E. M. Forster and the Motor Car

Andrew Thacker University of Ulster

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In a revealing recent essay on writing, Englishness and the cultural resonances of different forms of modern transport, John Lucas has drawn attention to how E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) employs the motor car as a ‘symbol of intrusive, unsettling power’ which disrupts the ‘sentimental ruralism’ Lucas detects in the novel.1 In this essay I want to dwell some more upon the role of the motor car in Forster’s novel, specifically arguing that the historical emergence of the automobile needs to be located in more detail in order to understand its significance in Howards End. The motor car is not just a vehicle for symbolic meanings, as Lucas shows, but also has a powerful influence upon the narrative form of the novel itself. Forster’s novel, I suggest, is concerned with attempting to understand a variety of new spaces and spatial experiences, attendant upon modernity, and the theme of the speeding motion of the motor car offers a significant image for comprehending the connections between these new geographies of modernity. By focussing upon the motor car’s role in Howards End we can begin to place the novel within a spatial history of modernity, showing how this combines
with a set of textual spaces where Forster’s idiosyncratic modernism can best be appreciated.

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