Phaethon, Persephone, and "A Room with a View"Author(s): Philip C. Wagner, Jr.Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1990), pp. 275-284Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246766Accessed: 30/06/2010 10:45

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Phaethon, Persephone, and A Room with a View

PHILIP C.WAGNER, JR.

E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel stated that "parody and adaptation have enormous advantages" for those novelists "who may have a great deal to say and plenty of literary genius, but who do not . . . take easily to creating characters."1 For these writers "an already existing book or liter-

ary tradition may inspire them - they may find high up in its cornices a

pattern that will serve as a beginning, they may swing about in its rafters and gain strength."2 One such "pattern" is provided by classical mythol- ogy, as in the example he gives of James Joyce's Ulysses, a tale of "the modern man's journey from morn to midnight" which "coheres because it

depends from the journey of a hero through the seas of Greece, like a bat hanging to a cornice."3 As James McConkey points out, Forster himself had a great interest in classical mythology from his days as a Cambridge undergraduate, and this interest spilled over into his short stories wherein "Pan roams, a girl is a Dryad and turns into a tree to escape her boorish lover . . . , and a curate meets a Faun in the woods and comes to a realization of his own hypocrisy."4 And Forster introduced the classical

mythological characters of Phaethon and Persephone into his novel A Room with a View by using not only their names as the names of an Italian

carriage driver and his lover, but also adapted the myths to the plot of the novel to emphasize Lucy Honeychurch's and George Emerson's passionate awakenings. By reading the novel for this mythic structure, the reader can better appreciate the personae of Lucy and George and their actions as

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vpl. 27, No. 4, 1990. Copyright © 1990. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

276 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

they relate to their classical analogues. Persephone, who spends half of the year in the darkness of the underworld and half in the light of the surface, is Lucy Honeychurch, who breaks from the darkness of Victorian conventionality to experience the brightness of passion. And Phaethon, whose brashness causes him literally to fall from heaven to earth, is

George Emerson, who forever contemplates the "everlasting Why" until the experience of passion leads him to an encounter with the physical.5 As in any adaptation the myths of Persephone and Phaethon in A Room with a View provide a means of governing the novel's action, an action that is most strongly felt beginning with chapter six, wherein the personae of Persephone and Phaethon are introduced.

As chapter six opens, the major characters are going on an outing into the hills about Florence. They are transported in carriages driven by Italians, the one driving Lucy's carriage being the one named "Phaethon." Phaethon has with him a young lady named "Persephone," whom he claims is his sister. But their lovemaking quickly identifies them as lovers, and the English party rapidly becomes polarized with Mr. Eager, the minister, wanting the couple to be separated and Mr. Emerson, George's father, and Miss Lavish, a novelist, wanting the couple to stay together. Yet both Phaethon and Persephone appeal to another party, namely Lucy Honeychurch. "Lucy had a spasm of envy" as she earlier watched the

couple "sporting with each other disgracefully," but she does not know how to respond to their appeal (74). According to Frederick Crews, this

appeal to Lucy from Phaethon and Persephone is similar to the one delivered to her earlier in the Piazza Signoria from the murdered man who "bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin."6 The blood trickles onto some photographs which Bonnie Finkelstein calls Lucy's "first act of rebellion,"7 since the photographs include a nude Venus which Charlotte Bartlett, her extremely prudish chaperone, calls "a pity," for it "spoilt the picture" (47). Finkelstein derives from the image of blood on a nude the following equation: ". . . Nudity plus blood equals life."8 It is towards life that Lucy is being called, for she is shackled by Victorian

conventionality, which deadens life by subverting passion beneath ration-

ality, and she must break free of this conventionality if she is to live. Thus, she truly re-embodies Persephone, for she is trapped beneath the earth, beneath convention, and the driver and his lover turn to her to

PHAETHON, PERSEPHONE, AND FORSTER 277

appeal to her trapped passions, to force her to release those passions and return to the earth's surface. But Lucy is a product of her society, a society which, according to H. A. Smith, Forster presents as "depersonalized by materialism, philistinism, some of the more inhibiting forms of puritanism and, most of all perhaps, by a blinding complacency engendered by a confident sense of its own entrenchment."9 It is a society which lacks "any firm sanctions for the imaginative life," thereby allowing a "rational, sceptical spirit" to gain a firm grip on the society and, hence, on its conventions.10 Lucy is trapped in this grasp, is trapped in this rational

spirit. Consequently, she does not respond to the couple's entreaty, does not allow her passions release, and the couple is subsequently separated.

George, likewise, is also trapped. He is a completely ethereal person, forever intent on contemplating the "everlasting Why" (32). George recognizes this aspect of himself, as he relates in discussing Lucy's brother's cleverness and subsequent behavior: " 'It is his philosophy. Only he starts life with it; and I have tried the Note of Interrogation first' "

(177). But George's "try" has blocked off what life is, and his father wants him to experience a more physical existence by charging Lucy to answer

George's question: " 'Make him realize that by the side of the everlasting

Why there is a Yes - a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes' " (32). When

the sight of the red trickle down the Italian's chin causes Lucy to faint and to fall into George's arms, he experiences passion for the first time, and now he wants to live, i.e., to recognize more clearly the physical reality.11 Thus, George is a Phaethon figure who falls from the sky, or the ethereal, to earth, or the physical.

Hence, both Lucy and George need new directions to their lives; in other words, they need a renewal, and spring is arche typically the time of renewal if one does not fight the influence of spring on man, which Mr. Emerson holds has happened in the expulsion of Persephone from the driver Phaethon's side:

"... I refer to Lorenzo the poet. He wrote a line - so I heard yesterday - which runs like this: 'Don't go fighting against the

Spring.' "

Mr. Eager could not refuse the opportunity for erudition. "Non fate guerre al Maggio," he murmured. " 'War not with

May' would render a correct meaning." "The point is, we have warred with it. Look." He pointed to the

278 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Val d'Arno, which was visible far below them, through the bud'

ding trees. "Fifty miles of Spring, and weVe come up to admire them. Do you suppose there's any difference between Spring in nature and Spring in man? But there we go, praising the one and

condemning the other as improper, ashamed that the same laws work eternally through both." (75)

George and Lucy are experiencing the "Spring in man," and although George does not fight it, Lucy does. Thus, George allows the passions that have grown in him since he held Lucy to be released in his spontaneously kissing Lucy. Lucy's passions are awakened also, as signified by Lucy's embracing Charlotte shortly after being kissed by George, though Char- lotte "knew perfectly well that Lucy did not love her, but needed her to love" (90). But Lucy buries her passions again in the dead of convention when she becomes engaged to Cecil Vyse, a man of convention.

Lucy, however, personifies Persephone, and as such she travels from the darkness of the forest to the light of the meadow, from Hades to the surface, from convention to passion, from death to life. She makes this

passage through love, defined by Mr. Emerson as "of the body; not the

body, but of the body" (237). For Mr. Emerson the body is extremely important:

" 'We shall enter [the Garden of Eden] when we no longer despise our bodies' "

(146). The Victorian society of the novel does not love the body, but tries to hide it, calling, for example, nudes in art

"pities," for the Victorians fear sexuality and, hence, have erected a number of conventions which manipulate and repress one's sexuality. To Forster these "forces of manipulation and repression are more dangerous than the forces of sexuality," for they go against what is natural, what is

truly human.12 Hence, the body is not something to be hidden, but to be

appreciated, for a person's body is "radiant" and "personable," yet Lucy herself only recognizes these human aspects after being confronted by a real nude in the form of George Emerson (153).

Yet even George cannot show off his body until he has sanctified it by bathing in the "Sacred Lake." He is joined in the bathing by Mr. Beebe, the minister, and Freddy Honeychurch, Lucy's brother. Freddy invites

George to bathe, thereby becoming George's sponsor in the baptismal ceremony, and George's rebirth (i.e., his gaining a new perspective on

life) becomes manifested through a sacramental activity and is further

signified by his confronting Lucy and her mother when they happened

PHAETHON, PERSEPHONE, AND FORSTER 279

upon the bathers "barefoot [and] bare chested," "[regarding] himself as dressed" (153). Thus, George after bathing in the lake no longer contem-

plates just the ethereal; he now also acknowledges the importance of the

physical. Earlier, he averted his eyes from the nakedness of Lucy's soul after holding her in his arms, but now he freely shows off his body, his flesh, his physicality.

13 When Lucy gazes on George's body, she comes to an understanding of Mr. Emerson's definition of "love," for to love the body is to give in to lust, which is wrong, but to love "of the body" is to sense the "directness" of passion and "the need to connect" and to act on these feelings.

14 But in order to feel these impulses, one must first appreci- ate the body. George after bathing appreciates his and, subsequently, these impulses as signified by the second spontaneous kiss which he gives to Lucy. And even though Lucy starts to appreciate the body, two other

personae prevent her from giving in to these impulses, Charlotte Bartlett and Cecil Vyse, her fiancé.

Charlotte is an extremely prudish woman, the type who is so concerned about maintaining her chastity that she checks her hotel room for oubli- ettes and other secret entrances and finds it improper for a young lady to leave her door unlocked and to lean out of a window. Charlotte is locked in convention and as such is depicted as an earthy, i.e., dull, person who

prefers to sit on the ground without the comfort of a mackintosh square and who "[stands] brown against the view" (80). Her concern over con- vention and over Lucy leads her to question George's possible subsequent actions after she comes upon the two of them while George was kissing Lucy the first time, for as she tells Lucy,

" 'I am a woman of the world, in

my small way, and I know where things lead to' " (15). Charlotte does not

believe that Lucy knows "where things lead to," for Lucy has been uniniti- ated into the world and, thus, must be dismissed when Charlotte and Miss Lavish " 'wish to converse on high topics unsuited for [her] ear' "

(77). It is this concern for Lucy and for convention that leads her to take Lucy, in a very significant motion, to Rome to escape the Emersons in Florence, and there they meet Cecil. And why is this movement significant? Flor- ence is the city of the Italian Renaissance, and as such is full of the vitality of the spirit as signified in the art of the city, an art that worships the body and, hence, produces "pities." Rome, on the other hand, since it was the seat of a sprawling empire, is much more official and spiritually oppressive and is, therefore, a most suitable environment for stopping the flow of

passion and for meeting Cecil Vyse. This movement from Florence to

280 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Rome, from vitality to oppression, from the Emersons to Cecil, can be likened to Persephone's movement from the surface to Hades. And as the

pomegranate doomed Persephone to life in the underworld so is Lucy trapped in the world of oppressive convention by her engagement to Cecil

Vyse. Cecil Vyse is a London man and, thus, does not appreciate the rural

lifestyle that bred Lucy, since it provokes a disregard for convention

leading to Lucy's "

Always quoting servants, or asking how the pudding is made* "

(141). This staid conventionality of his has a strong influence on how Lucy thinks of him, as reflected in this conversation during a walk in a forest:

"I had an idea - I dare say wrongly - that you feel more at home with me in a room. . . . Or, at the most, in a garden, or on a road. Never in the real country like this. ... I connect you with a view - a certain type of view. Why shouldn't you connect me with a room?"

She reflected a moment, and then said, laughing: "Do you know that you're right? I do. I must be a poetess after

all. When I think of you it's always in a room. How funny!" To her surprise, he seemed annoyed. "A drawing-room, pray? With no view?" "Yes, with no view, I fancy. Why not?" "I'd rather," he said reproachfully, "that you connected me with

the open air." (122)

But Cecil's conventionality traps him in the lifeless London environment as symbolized by a room with no view. To be connected with "the real

country," a more Romantic (and, hence, more passionate) environment, he must set aside these conventions and give in to passion. But he refuses to do so. Thus, when he kisses Lucy after first procuring permission to kiss her (as is proper), the kiss is a disaster, for as Forster states:

Passion should believe itself irresistible. It should forget civility and consideration and all other curses of a refined nature. Above all, it should never ask for leave where there is a right of way. (124)

PHAETHON, PERSEPHONE, AND FORSTER 281

Cecil's inability to be passionate also prevents him from admiring the flesh. While leading Lucy and her mother through the forest, he comes

upon the bathers, and his first reaction is to lead the ladies away from such a socially unacceptable scene, for he "always felt that he must lead women, though he knew not whither, and protect them, though he knew not against what," the proper actions of a gentleman (152). He cannot even enjoy his own body as signified by his refusal to play lawn tennis. Instead, he prefers to stroll about the court reading and calling out to his fiancé,

" 'I say, listen to this, Lucy. Three split infinitives' " (182). He

prefers intellectual activity to physical activity; by emphasizing the ra- tional, he closes off the passionate. And for this reason Lucy wisely breaks off her engagement with him, for, as she tells Cecil,

" 'you're the sort who

can't know any one intimately' "

(201). And it is his conventionality that truly interferes with his ability to be intimate:

". . . Conventional, Cecil, you're that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don't know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap me up. I won't be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for

people are more glorious, and you hide them from me. That's why I break off my engagement." (201-02)

As Persephone, Lucy has already risen from the Hades of convention, but unlike the classical Persephone, she has a choice whether or not to return to the underworld. She will return if she marries Cecil; but with the engagement broken, the pomegranate loses its effect, and she can remain on the surface. And another character surprises her by being the means of her remaining on the surface, namely Charlotte B^rtlett.

Charlotte is described by Lionel Trilling as a "goat with a sheep some- how hidden within her."15 Her conventionality and prudery make her a

goat, but her care for Lucy is the sheep within, and this interior drive forces her to bring Lucy to George via George's father. The meeting of Lucy and Mr. Emerson occurs at a crucial point in the narrative: Lucy, having broken her engagement to Cecil, is preparing to join two eccentric older women, the Miss Alans, in a tour of Greece. After doing her shopping in preparation for the trip, Lucy takes Charlotte to the village church for the celebration of vespers, but Lucy is not interested in going

282 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

to church so she waits in the rectory. Also waiting in the rectory is Mr. Emerson. As revealed by George later in the novel, Charlotte knew Mr. Emerson was there and evidently wanted Lucy to talk with him. Mr. Emerson had been told by George of his kissing Lucy and his feelings for Lucy. He also knows how Lucy feels for George although Lucy tries to deny those same feelings:

"You love [my] boy body and soul, plainly, directly as he loves you, and no other word expresses it. You won't marry the other man for his sake."

"How dare you!" gasped Lucy, with the roaring of waters in her eyes. "Oh, how like a man! - I mean, to suppose that a woman is always thinking about a man."

"But you are." (237)

Mr. Emerson warns her not to waste her life, for to deny her love for George is to deny a part of herself (237). After much crying, she accepts his warning and returns home, knowing that "he had robbed the body of its taint, the world's taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire" (240). And he had shown her this holiness in a church, thereby sanctifying it in a manner similar to George's bathing. Mr. Emer- son had first spoken of this holiness of direct desire during the controversy concerning Phaethon and Persephone's lovemaking:

" To be driven by lovers - A king might envy us, and if we part them it's more like sacrilege than anything I know' "

(73). And when the lovers are separated, he laments,

" 'It is not victory. ... It is defeat. You have parted two people who are happy'

" (74). Likewise, Mr. Emerson does not want Lucy to

defeat herself; he wants her to be happy, and happiness will be found in

marriage to George:

"I have no time for the tenderness, and the comradeship, and the

poetry, and the things that really matter, and for which you marry. I know that, with George, you will find them, and that you love him. Then be his wife." (237)

He warns Lucy that even if she does run away to Greece and never sees George again, he will become the proverbial thorn in her side, constantly working in her thoughts until she dies:

PHAETHON, PERSEPHONE, AND FORSTER 283

"It isn't possible to love and to part. You will wish it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal." (237)

Thus, Lucy decides not to return to the Hades of convention, but marries George, thereby making Phaethon's fall from heaven complete and

Persephone's tenure on earth permanent by having their passions requited and their love attained (246).

Hence, the novel ends with Lucy and George married and in Florence, the city of vitality and passion, since they have escaped the oppressiveness and conventionality of the British empire. They occupy the same rooms

Lucy and Charlotte had occupied on their first sojourn to Florence, with both George and Lucy having followed the courses of their classical mytho- logical counterparts. Phaethon has fallen from heaven, from the realm of the ethereal, to earth, the realm of the physical. And Persephone has travelled from the underworld, convention, to the surface, passion. George has learned that beside the "everlasting Why" is a "yes," but it is not transitory; it is eternal, and it is called "love" (32). And Lucy has learned that one cannot ignore love by hiding behind societal conven- tions; in love, she learns, lie the tenderness, comradeship, and poetry of a

relationship and that to deny love is to deny "the expression of touch, the contradiction of desire, the need to connect,"16 which are "the things that

really matter, and for which [one marries]" (237). To deny all of this is to waste one's life, and Lucy, in the end, decides not to waste her life, but connects with George. They now have the new direction in life for which

they were seeking, and just as spring in man has been realized in them so the landscape about Florence celebrates the spring in nature as depicted in the novel's closing sentence: ". . . They heard the river, bearing down the snows of winter into the Mediterranean" (246).

University of Texas at Arlington

284 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

NOTES

1. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1954) 176.

2. Forster 176. 3. Forster 178. 4. James McConkey, The Novels ofE. M. Forster (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1957) 48. 5. E. M. Forster, A Room with a View (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1986) 32.

Subsequent references to this edition will be made in the text by page number. 6. Frederick C. Crews, ME. M. Forster's Comic Spirit," Forster: A Collection of Critical

Essays, ed. Malcolm Bradbury, Twentieth Century Views 59 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice- Hall, 1966) 100; Forster, A Room 49.

7. Bonnie Blumenthal Finkelstein, Forster's Women: Eternal Differences (New York: Columbia UP, 1974) 66-67.

8. Finkelstein 77-78. 9. H. A. Smith, "Forster's Humanism and the Nineteenth Century," Forster: A Collec-

àon of Critical Essays 106. 10. Smith 116. 11. Lionel Trilling, E. M. Forster (New York: New Directions, 1964) 100. 12. Finkelstein 79. 13. Finkelstein 78; Forster, A Room 53. 14. Judith Scherer Herz, "The Double Nature of Forster's Fiction: A Room with a View

and The Longest Journey," Critical Essays on E. M. Forster, ed. Alan Wilde (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985) 84.

15. Trilling 111-12. 16. Hen 84.