FEMALE FRIENDSHIP AND TRANSGRESSIVE ACTS IN TWO NOVELS BY E. M. FORSTER

Abstract

This article attempts to examine female friendship in A Room with a View (1908/2006) and Howards End (1910/2000, 2006). In these novels, friendship emerges as a zone of protection against repressive norms or even as a means through which such norms were subverted in favor of personal choices. The values concerning friendship are discussed following Forster (1976) and Greenberg (2024). The changing context of women’s lived experience is grounded in the analysis made by Marcus (2007), while the fictional deployment of such expressions are guided by the discussion in Woolf (2018, 2023). The analysis of female friendship in A Room with a View (2006) focuses on the bond between the spinsters Charlotte Bartlett and Eleanor Lavish, secondary characters whose closeness arouses suspicion of a romantic infatuation. In Howards End (2000/2006), the unlikely friendship between Margaret Schlegel and Ruth Wilcox serves as a device to problematize the transfer of property between women unrelated by kinship. In both novels, friendship is the means by which female characters engage in behaviors traditionally seen as male prerogatives such as agency, challenging established thought, admiring feminine beauty and even transferring property ownership.