Howard's End

Tara and I watched "Howard's End" last night. Howard's End was a novel by E.M. Forster, the British novelist. Forster is famous for writing about the division of classes in Edwardian England. He was a member of the Bloomsbury Club, which evolved out of "the Cambridge Apostles" society. Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Henry Sidgwick were amongst the philosophers in the Apostles society. John Maynard Keynes was in both the Apostles and the Bloomsbury Club.

Howard's End is the story of two sisters, Margaret (Emma Thompson) and Helen (Helena Bonham Carter), who are part of the intellectual middle class and who meet in groups like Bloomsbury for discussion and edification. They both find themselves associated, on the one end of the spectrum, with the newly wealthy Wilcox family, and on the other end, with the Basts, who are struggling to stay alive. The question is how to stir Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins) out of his selfish egocentrism, and to remind him of his social duties, and how to help the Basts weather the changing times. Sounds a lot like what we're living through.

Henry Wilcox epitomizes the wealthy businessman who lives out the Gospel of Wealth, and who has no conscience when it comes to the poor. When confronted with the Basts' plight, Wilcox warns against sympathizing with the poor, and says: "The poor are the poor, and one's sorry for them - but there it is."

The thing that I like about this film, aside from terrific performances all the way around and beautiful footage of old English homes, is that the women are intelligent characters. Watching them in action reminds me how, to this day, we see far too little of this. Margaret and Helen are heroines for a new age who become forces for good without completely rejecting their tradition. They drag the tradition along into the new world and a new consciousness of it.

The novel concludes with these lines:

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.

The two sisters represent, to me, the integration of prose and passion, and their entire effort is to bring this union into society.