The Collision · No. 7
Before Untamed, Lucy had the view — and refused to call it knowing.
Rain on a Sunday in Surrey. Lucy Honeychurch has broken her engagement, bought a ticket to Greece with the two Miss Alans, and told everyone the polite version. The carriage stops at the Rectory so Charlotte can go to church. There is only one fire in the house, so the maid puts Lucy in Mr. Beebe's study — where old Mr. Emerson is already sitting with his foot on a gout-stool. Not a word will come to her lips. George she had faced, and could have faced again. She has forgotten how to treat his father.
He does not scold. He asks about going abroad, and she admits that Cecil is not the one going with her, and the question arrives without malice: you are leaving him, you are leaving the man you love? Terror comes over her and she lies again — the long, convincing speech she had already tried on Mr. Beebe and meant to deliver to the world. He hears it in silence. Then, dreamily, so gently that she is not alarmed: my dear, I am worried about you; it seems to me that you are in a muddle. In Chapter XIX, Forster hands you the scene before he hands you the theory. No one is holding Lucy in a cage. She is holding the door.
Glennon Doyle's Untamed (2020) would arrive a century later with a cleaner diagram: there is a Knowing underneath the noise, the cage you were trained to call duty is still a cage, and the tame life you perform is billed to the wild one you did not live. We forgot how to know when we learned how to please. That insight sells because it is often true. E.M. Forster had already staged the harder case in 1908: a girl who never forgot how to know, who took the window on her first night in Florence, and spent the rest of the novel learning how to please anyway.
The book you bought
“We forgot how to know when we learned how to please. This is why we live hungry.”
Untamed · Glennon Doyle · 2020 · ~3M copies
The book that beat it by 112 years
“Do you remember before, when you refused the room with the view? Those were muddles — little, but ominous — and I am fearing that you are in one now.”
A Room with a View · E.M. Forster · 1908 · Ch. XIX
Doyle wants you to recover the knowing the world trained out of you. Forster wants you to meet a woman who never lost hers — who named her own cage out loud, laughed, then tampered with the truth until she forgot the truth had ever been.
Doyle's move is useful — and it does not hold the window
Untamed names what millions of women already feel: a life that photographs well and cannot be breathed in. Doyle teaches readers to listen for the Knowing — the quiet insistence that something is wrong before there are words for it — and to treat a cage as a cage even when the bars are made of praise, marriage, motherhood, or a brand you built yourself. The rule she gives her own daughter is blunt: every time you are given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, disappoint them. Book clubs leave with vocabulary and permission, which is more than most books hand out.
Map Lucy onto that grid and the knowing arrives twelve decades early. In Chapter I, the Signora has given them north rooms looking into a courtyard, and one of the ill-bred people one does meet abroad leans across the dinner table and says it twice: I have a view, I have a view. Charlotte calls the offer quite out of the question. Lucy watches the argument widen and deepen until it deals not with rooms and views but with something quite different, whose existence she had not realized before. She takes the Arno room anyway. The chapter ends with two women in two bedrooms — Lucy opening her window to the lights dancing on the water and the cypresses of San Miniato, Charlotte fastening her shutters and locking her door.
Italy keeps handing her the evidence. On a wet afternoon she opens the little draped piano at the Bertolini and plays the tragic Beethoven sonatas as victories, because she has decided they should triumph; when she closes it, Mr. Beebe finally says to her face what he once said to a vicar in Tunbridge Wells — if Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for us and for her. At Fiesole in Chapter VI she falls out of a wood onto a terrace covered with violets from end to end, and George kisses her before either of them has a sentence for it. Then England, and Cecil, who reads her as a woman of Leonardo's — loved not for herself but for the things she will not tell. In Chapter IX he complains that she never pictures him out of doors, and she laughs and agrees: a drawing-room, with no view. She diagnoses her own engagement as a joke among the pines. That is not ignorance. That is knowing with nowhere to put itself.
Read the chapterThe source · Chapter XIX, A Room with a View
“You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”E.M. Forster, A Room with a View, Chapter XIX (public domain)
Why the old one is harder than the new one
Doyle's version is a liberation arc: hear the Knowing, name the cage, rebuild on the far side. It works when the thing in the way is permission — someone else's rule, someone else's disappointment, someone else's idea of a good woman. Forster removes that comfort. Lucy's cage is not Cecil, or Charlotte, or her mother. It is her own fluency in a language that can make panic sound like taste and cowardice sound like growth.
In Chapter XVI, Forster writes the sentence no memoir will print. Lucy had developed since the spring — that is to say, she was now better able to stifle the emotions of which the conventions and the world disapprove. Development, in her case, is skill at suppression. Love felt and returned, the most real thing we shall ever meet, reappears as the world's enemy, and she must stifle it. The contest lies not between love and duty; it lies between the real and the pretended, and Lucy's first aim is to defeat herself. Tampering with the truth, she forgot that the truth had ever been. By Chapter XIX she is reciting a litany — I do not love George, I broke off my engagement because I did not love George, I must go to Greece because I do not love George — and Forster names the damage exactly: she was disordering the very instruments of life. Doyle's method needs the instrument to work. Forster shows a woman breaking it on purpose.
She runs twice. In Chapter VII Charlotte gives notice at the pension, kneels by an empty trunk packing books by candlelight, and takes the eight o'clock train while Lucy cries out that she wants not to be muddled, that she wants to grow older quickly — and Charlotte taps on the wall and tells her to go to bed at once. Greece she arranges herself. Mr. Emerson offers no metaphor for any of it, only accounting: do you remember before, when you refused the room with the view? Those were muddles, little but ominous, and he fears she is in one now. Though you fly to Greece and forget his very name, George will work in your thoughts till you die. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you.
Then the bill. Lucy's defense is not that she is right; it is they trusted me — and the old man will not grant it. Why should they, when you have deceived them? He tells her the truth will send her cold into a battle that needs warmth, out into the muddle she made herself, and that her mother and all her friends will despise her, and rightly, if it is ever right to despise. That is the line the memoir deletes. Cages make the problem a category error — wrong partner, wrong role, wrong audience. Forster makes it a habit of mind — borrowed shame, performed delicacy, the window you take and then pretend was only Italy. Doyle says stop performing. Emerson quotes a friend who said life is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along. There is no leaving the stage. There is only playing it honestly or faking the notes, and no zoo metaphor decides which. Only one true sentence, said out loud in a borrowed study with no hillside left to blame.
Bring this to the table
Lucy's Greece ticket was movement bought instead of a sentence spoken — and she could afford it because everyone around her preferred the itinerary to the truth. When have you paid for the escape rather than say the one true thing, and who in your life loves you enough to call it a muddle instead of an adventure?
Common Questions
Search questions this collision answers—what readers ask about Untamed vs. what Forster stages in Lucy's muddle.
Is Untamed based on A Room with a View?
No direct citation. The collision is structural: Doyle teaches readers to name cages and trust the Knowing they were trained to please away. Forster dramatizes a woman whose knowing never left — she takes the view, hears the music, gets kissed among the violets — and who then works, chapter by chapter, at forgetting it, until an old man by a Rectory fire names the muddle out loud.
What does the room and the view mean in Forster?
Literally, courtyard rooms versus south rooms over the Arno at the Pension Bertolini. Symbolically, the room is propriety, performance, and borrowed shame; the view is passion and directness. Forster makes it explicit in Chapter IX, when Cecil complains that Lucy only ever imagines him indoors and she cheerfully agrees — a drawing-room, with no view.
Why does Lucy book a trip to Greece?
After breaking her engagement to Cecil, she plans Greece with the Miss Alans as a respectable escape — movement without honesty. Mr. Emerson sees through it: geography cannot pull love out of you once it has taken root.
What does Mr. Emerson mean by "muddle"?
Self-deception dressed as duty. He counts the instances for her: the church where she pretended to be annoyed and was not, and before that, the room with the view she refused. Those were muddles, little but ominous. Muddle is knowing the truth and arranging your life so that you never have to say it aloud — and Forster's verdict is harsher than his, because Lucy tampers with the truth until she forgets the truth had ever been.
Did Glennon Doyle write "we forgot how to know when we learned how to be afraid of knowing"?
No. That version circulates online but is not hers. The line in Untamed is "We forgot how to know when we learned how to please. This is why we live hungry." The distinction matters for this collision: Doyle blames pleasing, not fear — and pleasing is precisely Lucy's method, from refusing the Emersons' rooms out of delicacy to accepting Cecil on the third proposal.
Read the muddle in context — not the Merchant Ivory cut.
A Room with a View is not a tame-yourself manual. It is a novel about a woman handed the view in the first chapter who spends nineteen more learning to lie about it — and one old man who refuses to accept the lie in a room with a single fire. The muddle is one chapter in a twenty-chapter argument. We narrate it chapter by chapter in plain English. First chapter's audio is free. The rest is $2.99 a month, every book on the shelf.
Buy the book
Public-domain source
A Room with a View
E.M. Forster
Modern bestseller
Untamed
Glennon Doyle