From Confrontation To Evasion

E. M. Forster's "connect" notion has long been a heated topic among literary critics who have managed to make use of various means to approach it. However, their attention is mainly directed to two of his later novels—Howards End and A Passage to India, while the earlier three ones published during his lifetime are somewhat minimized. Hence, this thesis aims at filling this gap and viewing all these five novels as a whole to detect the changing process of Forster's "connect" notion together with its causes.To obtain this objective, the present paper chooses the recurring image of sudden death, on which Forster constantly falls back in his pursuit of connections, as a "thread" to link up all the five novels. A detailed comparative analysis of the differentiated depictions and functions of the death image by applying J. Hillis Miller's repetition theory reveals to us that Forster's attitudes toward the establishment of "spontaneous connection" among human beings undergo alteration from positive confrontation to negative evasion. As to the causes of this variation, Forster's own life experiences and cognition journey in his specific social and historical milieu during the composition of the five novels can give us some hints. In expanding his writing horizons and getting into more comprehensive contact with the industrialized society and values, Forster gradually lost his confidence in adopting death shocks to waken people's spontaneous feelings and felt his incapacity to accomplish connections in the face of the challenge brought by his age. The accelerated industrialization and its byproducts like colonialism and imperialism discouraged him from endeavoring to eliminate separations between individuals, classes, nations, cultures and even between a man and his inner self.In reconsidering Forster's dynamic "connect" attitudes, we can also leam something from him in dealing with the problems concerning human relations we are facing now, since there are similarities between his world burdened with industrialization and ours accompanied by intense modernization.