E. M. Forster's The Longest Journey: An Interpretation

by Rob Doll 

© 2002

In order to understand the failure of the central character of The Longest Journey, it is first necessary to draw together from various places in the novel the details of Rickie Elliot's early life. As a child Rickie tried to alleviate his loneliness with imaginary friends, since he received real affection only from his mother, who was kind but not intimate. His father was cruel and cynical and, as befitted his position as a lawyer, chose to take his family to the suburbs. The "grey monotony" there applies not only to the physical environment, but to the emotional dreariness and alienation of the class of people who live there. After his father died, Rickie saw that his mother "was trying to establish confidence between them." At the same time she proposed to move "somewhere right in the country, with grass and trees up to the door, and birds singing everywhere, and a tutor. For he was not to go back to school." Mrs. Elliot's reasons for this new confidence and move came from a part of her life that Rickie did not know. She had endured her husband's cruelty and bore his child, but she loved another man, a farmer named Robert, who was handsome and gentlemanly, but whose hands showed that he had worked the earth. "As he talked, the earth became a living being--or rather a being with a living skin,--and manure no longer dirty stuff, but a symbol of regeneration and of the birth of life from life."

When Mrs. Elliot was finally shocked out of her loyalty to her husband who had deserted her, she accepted Robert's love, ran away with him to Sweden, and--although Robert drowned after a couple of weeks of passion and joy--she bore his child, Stephen, who was given to relatives, the Failings, to be raised. Returning to her husband and Rickie, Mrs. Elliot found that "her second child drew her towards her first." After Mr. Elliot died she would have taken Rickie to the country, where he would have had the friend and brother he had always imagined. The plan was aborted when Rickie's mother died only eleven days after his father. The life she would have taken him to remains a personal myth, a myth that is distorted because Rickie never knew that out in the country he would not have been just with his mother; he would also have had friends and a brother. But his limited childhood vision was one of happiness with his mother amidst nature. Instead of seeking a broader balanced social and emotional life, Rickie tries to realize his earlier immature vision; he looks for replacements for his mother.

It was because of his father that Rickie had been sent to public school at first, and when he returned there because his mother had died, he was inculcated with the values and attitudes of his father's middle-class world. He came out of the school

cold and friendless and ignorant . . . preparing for a silent and solitary journey, and praying as a highest favour that he might be left alone. Cambridge had not answered his prayer. She had taken and soothed him, and warmed him, and had laughed at him a little, saying that he must not be so tragic yet awhile.

In short, Cambridge, which provides the setting of the beginning of the novel, becomes like a mother to Rickie. That his life at Cambridge is like the life his mother would have given him had she not died is shown symbolically by the dell "paved with grass and planted with fir-trees." This dell is a pleasant and secluded spot outside of the town of Cambridge where Rickie enjoys himself with the real friends he never had as a child. Cambridge, then, assumes the role a mother ought to have, to love and nurture a child so that it will grow to love and nurture in turn. In one year at Cambridge Rickie "had made many friends and learnt much, and he might learn even more if he could but concentrate on that cow." The cow, of course, is the object used by the undergraduates in their discussion of "the existence of objects" at the very beginning of the novel. Among the things he might yet learn is to know that his personal childhood myth is an incomplete vision.

Rickie's concentration on the cow is interrupted by the entrance of Agnes Pembroke into the room and into his life. His friend Stewart Ansell ignores Agnes when she comes in because he realizes she is not "real", that she is a representative of the unfeeling middle-class world of Rickie's father. Rickie, however, regards her as real, not seeing that she is among that kind of phenomena which, according to Ansell, "are the subjective product of a diseased imagination, and which, to our destruction, we invest with the semblance of reality."

This kind of undergraduate discussion comes straight out of Forster's own experiences at Cambridge, particularly with the Apostles, a meeting of which seems to be the model for the opening scene of the novel. The commonly reproduced photograph of Forster as a student at Cambridge. shows him seated in his room, half facing the camera, reading a book. Behind and slightly above his head is a framed print of the Apollo Belvedere. As an undergraduate, like Rickie Elliot, Forster probably "loved his rooms better than any person." The display of Greek male beauty on his wall can be read as an expression of his repressed homosexual desire. But the particular classical image is significant. Citing Nietzsche's contrast between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Frederick Crews explains that "the Apollonian insists on measure and morality; it substitutes the ideal of knowledge for that of participation." In the photo Forster sits reading a book, with his back to the picture of the beautiful young Apollo, chaste god of poetry. The scene emblemizes Forster's sexual situation at that time; his homosexual feelings found an outlet only in art and literature, through knowledge, that is, rather than through participation. For a long time Forster would settle for such a secondary expression of passion, for the image rather than the reality. A few years after he left Cambridge Forster wrote in his diary, "I too have sweet waters, though I shall never drink them. I can understand the draughts of the others, though they will not understand my abstinence" (21 March 1904). Although abstaining in his life, in his early fiction Forster would advocate participation and draw on the Dionysian side of the Greek pantheon--Pan and his father Hermes, with their phallic sexuality--for many classical images. In The Longest Journey in the house of Herbert and Agnes Pembroke "a replica of the Hermes of Praxiteles--of course only the bust--stood in the hall . . . ." Forster presents the image as a symbol of the denial of the body by the middle class. In cutting off Hermes' body, the bust also cuts off the baby Dionysus in his arms. On his first trip to Italy in 1901, Forster wrote in his diary, "Boys of 16 lovingly cuddled babies," as if Praxiteles' Hermes had come alive. After Italy Forster was soon enough dissatisfied with the intellectual passion represented by Apollo, and from his earliest stories he promotes the kind of fleshly passion associated with Hermes and Pan. It is as if he replaced the picture of Apollo on his wall at Cambridge with a picture of Hermes. It was, however, still a picture on the wall.

When Rickie visits the Pembrokes he finds at first that Agnes's fiance, Gerald, behaves as Rickie's father had behaved towards his mother: "rude and brutal and cold." But when he sees Gerald and Agnes kiss, he finds them transfigured into an ideal of love. Rickie's diseased imagination, which had invested Agnes with reality, has now led him to a false vision of love. After the "symbolic moment" of the embrace, Rickie feels that Agnes "had more reality than any other woman in the world." After Gerald has died, Rickie, "who believes in woman because he has loved his mother", falls in love with Agnes. She has become a mother for him; and, in assuming Gerald's place as her lover, Rickie has affirmed without knowing it the world of his hated father. By unknowingly establishing Agnes as the avatar of his mother as he mistakenly conceived her, Rickie has supplanted Cambridge, the avatar of the mother as she really was.

When Rickie sees Gerald and Agnes embracing he thinks "they had gotten into heaven, and nothing could get them out of it." Later Rickie consoles Agnes by telling her that Gerald "is in heaven." Thus, when Rickie and Agnes have their first embrace in the dell that Rickie had once thought of labeling "This way to heaven," Forster intends a blatant irony. Rickie's love for Agnes leads to no positive heaven, but to death. The only other time they are found kissing in the novel is when they are thrown into each others' arms when the train they are riding in has slackened speed after having run over and killed a child. Then too "they were in heaven." Unlike Where Angels Fear to Tread, where the death of a child signaled Philip's birth into a new life, the child's death here symbolizes the emptiness and sterility of Rickie and Agnes's relationship.

Having fallen in love, Rickie and Agnes enter on a long engagement because Herbert, who, like most of his class, thinks of human relationships in terms of money and settlements [see Howard's End], says that Rickie "must at least double his income before he can dream of more intimate ties." Since his only potential career is as a writer, Rickie tries to sell some of the stories he has written. They do not sell, however; the life they would support contradicts their theme "of getting into touch with nature." That he can write such stories indicates that Rickie, like Philip Herriton, who had an intellectualized "idea" of Italy, has at least the potential for emotional liberation. Since he can't make any money from the stories, Rickie decides to supplement the "dead money" he has inherited from his father--and thereby facilitate his marriage to Agnes--by going to work as a teacher at Sawston School. By so doing he becomes part of an institution which perpetuates the kind of emotional impairment that Rickie inherited from his father. Thus, Rickie and Agnes's marriage is sustained both economically and emotionally by the world of his father. Rickie largely abandons his will to Agnes and her brother, following Herbert's example as an unfeeling, dictatorial school master and surrendering his pocketbook to Agnes, who "always did the paying." When Stephen Wonham comes to visit, Rickie, who believes Stephen is the son of his father, refuses even to see him, giving Agnes a signed blank check with which to bribe Stephen to silence.

When Rickie finally discovers that Stephen is his mother's son, he realizes that he has based his life wrongly, that the symbolic moment that led him eventually to marry Agnes was a false symbol. He knows that he was wrong to marry Agnes, but what he does not know is that he has made a surrogate mother out of her; nor does he come to a full realization of what his mother signifies. Such a realization would involve not trying to find the mother in other people, but rather acting as the mother acted in her relationship to Robert--affirming the earth, affirming fertility and growth. In his relationship with Agnes Rickie has done the opposite; he has affirmed death. The most telling confirmation of this is the fact that the child of their marriage dies a few days after it is born with the same lameness that Rickie had inherited from his father--a physical defect which corresponds to his emotional inadequacy.

Instead of finding in Stephen a brother and friend, Rickie again tries to find his mother. The day after Stephen has returned to Sawston drunk and has broken up the house, Rickie goes up to Stephen's room carrying a picture of their mother. Since his drunken collapse the night before, Stephen has "recaptured motion and passion and the imprint of the sunlight and the wind." But Rickie does not see the energy and life; he sees "our mother--for me she has risen from the dead." Stephen, who will not conform to Rickie's illusions, shouts, "I see your game. . . . You talk to me, but all the time you look at the photograph." He tears the photograph and begins to leave.

In the last chapter of the novel Herbert Pembroke, who is leaving after discussing some business matters with Stephen Wonham in his country home, looks at the picture of the Demeter of Cnidus on Stephen's wall.

The "shattered knees" of the Demeter of Cnidus have not prevented it from surviving as a work of art and a symbol. Similarly the loss of Rickie's legs in the fatal accident has a positive value. The crippled foot--the heritage of his father's inhibitive middle-class world--has been severed; the Elliot line will die out. But something substantial of Rickie survives: his stories, with their theme of getting in touch with the earth. While Rickie was alive affirming the heritage of his father, the stories would not sell. Now that his lame foot has been cut off and he has died, the stories sell. Stephen, who has always lived in accordance with the stories' theme, has prevailed, and the stories will bring him the money they never brought to the marriage of Rickie and Agnes.

Near the end of The Longest Journey, in his last conversation with Mrs. Failing, Rickie tells her about a story he has written "about a man and a woman who meet and are happy. The next of Forster's novels to be published, A Room With a View, fits precisely that definition; and we know for a fact that the novel had been in Forster's mind while he was writing The Longest Journey. When Rickie says, "In literature we needn't intrude our own limitations," it almost seems to be Forster's voice anticipating the potential criticism that The Longest Journey is flawed by the intrusion of Forster's limitations, by his inability to separate his own problems in life from the problems of his characters. A Room with a View presents an answer to those criticisms, even though they may result from a misreading of the earlier novel.