This is the eighth post in the Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” series. This series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, invites contributors to build off of scholarship and lived knowledge that envisions queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.

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E. M. Forster’s Maurice follows Maurice Hall, as he comes to terms with his sexuality. Experiencing a moment of desperate loneliness, he fantasises about Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest, or the “greenwood,” as a symbolic refuge where queer men like him can disappear together, finding liberation and lasting queer joy. Shortly after this, he comes across Alec Scudder, a gamekeeper who according to Elizabeth Ladenson is “not just an employee but one in signal touch with nature.”¹ In many ways Alec is a creature of impulse, referenced fondly by Forster himself as the “stealer of apricots,” an instinctive gesture that sees him seizing his small and quaint pleasures from the natural world in the immediacy of the moment.² Such simple yet profound action implies earnestness in the directness with which Alec inhabits the world around him. Maurice’s later romantic entanglement with Alec subtly restructures his own relationship to nature and culminates in his decision to leave behind societal expectations and escape with Alec into the greenwood of his dreams.

A deeply personal novel, Forster’s Maurice sets itself apart from the unhappy and tragic endings often meted out to queer stories. As Heather Love notes “the history of Western representation is littered with the corpses of gender and sexual deviants.”³ When Maurice and Alec escape into the greenwood, they miraculously survive a world which statistically never gives individuals like them much of a chance at survival. In the terminal note, Forster famously declares that “A happy ending was imperative … I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood.”⁴ This lasting queer solace and tranquillity found in the forest engages in a uniquely queer politics of resistance. Forster’s lovers not only evade an “unhappy” ending but are also able to create a concrete vision of a potential futurity that so often eludes queer love, embodied in these transcendent moments of quiet joy found whilst “roaming” in the greenwood.

“This lasting queer solace and tranquillity found in the forest engages in a uniquely queer politics of resistance.”

Forster first conceived of Maurice following a visit to Edward Carpenter and his partner George Merrill at their farm. The visit was profoundly formative, perhaps offering Forster a glimpse of a successful queer relationship that would have been rare at the time. An oft-cited anecdote recalls Merrill touching Forster at the small of his back, an intimate and spontaneous gesture Forster later credited with having inspired him to write Maurice with its “imperative” happy ending. José Esteban Muñoz in his theorization of queer futurity states that “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”⁵ For Forster, this “concrete possibility” of a fully realised queer future seemed largely unattainable within the conservative and strictly heteronormative climate of the era. Dedicated to a “Happier Year” the novel seems to cross a threshold that was perhaps out of reach for Forster himself at the time and found its inception in that spontaneous moment when a simple touch at his backside revealed what a possible queer future could hold for him beyond the “here and now.”

Maurice envisions the greenwood during a vulnerable moment when his first queer relationship comes to an end, urging him to proclaim “Perhaps among those who took to the greenwood in old time there had been two men like himself— two. At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world.”⁶ Towards the end of the novel, Maurice and Alec succeed in the invocation to “defy the world,” by exiting the intolerant English climate temporally to disappear into a surreal iteration of the fictious greenwood of the past. This evocative moment also finds a touching emotional parallel in a later scene with the cricket match when Maurice and Alec play together. Forster writes:

His [Maurice’s] mind had cleared, and he felt that they were against the whole world…They played for the sake of each other and their fragile relationship —if one fell the other would follow. They intended no harm to the world, but so long as it attacked, they must punish, they must stand wary, then hit with full strength, they must show that when two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph.⁷

Commenting on this, Anne Hartree notes that “[in] a brilliant reversal, the estate-village cricket match, quintessential emblem of conservative Englishness, becomes a symbol of the Maurice-Alec relation. Batting together they are comrades, an equal pair, mutually dependent, placed at the heart of Englishness and yet excluded from it.”⁸ Forster’s phrase “when two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph” dovetails well with Maurice’s earlier stance that “Two men can defy the world.” Doing so allows them to reclaim their place within their fraught connection to English culture. This poignant asymmetry of the two against the whole, the minority excluded by the majority, underscores the minimalistic poetry of Forster’s resistance to exilic forces that work to dispossess the queer individual from the countryside. Hartree also comments on the setting of the greenwood writing how “Implicitly this choice of location also asserts homosexual love as the lost or invisible heart of English culture and history, for this greenwood evokes both Shakespeare’s, with its cross-dressing lovers, and Robin Hood’s Sherwood.”⁹ Maurice and Alec’s traversal into the greenwood works to repair the frayed threads connecting two vital aspects of their identity, their queerness and their English cultural heritage, so that they can re-enter the pastoral space emotionally unencumbered at the end of the novel. Rather than acknowledging the countryside as a seat of intolerance, Forster’s novel seeks to instead present it as a tranquil and restorative site of queer sanctuary and agency. In the widely referenced alternative ending, when Maurice and Alec finally enter the greenwood as anonymous “woodcutters,” they become an essential part of the natural environment within which their labour is situated. Vocations such as gamekeeping or woodcutting, which entail hours of physical labour within a rural environment, foster a deeply meaningful and peaceful immersion into nature. In choosing this idyllic life, Maurice and Alec prioritise real and simple joys over worldly and material comforts, thus stealing their metaphorical apricots.

In the novel, Forster chooses a more ambiguous ending that is powerful in its own way, generating hope not through an elegant conclusion, but through a suggestion of possibility. Muñoz also writes of queer futurity as the desire for an approaching “horizon,” explaining that “[this] desire is always directed at that thing that is not yet here, objects and moments that burn with anticipation and promise.” Maurice and Alec’s moment of departure occurs beyond even the scope of the narrative. As Paul Morrison observes, “the lovers ultimately elude novelistic representation …”¹⁰ In prioritising the promise of future happiness over the actual depiction of an idyllic happy ending in the greenwood, Forster tenderly preserves its immortality as a site of quiet refuge.

“The greenwood itself occupies an interesting place as the emotional crux of the novel, existing always just beyond the edges of the text, yet never fully captured or realised within its span.”

The greenwood itself occupies an interesting place as the emotional crux of the novel, existing always just beyond the edges of the text, yet never fully captured or realised within its span. For Muñoz queerness itself exists as an “ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”¹¹ The greenwood that Maurice and Alec disappear into at the end of the novel is not one that corresponds with the actual greenwood of the novel’s Edwardian temporal setting. As Meredith Miller comments, Forster’s characters “exit the space of realism, which sits at the conjunction of the everyday and historical time and disappear into mythos.”¹² By drawing on a more tolerant English cultural identity, rooted in Robin Hood’s queerly aligned and homosocial greenwood of the past, Forster projects a hopeful vision for a queer future that extends beyond the novel’s restrictive Edwardian context. Invoking the outlaw rebel status of a figure like Robin Hood known for his egalitarian politics, additionally works to radicalise the otherwise imperialistic, conservative and nostalgic insularity associated with the pastoral.

“Ultimately the ‘happy ending’ that Forster offers his queer lovers focuses more on the positivity of possibility than on the certainty of a clearly etched future…”

Ultimately the “happy ending” that Forster offers his queer lovers focuses more on the positivity of possibility than on the certainty of a clearly etched future which is thus remarkably well suited to its positioning within Forster’s reconstruction of Robin Hood’s forest as a partly mythic partly real space that finds a fine balance between its bridged associations with the past and future. Situated in a reclaimed pastoral space where “two men can defy the world,” the queer future of Maurice and Alec is chiefly hopeful and achieves a sense of permanence because it is untainted by the actual culmination of their relationship. They are instead “roaming” in “the ever and ever that fiction allows” finding simple moments of tranquil joy in the greenwood.

Feature Image: Vladimir Osipovich Sherwood, A landscape with a waterfall and hounds,1897, Oil on Canvas. Private Collection, Wikimedia Commons.

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Notes

1. Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from ‘Madame Bovary’ to ‘Lolita’ (Cornell University Press, 2017), p. 137. ↩︎
2. E. M. Forster, Maurice (W.W Norton & company, 1993), p. 187. All further references to the text pertain to this edition. ↩︎
3. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard University Press, 2009), p.32. ↩︎
4. Forster, Maurice, p. 185. ↩︎
5. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009), p.1. ↩︎
6. Forster, Maurice, p. 98. ↩︎
7. Forster, Maurice, p.147. ↩︎
8. Anne Hartree, ‘“A Passion That Few English Minds Have Admitted”: Homosexuality and Englishness in E.M. Forster’s “Maurice”’, Paragraph 19, no. 2, (1996), pp. 127–38 (p.134). ↩︎
9. Hartree, Paragraph, p. 135. ↩︎
10. Paul Morrison, ‘“Maurice or Coming Out Straight.”’, Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Intervention (Ohio State University Press, 2015), p. 69. ↩︎
11. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, p.14. ↩︎
12. Meredith Miller, ‘Lesbian, Gay and Trans Bildungsroman’, A History of the Bildungsroman (Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 246. ↩︎