Back to AtD...Howard's End allusion and spoiler (if you haven't read )
Mark Kohut
markekohut at yahoo.com
Wed Dec 26 06:33:30 CST 2012
The end of Howard's End [pub 1910] presents (part of) Forster's vision of the future of England
in that rich way novels can. Two sisters will be raising one's child together at Howard's End. One
'emancipated' sister is staying in a loveless marriage out of compassion for her 20+years older
husband who has been "broken" by his son's conviction of a crime for which the father helped
to cause (indirectly). The younger sister, who is the boy's mother, had the briefest of impusive affairs with
a man not of her class for whom she may have felt too miuch sympathy. She says she cannot love again.
The child will inherit Howard's End, olde England, metaphorically.
AtD p962 (and up to it). Yashmeen has told Reef that Cyprian still loves them as they are raising Ljublica together
now after Cyprian has entered the monastery. Yashmeen fondles C's clothes and wishes things could be different.
A Traverse son, full of righteous violence, is the father; A gay man, part of the sexual threesome once,
who enters a monastery but who "still loves them" : and a brilliant female mathematician who gives that up.
A new 'family'?
I am NOT coming close to suggesting any overt comparison or influence from Howard's End, just asking a question
that comes up when we deal with fictional visions: what is Pynchon's here about love, family, raising a child in this
pendant world.
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