A Passage to Italy: Narrating the Family in Crisis in E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread

Critics consistently neglect to consider crucial place of family in E. M. Forster's novel Where Angels Fear to Tread. Using terminology of family systems psychotherapy, this essay illuminates Forster's illustrations of class, culture, and ethics in text. Despite Herriton family's pivotal role as a narrative force in E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), a force that precipitates many of novel's moral dilemmas, critics consistently neglect to consider crucial place of family in novel. Focusing on family's psychological dimensions in Forster's 1910 novel, Howards End (see Olson, Womack); scholars turn to Where Angels Fear to Tread for its intriguing tragicomic and homoerotic elements (see Simon and Rahman, respectively), eschewing any discussion of novel's intricate family dance. This essay attempts to correct that oversight by reading Where Angels Fear to Tread through terminology of family systems psychotherapy. Both as a form of therapeutic treatment and as an interpretive methodology; family systems psychotherapy maintains that family presupposes individual as matrix of identity. In The Theory and Technique of Family Therapy (1979), Charles P. Barnard and Ramon Garrido Corrales observe that the members of one's family are one's significant others par excellence (9). Proponents of family systems psychotherapy acknowledge that family's most important role is fraught with difficulty: as an inherently open system, family must at once provide support for its individual members' integration into a solid family unit, as well as their differentiation, or emotional and psychological separation, into relatively autonomous selves. This mutual developmental process possesses capacity for producing functional and dysfunctional families. In functional families, individual members evolve into fully realized selves able to act, think, and feel for themselves. In dysfunctional families, however, family me mbers develop pseudo-selves--often fostered by fear and anxiety within system--and thus, such individuals frequently remain unable to maintain any real equilibrium between their inner feelings and their outward behavior (Barnard and Corrales 85-87). In addition to its therapeutic applications, family systems psychotherapy's clinical vocabulary affords literary scholars with a critical mode for investigating, in fictional narratives, role of family both as an agent of change and as a mechanism for maintaining stasis (see, for example, Kaufman 70; Knapp 12-20; Roberts 213-16). In Forster's novel, Herritons' dysfunctional family system requires development of a series of triangulated relationships to protect family's upper-middle-class Edwardian values of social restraint and interpersonal decorum. As means by which Mrs. Herriton preserves her family's rigid sense of morality and virtue, process of triangulation determines nature of many of novel's human relationships. Family members--under scornful gaze of Mrs. Herriton, de facto protector of family's value system--maintain their interpersonal equilibrium by covertly scapegoating each other for subscribing to values that conflict with narrow and lofty social standards of Sawston, London suburb where Herritons live. Forster's depiction of Lilia Herriton, Caroline Abbott, and Philip Herriton's various journeys to Italy affords novelist with a means for removing each character from Herriton family system that triangulates, and ultimately scapegoats, them for adhering to values of friendship and aesthetic experience implicit in Cambridge philosopher G. B. Moore's Bloomsbury-era humanism. Italy, with its relaxed system of social values, in contrast with Sawston's staid, Edwardian lifestyle, provides a social mechanism that ultimately liberates Liia, Caroline, and Philip from Herriton ideology that previously prevented them from achieving selfhood beyond interpersonal boundaries of their dysfunctional family system. …