Commentary : ‘Maurice’s’ Message for Today’s Audiences

When I first saw “Maurice,” the film adaptation of E. M. Forster’s 1914 novel about the travails of homosexual love in Edwardian England, I imagined it would speak to me as powerfully as the book did 10 years ago when I was an 18-year-old first coming out to family and friends.

It didn’t--at least not at first.

James Ivory’s film, while staunchly loyal to Forster’s often tortured but eventually celebratory novel, lacked the subtle didacticism and hints of outrage that punctuated Forster’s coming-out tale: that due to society’s intolerance of homosexuality, an open, well-adjusted homosexual would have no choice but to reject society.

But then I saw the movie a second time, accompanied by a group of straight friends, and I understood its power. I watched curiously as a married couple among us identified more with the two Cambridge University men in love on the screen than my boyfriend and I had previously.

The dilemma between the aristocratic, calm and delicate (but hardly frail) Clive Durham and middle-class, handsome, athletic but blundering Maurice Hall is simple enough. They truly believe making love will divest them of their British bounties. And they are right: Religion, social-class standing and the law prohibited homosexuality (only decriminalized in Great Britain in 1967).

Still, this cultural censoring of passion struck a deep chord in one friend of mine, a married woman in her early 30s.

“Pounce,” she went so far as to exhort at the silver screen.

At first, I laughed at her impetuousity, then felt uneasy. This repression was so utterly unbearable to her; it summoned up her own deeply private misgivings in her marriage and her career because, it seems, she had sacrificed one for the other.

Had I so easily forgotten my own painful coming out that “Maurice” was making more sense to her than to me? Like a lot of gay people, “Maurice” had brought up the struggle of being gay that I had wanted to forget. Also, I was used to recent films like “My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Waiting for the Moon” and “Desert Hearts,” which took being gay as a given, without apologies or repression.

Still, stripping away the Edwardian embellishments, Maurice’s story seemed no different from any homosexual’s because his transformative force begins with an awareness of being different . Then the subsequent hitches become apparent.

“I think it’s better that we remain platonic,” Clive says.

“He’s got some nerve,” my friend chimed in again. The verbalization of the frustration she felt when she didn’t get to see the standard Hollywood “wet kiss” caused me to see “Maurice” as more than a boy-meets-boy story. As Clive goes on to completely reject Maurice by marrying out of need instead of from desire, and Maurice finds solace in the hands of a lower-class gamekeeper, “Maurice’s” message grew broader: If you can live a life without the intoxication of passion, you don’t know who you are.

Glancing at any Forster novel (or its film remake), it’s evident that desire (or sex) is often just an excuse to assist one in an odyssey of self-discovery. (In “A Room With a View,” it’s the kiss in the meadow that helps transcend both class and psychological boundaries, but in “A Passage to India,” the echo in the Marabar Caves that Miss Quested hears disrupts prudish morality.) In Maurice and Clive’s repressive worlds, cluttered by cricket, mansions and nosy servants, sex is not just revolutionary, but spiritualizing as well.

As Forster wrote of Maurice in a terminal note to the novel: “His surroundings exasperate him by their very normality . . . he must either smash them or be smashed”: Maurice escapes society and thus finds himself.

Love emerges as a political tool to ward off degrading paralysis. The lower-class gamekeeper, with whom Maurice eventually falls in love, has no money and so conjures up an abundance of love. But Clive can’t.

If Clive were alive today, he might be a yuppie, albeit a very wealthy one. He is a man who has no choice but to make some compromises with a media-saturated world that will stop at nothing to inundate him with messages and information about AIDS, global warfare, the failure of both the welfare society and Reaganomics, erasing the gap between his private life and public persona. And with the world being so unpredictable, who can blame him for his compromises?

Director Ivory does, I believe--as evidenced by the very beginning of the film. A stereotypically upper-class family, strolling on the beach, happens onto the etchings of a penis and vagina in the sand (a trace of the sex-ed lesson that occurred moments earlier between a pre-teen Maurice and his schoolmaster). The mother, appalled, barks to her daughter: “Come along, Victoria.”

It’s a cheap shot and one that can not be found in the novel, but it works to telegraph Ivory’s gloomy message: We are still Victorians, much more products of our society than we give ourselves credit for. And now that it’s been proven that gay men can be every bit as corporate as the next guy, with subtly varying degrees of discretion required in different lines of work, homosexuals are given the chance to play by society’s rules.

This is not to suggest that homosexuality does not still upset people or that being a homosexual can be very upsetting.

I just recently buried my best friend in New York--a talented young critic for the New York Times who died from AIDS and who eventually wrote that our government’s fear of responsibly addressing the problem of AIDS in the early ‘80s hastened its spread.

Last month, I was brutally and mindlessly attacked by a man with a 2-by-4 just because I was walking alone in a gay neighborhood and so was presumed to be gay. Just moments earlier, I had been writing an article on the Helms Amendment, which would prohibit Congress from allocating money to AIDS education that directly or indirectly discusses homosexual sexual practices.

Sure, “Maurice” speaks a private language to gay people, especially to those who must now come of age during these plague years. Yet, in a broader light, “Maurice” touched my straight friend because it brought up, allegorically, the inconvenience of being passionately human. And her empathetic reaction to “Maurice” touched me more than the movie did; homosexuality was being seen not just for its defiant role in society, but its didactic one. And that was the kind of civilizing revolution Forster wanted most.

In fact, my friend found Ivory’s message more meaningful for contemporary audiences than Forster’s, because it treated Clive more kindly in the film than the book did. Ivory’s message, she argued, lay in mutating the Clive and Maurice who exist within all of us, thus mixing gestures of defiance with social participation.

My boyfriend, I think, questioned the conflation of gay and straight sensibilities. As we got in the car, he asked me if being gay is really any easier today than it was for Forster. I could tell he was thinking of all the Maurice Halls who are now dead. And as we drove home, I was quiet. I felt as if I were Maurice’s offspring, just a little bit safer for his efforts--at least for the time being, and, perhaps more reprehensibly, a little less daring too. My triumph lay in driving home to the house I live in with another man.