"I can reach you no other way. You must marry or your life will be wasted."Mr. Emerson: Romantic or chauvinist
Posted by Kay on February 26, 1998 at 09:46:30:
"I can reach you no other way. You must marry or your life will be wasted."
I prefer to put this quote in context of Mr. Emerson's whole impassioned speech, which was a jolt to Lucy's soul. I think he meant that since Lucy has fallen in love, it would be a tragedy not to marry George.
But thinking back to Miss Bartlett -- is Forster trying to show us that her life is wasted because she did not marry?
There is a fairly famous story about Forster, from Virginia Woolf's diary. They were ready to testify for the lesbian writer, Radcliffe Hall, whose novel, "The Well of Loneliness" was being censored. Both thought the book uninteresting, but wanted to testify on principle. In a conversation with the Woolfs, Forster said he thought "Sapphism [Lesbianism] disgusting: partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men."
The next day, he attributed his thoughts to the fact that he was drunk.
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