as it shows how ill you are. I have waited to hear from you for a fortnight and now come two sentences, which I suppose mean that you cannot love anyone of your own sex any longer” (117). Clive tears the letter up and resolves to be clearer.
Part 2, Chapter 24 Summary
Clive spends a final week in Athens, unnerved by how suddenly his sexual orientation seemed to change during and after his illness: “When he went a drive his eye rested on women. Little details, a hat, the way a skirt is held, scent, laughter, the delicate walk across mud—blended into a charming whole” (118). Clive initially hoped these feelings wouldn’t impact his relationship with Maurice; however, his relapse after visiting the Halls confirmed that he now found “Maurice or anyone connected with him […] revolting” (119). Despite his best efforts (including the trip to Greece), Clive hasn’t been able to revive his feelings for Maurice, or men more generally.
Part 2, Chapter 25 Summary
When Clive finally visits the Halls, Maurice is out. Clive is struck by Ada’s beauty, and after dinner, he allows her and Kitty to practice bandaging him for their first aid class. A phone call from Maurice, who just received Clive’s telegram, interrupts them: “[T]he approach of reality alarmed [Clive]. He was so happy being bandaged: his friend would arrive soon enough” (124). While waiting, he tells Ada how disappointing his trip to Greece was; she admits she’s happy he’s returned, and he asks her to walk with him the following day.
When Maurice arrives home, he takes Clive to the smoking room and challenges him on his feelings. Clive tries to postpone the discussion, but eventually reiterates his claim that he has “become normal,” detailing his experiences before and after his illness. Maurice chastises him for allowing the situation to fester by keeping it secret: “Can the leopard change his spots? Clive, you’re in a muddle. It’s part of your general health” (127). Clive is nevertheless adamant, arguing that at this point he loves Ada more than Maurice.
Beginning to believe Clive is serious, Maurice tries to question him about Ada, and then calls for her. This angers Clive, and the two grapple for the room’s key. Afterwards, Maurice is remorseful and worries he’s hurt Clive, who goes to check on Ada. When he returns, Maurice has locked the door. Clive leaves sorry for the way things with Maurice have ended, but optimistic about his future.
Part 2, Chapters 20-25 Analysis
To modern readers, Clive’s insistence that he’s become straight is likely to read as denial. This is certainly plausible; much more than Maurice, Clive struggled with the belief that his sexuality “tainted” and “damned” him while growing up (69), and he continues to view actual sex between men as “inexcusable” (165). The novel also implies that Clive eventually comes to regret leaving Maurice: “To the end of his life Clive was not sure of the exact moment of [Maurice’s] departure […] Out of some external Cambridge his friend began beckoning to him, clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of the May term” (246). Clive’s change may also reflect an unconscious fear of the “sterility” that Maurice lamented. His trip to Greece seems to solidify his belief that love between men inevitably ends in death, but he’s no longer able to rationalize this belief as “beautiful” (97). Instead, Clive now feels what the novel calls the “life spirit”—the desire to live, thrive, grow, and, in Clive’s case, reproduce.
Nevertheless, certain aspects of Clive’s experience are difficult to reconcile with the idea that he’s simply repressing his true feelings. In fact, Clive initially finds the change so upsetting that he tries to reverse it: “He believed in the intellect and tried to think himself back into the old state. He averted his eyes from women, and when that failed adopted childish and violent expedients” (120). Likewise, his desire for women seems at least somewhat sincere; when he meets his wife Anne, he sees her as “the whole world” (164).
This ambiguity may partly reflect the less settled nature of the Edwardian era’s ideas about sexuality. Maurice’s experiences conform to the modern understanding of sexual orientation as inborn and largely fixed; when he realizes that he’s gay, he realizes that “[h]e love[s] men and always ha[s] loved them” (62). However, this view was less prevalent at the time Forster wrote Maurice, and the conclusions people drew from it weren’t necessarily the modern era’s conclusions. The fact that Clive’s change follows an illness is a good example; if sexual orientation is physical or biological, the novel suggests, a physical disease could conceivably alter it. Alternatively, it’s possible Clive is and always was bisexual, but was slow to realize this due to the era’s gender norms. His feelings towards his nurse lend this idea credence, because they reflect a kind of heterosexual desire his society doesn’t recognize; when he first “notice[s] how charming his nurse [is]” he finds he “enjoy[s] obeying her” (118)—a feeling that’s incompatible with the conventional association of male heterosexuality and dominance. On the other hand, what he enjoys may simply be the relief of surrendering to societal dictates after fighting them for so long: “[Women] welcomed him into a world of delicious interchange. [...] How happy normal people made their lives!” (118-19).
Whatever the nature of Clive’s realization, the novel clearly condemns the way he treats Maurice. It isn’t simply that Clive ends their relationship, but rather that he preaches heteronormative ideas while doing so; when Maurice asks about his feelings for men, Clive says he “care[s] for men, in the real sense […] and always shall” (127), implicitly disparaging gay romantic relationships as “unreal.” Regardless of whether Clive’s transformation is genuine, Maurice suggests that his willingness to cater to society’s anti-gay stance is cowardly. It also stands in direct contrast to Alec, who experiences attraction towards both men and women, but ultimately chooses the substantially more difficult route of pursuing a relationship with Maurice.
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