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In the final scenes of Howards End, Schlegels are ascendant and Wilcoxes shamed and acquiescent. For many readers, however, the novel's competing impulses are resolved not in marriage, as was traditional in the novel of manners, but in the child of Leonard Bast and Helen Schlegel, presumably the inheritor of Ruth Howard Wilcox's house and land. These commentators generally regard the ending as exhibiting harmonious formal and thematic resolution, and see the promise of the famous epigraph "Only connect . . ." as having been realized. Others, of course, have found the conclusion forced and implausible, and the novel's achievement undermined by plot contrivances, inadequate character development, and most notably by Forster's alleged cultural elitism.1 Forster's privileging of Schlegelian values, now regarded as axiomatic, has been especially objectionable to some. "Forster doesn't really want connection at all," Wilfred Stone asserted nearly 40 years ago (266), epitomizing a chorus of challenges (before and since) to the novel's putative thematic vision. For Stone, Margaret and Helen Schlegel are domineering, destructive elitists who, having established at Howards End an idyllic sanctuary of "personal relations" and "the inner life," permit the devastated, uncomprehending Henry Wilcox to reside there. Stone's withering critique raised stimulating (and still germane) questions about the novel's formal and thematic integrity: Did Forster believe in the possibility of connection? What sorts of association (if any) does the novel actually advocate, and by what means might they be achieved? If Schlegels are "superior," what is such "superiority" actually worth in both personal and cultural terms? Can interaction between the antithetical dispositions ameliorate the extremes of both without effacing what is valuable in them? Most important for this essay, if Forster did not really want connection, is Howards End the "ethically evasive" novel that Stone believed it to be (258), and is its author elitist?2
Undoubtedly, Schlegels are more favorably presented than Wilcoxes, but their depiction is not always flattering, perhaps to mitigate the bias of which Forster must have been aware. In the final chapters, to cite but one example, Margaret appears to have transmuted into an imperialistic materfamilias, a female Henry in effect, who autocratically "straightens tangles" (288), adjusts "lopsidedness" (282), is "unable to forgive" (283), and "who had charged straight through these Wilcoxes and broken...