Through an analysis of E.M. Forster’s A Room with A View (1908), this article sets itself the twofold aim of (1) shedding light on the changes in courtship and the choosing of a partner that have characterised personal and romantic relationships over the last century, and (2) exploring an instance of the literary construction of Italian otherness in Anglophone fiction. By analysing the novel in the light of several recent insights and findings in (literary/popular) romance scholarship (Regis 2003; Fletcher 2008; Illouz 2012), this article corroborates the affiliations of A Room with a View with the romantic literary tradition.
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Positioned between two centuries, Jane Austen and Modernism, England and its others (Italy/India), the realm of the “undeveloped heart” and a difficult to attain but still achievable proficiency in emotional matters, Forster’s work stands on the cusp of the literary “great divide” which sees literary and popular forms of fiction take neatly separate directions for several decades (Huyssen 1986).With A Room with a View (1908), Forster creates one of the last canonized literary romances of the pre-wars era, a “light-hearted” romantic story of great formal complexity and extraordinary existential depth, with an H.E.A. ending – romance scholars’ jargon for “happily-ever-after” – of astonishing realism and gentle sadness.
The first part of this essay proposes a discussion of Forster’s novel in light of the eight narrative elements, isolated by Pamela Regis, which constitute the markers of romantic narratives, focusing, in particular, on the novel’s “happy ending” and its quality of unresolved ambivalence. It will then be suggested that A Room with a View is one of the first modern romantic narratives to display the emergence of a “regime of authenticity” (Illouz 2012, 31), an important turn in romantic relationships, as well as in literature about them, towards conceiving of courtship, and the choice of one’s partner, as a fundamentally individual and private matter, rather than a process a young woman would go through from a position of encasement within familial protective relations. Lastly, the article will present a final reflection on Italy as a cultural/imaginary construct enduringly associated with notions of existential authenticity and truth, evincing the affiliation between this notion and the imperial cultural standpoint shared by pre-modernist and modernist authors. (218)
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A Room with a View is one of the last canonized Anglophone romantic novels of the pre-wars period, a text in which Forster poetically articulates his own “view” (pun intended) of happiness as flawed, burdened, incomplete, and carrying with it a measure of personal loss. From this time onwards, happy endings will only be permitted to continue in popular romance fiction, whose uplifting qualities and entertaining vocation will be more and more read as markers of dubious literary value. (223)
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