FROM WORDS TO THINGS: MARGARET'S PROGRESS IN "HOWARDS END"

Letters occupy a prominent place in E. M. Forster's Howards End. Helen's letters about her infatuation with Paul Wilcox begin the novel, those of Margaret to Ruth Wilcox precipitate their important meeting in London, and, finally, Margaret's brief messages to her sister and Leonard Bast thrust the novel's characters headlong to their moment of truth. Each of these acts of communication is marred by misunderstanding, which seems an anomaly in a novel that urges only connect the passion and the prose.1 The open? ing letters result in Aunt Juley's ill-fated mission to Howards End. Margaret's written attempt to break off with the Wilcoxes leads instead toward a fateful deepening of her friendship with them. The final letters create the moment of greatest alienation between these sisters who place such faith in the language of personal relations (p. 25). So deep is the schism between the two at this stage that Helen believes Margaret's letters to have been written at the distrustful Henry's dictation. These moments of epistolary confusion typify Forster's questioning of language as a medium of personal intercourse . . . that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision (p. 79). Admittedly, the novel searches for an eternal moment in which such a transcending personality may unite the fragile and often fragmentary daily visions of the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes. Critics have emphasized Forster's all-embracing metaphysics, discussing the novel in ideal unions of body and soul, rich and poor, pragmatic and romantic, unseen and seen, male and female.2 The novel's epigraph, Only connect . . ., asks for resolution of conflict. Yet at the heart of Forster's quest for order in Howards End is a disturbing suggestion of the artificiality often inherent in acts to impose order?and nowhere is the novel's skepti? cism more self-conscious than in its treatment of language. Despite the at? tempt to synthesize, we find that prose often chokes passion, and, at other times, that passion can unsettle the prose. Moments exist when the narrator