Teaching Howards End to the Basts: class markers in the classroom, and in the Bourgeois novel (1).

"[I]ndependent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means"

--Margaret Schlegel, Howards End

Radical academics frequently observe that class is harder to talk about in the classroom than other axes of oppression, and although I'm wary of the tendency of such truisms to play into what Henry Giroux recently dubbed a cynical "pedagogy of the depressed," I've experienced this too. (2) While my students leave Freshman Orientation--which I've come to think of as a kind of "diversity boot camp," with squads of new recruits in new haircuts marching about the campus for drills in respect and open-mindedness--fully prepared, even expecting to talk about issues of race, gender and sexuality, they are much less forthcoming or articulate when it comes to questions of class, in literature and culture, and in their own lives. This is somewhat ironic, since in my estimation Nazareth College, where I teach, is a good deal more "diverse" in terms of class backgrounds than in terms of race. But of course "my estimation" is part of the problem, since the college publishes statistics on racial diversity ("7.6% minority enrollment"), but not on class.

Nazareth is a small, private liberal arts college rapidly adding the pre-professional undergraduate and graduate programs that pay the bills these days; we're formerly Catholic and all-women, now independent and co-ed, though still about 2/3 women among the undergraduates. We draw the bulk of our first-year students from the Thruway cines and surrounding towns of upstate New York; a substantial number of transfer students come from the local area via 2+2 programs with community colleges, which streamline the process of admission and transfer credit upon completion of an Associate's degree. The Admissions Office tells me that about 1/3 of our first-years are the first generation in their family to attend college (that number seems significantly higher among transfer students), and that over half of incoming students are eligible for New York State's Tuition Assistance Plan. And, in my highly unscientific sample, their family narratives, as told to me in class or personally, or as written about in journals and freshman composition essays, most often suggest backgrounds we'd likely think of as ranging from working to middle class. Those who market the college make much of its "affordability"--in addition to the usual, annual noise about our overall U. S. News and World Report ranking, we sometimes hear about our placement on their list of "Great Schools at Great Prices." (3)

I include all this about my institution and its students by way of preamble, or perhaps backstory, to a narrative about teaching E. M. Forster's 1910 novel Howards End to 16 upper-level English majors in a class on 20th-Century British literature, and the questions about class in the classroom, and in the bourgeois novel, that emerged in the process. Howards End is well known for its indictment of the philistinism of the new mercantile elite, at a moment of tumultuous social and economic change. The novel's two central families are laid out in Manichean terms that only an undergraduate compare-and-contrast essay could love: the Wilcoxes represent materialism, commercialism, industry, empire, and "the great outer life of telegrams and anger," whereas the Schlegels embody idealism, high culture, spirituality, and "personal relations" (23). In clearly preferring the social and cultural sophistication of the Schlegel sisters to the commercial and material impulses of the Wilcox family, Forster positions himself in the then-raging "Condition of England" debate, grudgingly acknowledging the necessity of the Wilcoxes' prosaic industriousness to keep the society's wheels turning, but insisting that the Schlegels must be the true inheritors of England and Englishness. Showing students these oppositions is as simple as a chart on the blackboard--so perhaps it's not only undergrad essays that appreciate Forster's schematic design.

However, there's another combatant in this "culture war," complicating its simple binaries--poor Leonard Bast, a clerk living "at the extreme verge of gentility" (38), but with a hunger for the easy cultural capital that the Schlegel sisters possess as a birthright. Despite some moments of withering condescension, on the whole Forster clearly wants to be sympathetic to this character, whose "mind and ... body had been alike underfed" (39), and to record the difficulties of those whose dream it is "to acquire culture! ... to pronounce foreign names correctly!" (34) Moreover, it is Bast who pushes Margaret Schlegel to realize, as she tells her sister Helen, that "You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence ... I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen upon the same ... and all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders" (51-52). However, neither Margaret nor Forster is able to do much with this surprisingly astute insight into the self-erasing ideological work of capital and Forster soon belittles Margaret's notions of political economy in a scathing and rather sexist representation of a ladies' discussion club meeting in which the Schlegels and their friends consider how they might help Bast, had they a million pounds to give away. Ultimately, the novel insists, Bast's attempts to master elite culture are doomed, and such Modern cultural climbers, and those who would assist them, are as prone to cause disaster as the social climbers of a thousand Victorian novels before them. Bast dies, appropriately enough, under a landslide of books in the parlor of Howards End, the house that epitomizes an England where people knew their places in the social order.

Critics have long noted a kind of bad faith in Forster's critique of the shallow mercantilism of the Wilcoxes, since Forster's readers were certain to be more like the Schlegels and less like the Wilcoxes. But what about a group of readers far more likely to sympathize with Bast than either of the two wealthy families at the novel's center? Most of my students, after all, also can't pronounce foreign names, don't know how to act at the symphony, and find themselves distracted from the joys of clever conversation by material realities a good deal more pressing than Bast's lost umbrella. And to my horror, our class discussions (and discussions of class) quickly made it apparent that understanding the ironic distance at which Forster holds the character of Bast, and the failures and blindnesses of a bourgeois critique of bourgeois materialism, required exactly the cultural capital that the Basts in my classroom didn't have. It became steadily more evident to me that the wealthier students, who weren't spending the bulk of their time in the low-wage jobs that enabled many in our classroom to be there at all, were at something of an advantage, both in terms of their background in reading multi-layered ironic prose, and in terms of the time they could dedicate to decoding Forster's winding sentences and free, indirect style.

From what I could discern, recognizing that these are dangerous generalizations that may say as much about my own class biases as about my students' actual understanding, the closer my students were to Bast in class back ground, the more likely they were to struggle to see the ideological contradictions in his story. For such students, Bast's tribulations--his struggle to parse a sentence of Ruskin and then his ludicrous meditations on how to use its structure in a letter to his brother--were simply accurate reflections of their own encounters with high culture, not least with Howards End itself. Of course this presented an irony of its own, as it seemed to reinforce Forster's point about the Basts of this world, forever locked out from the parlors and drawing rooms of elite culture.

Of course my story of teaching Howards End to the Basts, unlike Forster's story of Bast himself, has a happy ending, or I probably wouldn't be writing about it. Ultimately, the key to unlocking those drawing rooms, and revealing the sham logic and shoddy construction behind them, proved to be finding a back door. My students and I were able to get at the novel's contradictory class politics by looking first at its gender politics. The detour through gender to get to class may seem a bit of a cop-out, but I like to think of it as strategic, at this reactionary moment in American political life, in my institution, where our history as a women's college and current gender imbalance makes feminism a natural entree to political consciousness (though, even here, students struggle with the "f" word).

During our first class on Howards End, when I discovered that some students were struggling to understand the role of social class in the novel, I launched into my standard, quick overview of the three classes as they consolidated in the early 19th century in terms of their relationship to the means of production, and then offered some suggestions about how globalization, flexible accumulation and the rise of the service economy has complicated the traditional model today. At our next meeting, I circulated a brief handout that simply describes demographic and lifestyle characteristics (parents' educational levels and careers, housing location and type, and a few details to suggest degree of economic security) for "five Nazareth College students I've known," carefully selected and presented to suggest typical class fractions and backgrounds, so my students are likely to recognize versions of themselves and their friends somewhere on the list. After asking students to read through the list and identify (silently) the person who most resembles their own background, we discussed how each of the five could be described in terms of class, and what that might have to do with each one's experience of college--and this is where my trouble started.

While, as noted above, students were willing, even eager, to see connections between Bast's struggles with elite culture and their own ("yeah, we had to read Ruskin in Survey--totally hard"), they were much less willing to see connections between Bast's economic struggles and their own, especially in terms of class mobility and their post-college lives. Even for those students willing to admit (to themselves or to the class) that their backgrounds were working class, I found that they, like most Americans today, saw themselves, today and into the future, as solidly middle class, entirely irrespective of their actual living conditions. All of the standard American mythology about mobility and a classless society stood in the way of our discussion of class's structuring role in the lives of Forster's characters, and in our own, making it hard to even approach the questions I had begun with, about the ideological underpinnings of Forster's characterization.

But of course my students all "have" gender, in a way that they do not see that they "have" class, and I have found that my students are generally much more willing to acknowledge gender's role in everything from life choices and opportunities to reading preferences and strategies, making gender an easier place to begin ideologically situating Howards End. And on its surface, the novel has much to offer the feminist reader: a female protagonist who is at once intellectual and likable (a rare combination, even in 1910), an open critique of society's double standard with respect to male versus female sexual behavior, an embedded critique of conventions of wooing and marriage, and even some vague suffragist leanings. And in the end, Margaret has her "triumph. She, who had never expected to conquer anyone, had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken up their lives" (291). She is to inherit the house that she was destined to have all along, and her discovery of that destiny's arrival prompts a new mystical awareness: "Something shook her life in its inmost recesses" (293). She declares her plan to leave the house to the child of Helen and Bast's illicit encounter, and the novels famous final words belong to Helen, asserting a jubilant fertility in this bizarre household, populated by the Schlegel sisters, a broken Henry Wilcox, and Bast's bastard: "'The field's cut,' Helen cried excitedly--'the big meadow. We've seen to the very end, and it'll be such a crop of hay as never!'" (293)

My students found this ending a bit hokey, and I found that a good place to begin decoding it ideologically, to unpack the leaps and lapses by which Forster produces it. Most obviously, for all Forster's critique of the conventions of marriage, the novel's resolution depends on a marriage plot worthy of Trollope. The students were quick to see that Margaret's "destiny" at Howards End is accomplished not by the fulfillment of Ruth Howard Wilcox's final wish, nor by Margaret's own endeavors, but by marrying a powerful man and then being lucky enough to see him decimated by his son's bad judgment and bad luck. They were then led to ask whether a man like Wilcox would really remain under his wife's control, or whether her aesthetic and ethical superiority, familiar enough to them from other Angels in other Houses, would inevitably take a back seat to his pragmatism and economic power. More broadly, Margaret's decision to engage with the world by her influence over her husband, first through love and finally through force of will, seemed to my students to negate much of the feminist energy of her earlier characterization. Of course Forster beats us to this punch, as he so often does, having Margaret recognize and regret her newfound affinity with "Mrs. Plynlimmon [who], when condemning suffragettes, had said: 'The woman who can't influence her husband to vote the way she wants ought to be ashamed of herself'" (196). But, my students were quick to point out, just because Margaret recognizes her compromises with patriarchy doesn't make her any less of a sell-out, especially since the novel was written at a moment when actual "suffragettes" were hunger striking and being force red in British prisons.

In their thin veneer of feminist sensibility overlying myriad contradictions, the gender issues in the novel provided a kind of blueprint for the same contradictory pattern of bourgeois liberalism evident in the novel's class politics. My students, who were used to thinking about gender issues in terms of the work of ideology, felt renewed confidence in their decoding skills, despite the twists and turns of Forster's ironic sensibility, when we talked about gender roles in the novel in terms of individual passages or the broader plot. I then worked to convince them that those same decoding skills would work for class issues, by focusing on the character in whom the two patterns intersect most tellingly, Jacky Bast, Leonard's wife. By a coincidence that might have made Dickens blush, Leonard, whom the Schlegel sisters meet at the symphony, turns out to be married to the woman with whom Henry Wilcox had an affair some years before in Cyprus, and Henry's later condemnation of Helen's out-of-wedlock pregnancy gives rise to Margaret's famous feminist critique of the sexual double standard. But the representation of Jacky herself is unlikely to win the hearts of feminists, beginning with her introduction, which I'll quote in all its glorious length, as she returns home and interrupts Leonard's well-meaning but doomed effort to imitate Ruskin's prose style:

   A woman entered of whom it
   was simplest to say that she was
   not respectable. Her appearance
   was awesome. She seemed all
   strings and bell-pulls--ribbons,
   chains, bead necklaces that
   dinked and caught--and a boa
   of azure feathers hung round her
   neck with the ends uneven. Her
   throat was bare, wound with a
   double row of pearls, her arms
   were bare to the elbows, and
   might again be detected at the
   shoulder, through cheap lace.
   Her hat, which was flowery,
   resembled those punnets, covered
   with flannel, which we
   sowed with mustard and cress in
   our childhood, and which germinated
   here yes, and there no.
   She wore it on the back of her
   head. As for her hair, or rather
   hairs, they are too complicated
   to describe, but one system went
   down her back, lying in a thick
   pad there, while another, created
   for a lighter destiny, rippled
   around her forehead. The face--the
   face does not signify. It was
   the face of the photograph, but
   older, and the teeth were not so
   numerous as the photographer
   had suggested, and certainly not
   so white. Yes, Jacky was past her
   prime, whatever that prime may
   have been. (43)

The contrast between the colorless Leonard and the Technicolor Jacky couldn't be greater, and the narrator's horror at her gauche accoutrements couldn't be more pronounced. Students were quick to see the sexism in the different images of this couple--Leonard's Ruskin versus Jacky's azure boa, Leonard's desperate fumbling for culture and philosophy versus Jacky's complete absence of an inner life: "the face does not signify." And then it's a fairly simple step to see the interplay between sexism and class elitism at work here what the students called Jacky's "cheap tackiness" is the more horrific for its being feminized, even as her attempts at feminine seductiveness are the more repellent for their being tacky and cheap. Students were quick to see how in this passage Forster recruits the reader into a bourgeois subject position in order to look down on Jacky: "we" in this passage are the people who "sowed mustard and cress in our childhood," presumably not for food but as some kind of science project; "we" are quite dearly not the people whose hats resemble the ill-fated results of such projects.

Once my students began the process of denaturalizing the novel's representation of the Basts, they found evidence of its class contradictions at every turn. In particular, they were able to see how in the abstract we find some incisive critiques of the precarious position of people whom today we would call the working poor, and how easily chance could topple them into the "abyss" of poverty and despair, and to find connections to their own lives in our "rust belt" region where layoffs and plant closings abound. But, in Howards End, when such despair comes closer, what Margaret tellingly describes as "the odours from the abyss" become a bit much, and the novel turns away (197). Leonard, who is earlier characterized as "grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had sucked into town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit" (98), is replaced in the novel's conclusion by a dreamy-eyed rendering of the ploughboys who stayed behind. Forster's dosing celebration of the land and its people relies on a vague idealization of yeoman virtues embedded in a mythic past: "Here men had been up since dawn. Their hours were ruled, not by a London office, but by the movements of the crops and the sun. That they were men of the finest type only the sentimentalist can declare. But they kept to the life of the daylight. They are England's hope" (276). Ultimately, I believe, it was the students from outside the inherited world of economic and cultural capital--students who have experienced not just "the odours from the abyss" but have felt its pull on their own lives--who were more likely to resist the seductions of this nostalgic, aestheticized version of the English countryside and its inhabitants, in order to see the novel's conclusion most clearly. It was those students who were most inclined to ask, in response to Helen's jubilant closing pronouncement that "it will be such a crop of hay as never," "who cut and baled that hay?"

Such questions redounded not only through our discussion of Howards End but throughout the semester. Students' enthusiasm for the more explicit and energizing feminism of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own was tempered as they found echoes of Margaret's ideas on "independent thoughts" deriving from "independent means" (109) in Woolf's pronouncement that "[o]ne cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." (4) Once again, students realized that their own dinners were more likely to be current equivalents of the women's college's beef and prunes so disparaged by Woolf ("ramen noodles and day-old bagels," suggested one student) than the Oxbridgean sole and partridges that she finds necessary to light "the lamp in the spine" (18), and so, with some prompting, they began to consider the questions of class at stake in the aesthetic judgments by which Woolf evaluates women's literary history, and, more broadly, in the process of canonization itself. Woolf, after all, was neither the first nor the last critic to define an aesthetic purity she memorably calls "incandescence" in terms of writing that is "without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching" (71), and to go on to lament the rarity of that quality in the writing of women or the working class--of course, later, non-white authors would be perceived to have these same "impediments." And as we marched through a century of British literature and culture, my students continued to wonder about the questions of class at stake in the different academic and marketplace status of the novels of Kingsley Amis and Alan Sillitoe, or Salman Rushdie and Beryl Gilroy, or the films of James Ivory and Ken Loach. Of course they needed continual reminders that what we were likely to encounter as questions of aesthetics, or audience, of educational level (of characters, and cultural producers and consumers) were ultimately questions of class. And for some students, this interrogation of the ongoing, pervasive role of class politics in culture and society tan so directly counter to all they'd been taught about this "land of opportunity," and to their own upward mobility quests within it, that class remained for them an English problem, if indeed it was a problem at all. But for at least a few of the Basts in my class, such questioning gave them heart both to resist the economic determinism of Bast's futile encounter with Ruskin and Woolf's beef and prunes dinner as they tackled the opacities of The Waste Land, and to think for themselves about what's worth reading, and why.

It would be nice to end on that note of slightly muted triumphalism (indeed, an earlier version of this essay did end there), but of course the gap between what we think happens in our classrooms and what students think is often vast. In responding to that earlier version of this essay, the board member readers for Radical Teacher rightly suggested that an essay like this one would benefit from more direct quotation of student voices, a suggestion I've mostly been unable to address, because the idea of writing about this particular teaching experience only came to me some months after completing the semester. But the suggestion sent me back to the students' semester-ending course evaluations as a possible source of insight. After finding to my usual dismay that most students ignored the narrative portion of the evaluation and stuck to the "bubble sheet," I did glean a few useful responses. Among the half-dozen, mostly positive notes, three students responded to the course's emphasis on class issues in particular. One simply indicated that it was "a nice change from always talking about race and gender," which, alas, sounds a bit like switching from barbecue to honey-mustard sauce for his or her literature McNuggets. Another student liked the "connections between our lives and the books and movies," noting that "those construction workers [presumably in Ken Loach's film Riff Raff] could be my cousins." She or he went on to ask, "since they're elitist and 'problematic' (your favorite word), how come we spent so much time on stuff like Howard's [sic] End and The Waste Land (yuck)?"--and in posing that question, suggested an inkling of the sort of class consciousness that I am seeking to nurture. The third student who responded explicitly to the course's focus on class suggested that I "stop talking about class and money all the time. It gets old, and I don't really think it affects us that much."

But for all the (necessary) deflation of one's dreams of radical and radicalizing pedagogy that such comments inevitably provoke, for me the larger feeling evoked by the experience of teaching Howards End to the Basts is hopeful. Since that somewhat fumbling effort to help students understand ideologies of class using the example of ideologies of gender, I've become a bit more conscious and controlled in my efforts to work through, or around, student resistance to thinking about class, in literature and our lives. I imagine that for other teachers, successful strategies will depend on their personas and the composition of their classrooms--much as we adapt our strategies for analysis of race and gender depending on who we are and who's in the room. But of course class is far more than an "identity category," through which our students may have experienced solidarity, or exploitation, or both. As the proverbial water through which we fish swim, all the more invisible for its omnipresence, the precondition of our existence and primary determinant of its character, class is far harder for our students to see, and for us to see in our students. And for students like mine, for most of whom upward mobility through higher education is an article of faith, as well as an increasingly risky bet, making visible the ideologies and determinations of class is all the more difficult--and all the more crucial. My students know too well that the "conditions are not of their own making"; I hope and believe that by putting class at the center of my pedagogy, they may begin to find better ways to "make their own history."

NOTES:

(1) This essay began as a presentation at the Modern Language Association's 2001 Radical Caucus panel on teaching the bourgeois novel; I'm grateful to the organizers of that panel, the other panelists and the audience, as well as to Radical Teacher's board member readers, for suggestions about the paper. References in text to E. M. Forster's Howards End refer to the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition (New York: Penguin, 2000).

(2) Henry A. Giroux, "Pedagogy of the Depressed: Beyond the New Politics of Cynicism," College Literature 28 (2001): 1-32.

(3) If my response to our marketing sounds a bit snide, that's no doubt due to the usual academic discomfort with the commercial side of our enterprise, which is itself symptomatic of some of the broader questions about class and education that this essay will touch on. But for the record (and for my upcoming tenure review), I should say that I'm really quite grateful to be teaching at a "great school at a great price," not least for the opportunity to teach students who can't afford great schools at less-great prices. In particular, I'm grateful to teach in an English department where some 2/3 of our majors pursue certification to teach in the public schools, offering at least the hope that whatever radicalizing force arises from those students' experiences here will be passed on to future students in other settings.

(4) Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957), 18. Further references in text.

ED WILTSE teaches literature and writing at Nazareth College in Rochester, NY. He has published articles about Hollywood representations of the Kenyan "Mau Mau," the Sherlock Holmes stories, cyber-solidarity in on-line fan communities, and service learning through student-inmate reading groups at Monroe Correctional Facility.