Abstract
This thesis aims to utilise current discourses around identity politics to re-examine and re-evaluate the representation of class in the fiction of E. M. Forster – particularly of the working- and lower-class characters with whom the author seems to often identify.
Often considered an outsider by his peers and biographers, Forster belonged firmly to the middle-classes of English society. He had the benefit of a Cambridge education, inherited £8000 from his great-aunt, travelled abroad many times and lived comfortably between multiple properties. As a result, his working- and lower-class characters have received a mixed reception: they are often faulted for their unconvincing dialect, and frequently dismissed as caricatures. Yet Forster was also shy and reserved among large groups of friends; is rarely thought of as a modernist innovator; and his homosexuality and longing for companionship put him in perpetual danger of criminal persecution.
Today these notions of “otherness” are regularly defined in relation to social and academic debates around identity politics – in epistemological discussions centred around the value of “authentic voices” and “lived experiences” which have historically been side-lined or ignored by hegemonic social and cultural establishments. This thesis is therefore centred around the anxieties and tensions that emerge in the intersections between class, culture and “otherness” which up to this day define E. M. Forster as a somewhat peripheral figure. Through a detailed analysis of Forster’s novelistic output from 1905 up until the First World War, and by applying concepts borne out of identity politics (including the utilisation of “safe spaces” and a dissection of “culture wars”), I hope to illuminate how Forster’s status as an outsider figure is crucial to our understanding of his conceptions of working and lower-middle class lives, both throughout the Edwardian period, and within his fictional oeuvre.