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In recent years, interest in E. M. Forster has revived among scholars working in postcolonial and race studies, with new attention being paid to anti-imperialist and pro-Eastern strains in his writings; and also among those working in gender and queer theory, who have developed a body of interpretation of his posthumously published novel Maurice.1 But there has not been a similar reconstruction of Forster among scholars interested in class, generally thought to be Forster's most embarrassing blind spot. This blindness is perfectly illustrated, critics claim, by the narrator's dismissive pronouncement in Howards End - "We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable" (36) - and by what most consider the novel's condescending treatment of the lower-middle-class character Leonard Bast.2 It is ironic, given the narrator's scolding of Helen Schlegel for deeming Leonard "not a man, but a cause" (246), that Forster himself is widely scolded for doing the same thing.
Leonard has conventionally been viewed as a flat and unsympathetic character, a sacrifice to a larger argument Forster is trying to make about the state of high culture in modern English society. "Bast is anxious and envious among the rentier intelligentsia," writes Jonathan Rose, "and his attempts to acquire culture are hopeless. Forster frankly stamps him 'inferior to most rich people' " (402). 3 The same kind of treatment of Leonard is at stake in a complementary reading of the whole Bast subplot as foremost an expression of liberal guilt. For Henry Turner, Leonard and his wife,Jacky, are "mere symbols," "figures for surplus and the human cost of capitalism" (339) that allow Forster to work through his guilt over living off the fruits of a system he finds unjust and dehumanizing, yet without which he would not have had the means to become a writer. Others claim that it is the characters Margaret and Helen Schlegel who are using Leonard to assuage their guilt and that Forster is trying to critique their guilt-driven interference with Leonard's life. What no critic questions is the idea that Leonard has been degraded by virtue of the political interest taken in him, by being looked on as a "cause" - whether by Forster, in portraying the clerk as a victim of the class system, or by...