E. M Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread: An Interpretation

by Rob Doll

© 2002-2005

At the beginning of Where Angels Fear to Tread the family of Lilia Herriton's dead husband is sending her to Italy to keep her away from what they find to be unacceptable suitors in England.  The novel begins at a train station, initiating a motif that occurs often in Forster's fiction of emotional meetings and partings at stations—emblems of the growing nomadism he sees in modern culture.

"They were all at Charing Cross to see Lilia off—Philip, Harriet, Irma, Mrs. Herriton herself.  Even Mrs. Theobald, squired by Mr. Kingcroft, had braved the journey from Yorkshire to bid her only daughter goodbye."  By placing a particular twist on a few key words in these simple opening sentences, Forster initiates the ironic method and direction that he will pursue throughout his fiction.  The word "herself" appended to "Mrs. Herriton" implies that she might almost be thought too important to have come to the station, and the beginning of the second sentence seems to emanate from the mind of "Mrs. Herriton herself."   The phrase "even Mrs. Theobald" implies that there is some reason she would not have come to do what seems a natural and expected thing: "bid her only daughter goodbye."  This juxtaposition of Mrs. Herriton at the end of the first sentence with Mrs. Theobald at the beginning of the second creates a kind of dialogic counterpoint within the narration itself, separate from but related to the actual dialogue between characters.  Forster's narrative voice does not maintain a constant point of view, but moves among the viewpoints of different characters and even different narrator(s), illustrating a remark by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin that in the modern novel "one often does not know where the direct authorial word ends and where a parodic or stylized playing with the characters' language begins."  The method is effective; for instance, the reader is forced to confront prejudice by being thrust into that point of view.

Philip Herriton enjoins his departing sister-in-law not to go "with that awful tourist idea that Italy's only a museum of antiquities and art.  Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvelous than the land."  Philip does not realize that Lilia will take his advice literally, that she will find in Italy the love she is kept from in England.  Philip also tells Lilia "of the supreme moments of her coming journey"—which in his opinion have to do with the scenery.  At this point in the story he does not know that "supreme moments," as Forster sees it, have to do with human relationships.   Natural settings are connected to human relationship but cannot in and of themselves be supreme.  Philip knows only his idea of Italy: past grandeur and present picturesqueness.  His aestheticism is yet to be confronted with the Italy of real people living ordinary lives.

As the train pulls out Mr. Kingcroft, returning too late with the foot-warmer, excuses himself saying, "These London porters won't take heed to a country chap"; Mrs. Herriton replies with what the reader will shortly realize is scarcely veiled sarcasm, thus showing herself to be neither "noble" nor much more polite than the porters:

'And I think it simply noble of you to have brought Mrs. Theobald all the way here on such a day as this.' Then, rather hastily, she shook hands, and left him to take Mrs. Theobald all the way back.  Sawston, her own home, was within easy reach of London, and they were not late for tea.

With the hasty handshake and departure Mrs. Herriton avoids inviting Mrs. Theobald and Mr. Kingcroft home for tea, something which Forster lets us know could easily have been done.  As we read on in the chapter we find that Mrs. Theobald is old and frail and the weather bad.  When Philip asks, "Why ever did she come?", and Mrs. Herriton replies, "Mr. Kingcroft made her," they both seem unable to grasp the simple fact that Mrs. Theobald loves her daughter.  She "braved" the trip because Lilia was going away for a year and it was possible they might not see each other again, which in fact turns out to be the case, not, however, because Mrs. Theobald dies but because Lilia does.  And maybe Mr. Kingcroft accompanied her not merely out of a self-interested desire "to see Lilia again," as the Herritons think, but also out of kindness to an old lady.

The first chapter ends some months later.  Harriet and Mrs. Herriton are sowing vegetable seeds when a letter from Mrs. Theobald comes with the post.  "How intolerable the crested paper is!" exclaims Mrs. Herriton.  Mrs. Theobald is apparently landed gentry.  The Herritons' dislike for her is obviously mixed up with class jealousies; they disdain the very class from which their own middle class attitudes and values derive.  Ironically, of course, instead of the clergyman Mr. Kingcroft, Lilia marries—not Italian nobility—but the unemployed son of an Italian dentist, and when she eventually dies giving birth to his son, the Herritons undertake an expedition ostensibly to "rescue" the child, but in fact to protect their social image in Sawston.   They find, however, that the father, Gino Carella, "for some perverse reason . . . will not part with the child."  Forster's irony is blunt, for Gino's feelings are simply those of parent for child: he loves his son as Mrs. Theobald loved her daughter.  The "perverse" feelings about parental love are those of the Herritons.  When the letter arrives announcing Lilia's engagement, Mrs. Herriton's first emotion is rage at the fact that the news came from Mrs. Theobald, that Lilia had written to her own mother before writing to her mother-in-law.

When Mrs. Herriton looks up the offending Italian town, Monteriano, in a guidebook, she finds that Baedeker, like Philip in his parting advice to Lilia at the train station, lists buildings and views as notable, with the codicil, "The inhabitants are still noted for their agreeable manners."  Mrs. Herriton tells Harriet that Lilia is "not trying to marry any one in the place. Some tourist, obviously, who's stopping in the hotel.  The place has nothing to do with it at all."  Mrs. Herriton's own recourse to Baedeker belies the last statement: even she in her incomplete heart knows unconsciously that the place has everything to do with it.  The guidebook lists the chief attraction of Monteriano as the church of Santa Deodata, whose story is later told:

So holy was she that all her life she lay upon her back in the house of her mother, refusing to eat, refusing to play, refusing to work.  The devil, envious of such sanctity, tempted her in various ways. . . .  When all proved vain he tripped up the mother and flung her downstairs before her very eyes.  But so holy was the saint that she never picked her mother up, but lay upon her back through all, and thus assured her throne in Paradise.

Forster satirizes the holy reprobate Santa Deodata, who lacked the human concern for her mother that Mrs. Theobald and Gino have for their children, and thereby condemns those Sawstonians who share with the so-called saint a perverse and harmful concept of familial love, exalting convention above kindness.

The experience of Philip, Harriet, and Caroline Abbott at the opera in Monteriano dramatizes the conflict in the novel between Sawston, "a joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended," and Italy, with its emotional freedom and passion.  The scene is comic, but as Benjamin Britten has pointed out, "Under the comedy lies seriousness, passion, and worth: the worth of the Italians loving their tunes, being relaxed and gay together, and not being afraid of showing their feelings—not 'pretending,' like Sawston."   (Aspects of E. M. Forster: New York, 1969).

Forster's choice of Lucia di Lammermoor as the opera the English people see is not adventitious.  The opera signifies the intrusion of foreigners into Italy: a Scottish story set to music by an Italian.  The Italians in the audience take the story into their hearts, reacting freely and enthusiastically.  In contrast, the English—themselves foreigners in Italy—bring their own attitudes and prejudices to the opera as they have brought them to Italy in general.  During the overture Harriet, the unassailable bastion of Sawston morality, hushes the noisy and spirited Italians, who, as Forster points out, "were quiet, not because it is wrong to talk during a chorus, but because it is natural to be civil to a visitor."  As the theater fills up, however, Harriet loses her power; the audience enjoys itself, and so do some of the English visitors:

Miss Abbott fell into the spirit of the thing.  She, too, chatted and laughed and applauded and encored, and rejoiced in the existence of beauty.  As for Philip, he forgot himself as well as his mission.  He was not even an enthusiastic visitor.  For he had been in this place always.  It was his home.

Harriet does not join in the fun, trying instead "to follow the plot," which in fact bears some resemblance to the plot of Where Angels Fear to Tread.  In the opera Lucia of the clan of Lammermoor is in love with Edgardo of the rival Ravenswood clan.  Lucia's brother and guardian, Enrico, who hates the Ravenswoods and stands to profit if Lucia marries someone else, manages to foil their romance.  In the subsequent complications Lucia and Edgardo die; Enrico repents, but too late.  Like Enrico, Harriet and the Sawston forces behind her try to impose their own interests on the emotional life of the woman under their protection.  Unlike Lucia, however, Lilia does not die in a melodramatic tragedy; she dies in childbirth, apparently too weak to sustain the emotional life of which the child was a product and symbol.  In the novel, as in the opera, characters die as a result of the confrontation of two opposing forces; and, as there is repentance in the opera, so in the end is there redemption in the novel.  Lilia and her child die, but Philip and Caroline find a new life in the emotional awakening brought about by their part in the attempt to "rescue" the child.  That they can join in the fun at the opera indicates that they have the potential to feel, to escape the pretense and hypocrisy of Sawston.  Harriet, however, has little potential for such a liberation; she abhors the riotous atmosphere at the opera, finding it "not even respectable."

It is this paragon of respectability who stubbornly carries through with her determination to "save" the baby, even if she must kidnap it.  The "salvation," however, leads to the baby's death in the carriage accident, and Philip, no longer a mere observer of life now that the baby has died in his arms, takes responsibility and becomes the object of Gino's grief and anger in one of the most remarkable scenes in all of Forster, "my nearest approach to a strong scene," as Forster himself later described it.  "Gino had stooped down by the rug, and was feeling the place where his son had lain.  Now and then he frowned a little and glanced at Philip."  Gino's almost maternally instinctual reaction—He is, since Lilia's death, both father and mother to the child—his silent, "uncanny" palpation of everything in the room, contrasts sharply with Philip's talk about responsibility and the need to break down.  "The tour of the room was over.  He had touched everything in it except Philip.  Now he approached him."  From the moment Philip tells Gino what has happened and Perfetta leaves unknowingly to get milk for the baby she does not know has died, until Caroline has interrupted the torture which follows and Perfetta has returned, Gino does not utter a word, behaving literally as a non-verbal animal.  In contrast to Philip's words of comfort, fear, and pain, the only sounds Gino makes are "a low growl like a dog's," and later "a loud and curious cry—a cry of interrogation it might be called."  Philip is able to stop Gino's first assault on his broken elbow with a blow that knocks Gino down:

Then he [Philip] was seized with remorse, and knelt down beside his adversary and tried to revive him.  He managed to raise him up, and propped his body against his own.  He passed his arm around him.  Again he was filled with pity and tenderness.  He awaited the revival without fear, sure that both of them were safe at last.

Gino recovered suddenly.  His lips moved.  For one blessed, moment it seemed that he was going to speak. But he scrambled up in silence . . . .

In fact the worst is yet to come, but Gino's torture of and apparent intent to kill Philip is finally interrupted by the arrival of Caroline followed by Perfetta with the milk.  "Gino spoke for the first time," and "the peril was over at last."  Language returns; the animal fury subsides.  The fact that on his first trip to Italy Forster had fallen and broken his arm undoubtedly accounts for the particular physical pain described so graphically in the passage.

When he had initially turned on Philip, Gino's "face was that of a man who has lost his old reason for life and seeks a new one."  That is, of course, literally Gino's status, but it is also, though less clearly, Philip's, and the excruciating physical pain inflicted by Gino, as he finds in revenge an immediate reason for life, is a complex image of repressed homosexual masochistic ecstasy mixed with the agony of birth.  In the end both Gino and Philip are reduced to children.  Gino "gave a piercing cry of woe, and stumbled towards Miss Abbott like a child and clung to her."  She urges him to feed Philip the milk that "will not be wanted in the other room" and finish the rest himself.  Having drunk the same milk, Gino and Philip are symbolically brothers, and Caroline is their mother.

In the latter part of the novel Forster often describes Philip as seeing Caroline, with whom he has fallen in love, as a divine being.  When he meets her and Gino giving the baby a bath, he sees "to all intents and purposes, the Virgin and Child, with Donor."  In the scene Caroline assumes the role of mother to Gino's child, and hence of wife to Gino, with whom she obviously has fallen in love, perhaps even as early as when Lilia did.  The fleshly and tactile description of the baby and its bath functions as a surrogate scene of physical passion between Caroline and Gino.  Later, just before Caroline gives Gino the milk, we find out that "all through the day Miss Abbott had seemed to Philip like a goddess, and more than ever did she seem so now"; and later again he thinks, "This woman was a goddess to the end."  In her apotheosis Caroline appears to be the saint that Santa Deodata most emphatically was not.

At the end Philip and Caroline have come to "love and understand" an Italian in ways never anticipated by Philip in his opening advice to his sister-in-law.   Philip's aesthetic and intellectual appreciation of Italy has given way to an emotional apprehension.  He and Caroline have been shown to have the potential for a passionate relationship, though neither of them finds one in the novel.  Philip cannot have Caroline, for she loves Gino; and Caroline cannot have Gino, for he is betrothed inescapably to the lady from Poggibonsi: a marriage he had undertaken for the benefit of the child who has now died.   And, of course, in the inevitable homosexual subtext Philip cannot have Gino.  Two residents of Sawston have renounced its suburban values and found that the good in human intercourse lies elsewhere than in what Caroline calls the "petty unselfishness" of the Sawstonians, whose unselfishness is indeed calculated and slight while their selfishness is gross and hypocritical.  Harriet is reduced to a semi-invalid who must be watched to keep the cinders from getting in her eyes.  She had always possessed the Sawston characteristic of claiming to see the motes in other peoples' eyes in spite of the motes in their own.  Although Harriet collapses and the Herritons fail to take possession of Lilia's son by Gino, in England Sawston still prevails.  The Herritons did not get Gino's boy, but neither did Gino.  And the other child in the book, Lilia's English daughter Irma, will be brought up in Sawston and apparently suffer the same management that Lilia did.  Furthermore, though Philip and Caroline have been transformed, they are not united; they will have no children.

Philip has moved from intoxication with an incomplete "idea" of Italy to a broader understanding of the Italian experience.  Although he has gotten the mote out of his own eye, his clarified vision does not lead to a relationship, perhaps because in the end he has been left with a different kind of illusion.   He has seen an ideal of human passion, and he has found another "complete" person he would like to relate to, but she remains inaccessible, a goddess, a myth that doesn't have a functioning correlate in his life.  Such an illusion, such defective insight, marks the entire life of the main character of Forster's second novel, The Longest Journey.