Tuesday January 25, 2005 A Room with a View
A Room with a View - E.M. Forster (1908)
*** (out of 5)
Lately, I have been making a conscious effort to read some of the books on my lifetime reading list about which I have been procrastinating for years. A Room with a View is one of those books.
The novel is written in two parts. The first part takes place in Florence, Italy. In this part, a young British woman, Lucy Honeychurch, meets and becomes attracted to George Emerson, a socially unacceptable Englishmen with an eccentric father. Toward the end of the first part, Lucy finds herself alone with Emerson on a violet-strewn terrace. He kisses her – a kiss that is interrupted by another member of their traveling party. This kiss is a source of great confusion and internal conflict for Lucy – on one hand, she wishes to maintain the conventions of Victorian England while, on the other hand, a more repressed part of her would like to submit to her stimulated passions. The second part of the novel is set in Surrey, England. In this part of the novel, Lucy is courted by Cecil Vyse, a suitor that is socially acceptable, but unwilling to see beyond the stifling Victorian class and gender lines. Predictably, Lucy once again comes into contact with the Emersons in this part and is soon faced with a defining choice between a life with Cecil and a life with George Emerson. She ultimately breaks off her engagement with Cecil and marries Emerson. She chooses, in effect, passion over propriety.
A Room with a View is 'yet another' mild social satire that explores the conflict between propriety and passion. As is so often case with such novels, the treatment of the opposing forces is too lopsided and passion ends up predictably trumping social convention. Forster's characters are colorful, his dialogue is often amusing, and his themes are easily accessible. I simply could not, however, get too excited about the novel's unoriginal and relatively shallow treatment of the primary theme.
( Jan 25 2005, 11:00:10 PM PST )
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