A Psychological Reading of A Room with a View

The book opens on a complaint about business. Charlotte Bartlett says the Signora had no business to do it: they were promised south rooms with a view, close together, and have been given north rooms looking into a courtyard, a long way apart. An old man interrupts a conversation he was not in. 'I have a view, I have a view.' He thumps like a child and tells his son to persuade them, because women like looking at a view and men do not. George says it is obvious they should have the rooms, and that there is nothing else to say.

The originating trouble is a gift that will not wear the right delay. At a pension, Charlotte expects to be looked over for a day or two before anyone speaks. Mr Emerson speaks at once, in a heavy body, with large eyes she decides are ill-bred before she has finished seeing them. Lucy wants the river. She is also young enough to feel her cousin's embarrassment as if it were a conscience. Borrowed shame is efficient. It lets her refuse what she wants while experiencing the refusal as manners. The wall is being defended by someone else's panic.

Lucy finds daily life chaotic, and a more solid world when she opens the piano. She is then no longer deferential or patronizing, no longer a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music, the book says, is not the kingdom of this world. It will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have rejected. Passion is there, but it cannot be easily labelled. It slips between love and hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style.

Mr Beebe sits unnoticed in the window and says the sentence that organises her split. If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays, it will be very exciting both for them and for her. She steps back into daily life at once. Someone said the same to her mother, who trusted she would never live a duet, and who does not mind music but does not like one to get excited. The desire is not hidden from Lucy after she has played. It is hidden from the room. A view, like a sonata, can be treated as an occasion. The psychology of the book is what happens when an occasion keeps asking to become a life.

In the Piazza, at the hour when unfamiliar things are real, two men bicker over a debt. One is struck lightly on the chest, bends towards Lucy as if he had a message, and opens his lips. A stream of red comes out. She wants the moment put back into a picture she can send someone else to fetch. She tells George she dropped the photographs she bought at Alinari's, and asks him to add to his kindness by getting them. When he turns, she runs for the Arno. He will not let her go home alone. He has thrown the photographs into the river. They were covered with blood. He did not know what to do with them. Her heart warms towards him for the first time, because his voice is an anxious boy's.

Then the boy verges into a man. Something tremendous has happened, and he must face it without getting muddled. It is not exactly that a man has died. This is the first break in the pictorial defence. She needs the photograph so the square can be filed. He destroys it because the blood is on it. A mind trained to keep feeling as a view is frightened by a view that has a body on it. The muddle he refuses is the muddle she will spend the rest of the book perfecting.

They drive out to see a view. The driver, whom the book calls Phaethon, picks her great blue violets, and for a moment the world is beautiful and direct. She feels the influence of spring. Later the bushes close. George steps quickly forward and kisses her. Before she can speak, almost before she can feel, Charlotte calls her name. The silence of life has been broken by Miss Bartlett, who stands brown against the view.

Lucy then pours the trouble back into the person who warned her. She asks Charlotte to kiss her, because only Charlotte can understand, and she had thought she was developing. Charlotte promises that if Lucy's mother might blame her, she will never speak of it to her mother or to anyone. The promise ends the interview. Charlotte looks at her gloves and names the train to Rome, at eight. Lucy receives the announcement as easily as it was given. The defence does not deny the kiss. It schedules the departure, and it offers secrecy as care. A feeling that has not yet become Lucy's own sentence can still be moved off the hillside by a timetable.

The English rooms open on curtains pulled together, because the carpet is new and the August sun is not to be trusted. A poet might compare those curtains to sluice-gates, lowered against the intolerable tides of heaven. Outside is a sea of radiance. Inside, the glory is tempered to the capacities of man. Cecil appears late and must be described at once. He was medieval. Like a Gothic statue. His head is tilted a little higher than the usual level of vision. Lucy, in the account that loves her, is like a woman of Leonardo, loved not so much for herself as for the things she will not tell. No woman of Leonardo could have anything so vulgar as a story.

Freddy calls this Cecil's third go. Their mother is glad he is asking once more, and she is writing that Lucy told her of the first asking from Rome. Lucy accepts, clear and gentle, saying she loves him and will do her best to make him happy. The engagement is the picture completed. A woman with no story cannot bring a kiss down from a hill and set it on the tea table. Cecil is the defence she consents to, because he wants her mysterious, and mystery is what the house already requires. He even lets the forbidden people back in as a joke. He finds tenants for Cissie Villa in the National Gallery, absolute strangers in the Umbrian Room, and tells Lucy the whole joke is still to come. The Emersons move in while she is safe in London. What the silence removed, the comedy returns, so long as nobody has to call it desire.

A red book lies in the sun on the gravel, motionless while the house prepares for church. It is Under a Loggia, the library book Cecil has been reading. He takes it and reads. Miss Lavish knew, somehow, and had printed the past in draggled prose, for Cecil to read and for George to hear. Leonora sits on a bank carpeted with violets. Antonio steals up and enfolds her in his manly arms. Cecil says this is not even the passage he wanted. There is a funnier one. Lucy turns so he will not see her face, and sees George's.

This is the formal fact the psychology turns on. The private event comes back as someone else's bad style. She cannot correct the prose without confessing the afternoon. Charlotte's promise of silence has failed in the only way the drawing room can enjoy: the kiss is now a comic novel about Italians, read aloud by the fiancé. George has already named the man. Cecil is all right so long as he keeps to things, books and pictures, but he kills when he comes to people. The reading proves it. Cecil can hold the scene and not know he is holding her. In the narrow path she is kissed a second time, gasps no, and George slips back. Cecil rejoins her. They reach the upper lawn alone. The body has answered. The story in the house has not.

She breaks the engagement in the hour when, by the habit of the house, she pours drinks for the men. She tells Cecil that there was always a lot against it, that their relations seemed pleased, and that it was no good speaking until things came to a point. She does not say George. Alone, one decision stands firm. She could never marry. Cecil believed in her, so she must some day believe in herself. She must be one of the women who care for liberty and not for men. She must forget that George loved her, that he had been thinking through her and gained her this honourable release, and that he had gone back into the darkness.

She puts out the lamp. It will not do to think, or to feel. She gives up trying to understand herself and joins the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain and march by catch-words. They have sinned against passion and truth. The new defence sounds cleaner than Charlotte's train. Liberty, here, is the muddle in a better dress. Greece, taken from the Miss Alans' changed plans, gives the unwanted feeling a destination that is not a person. She can even see the true sentence and not use it. It would be quite easy to tell her mother that George has been bothering her, and that if he hears she has given Cecil up he may begin again. The sentence has the advantage of being true. She cannot say it.

At the Rectory she thinks the Emersons have already gone, and that the bother about Greece was waste: wasted plans, wasted money, wasted love, and a wounded mother. Then the old man is still there. After his long preamble, three words burst against her. 'You love George!' He does not wait for contradiction. She loves the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves her, and no other word expresses it. She reaches for the last respectable answer, that it is like a man to suppose a woman is always thinking about a man. He says that she is. When he weeps he says they fight for more than Love or Pleasure. There is Truth. Truth counts. She asks him to kiss her, and says she will try. The book lets that yes feel like a gain for more than the two of them. The truth is asked to justify itself by becoming good for the world.

The last chapter does not leave them in the feeling. The Miss Alans go to Greece by themselves. George and Lucy return to the Pension Bertolini. He thinks the room is his old one. She says it is the room she had, and she had his father's, because Charlotte made her, for a reason she forgets. He carries her to the window so that she sees the view. They say one another's names. Charlotte is not cured and not gone. Lucy thinks how horrible it would be to grow old in Charlotte's way, and how cruel Charlotte would have been if she had known Mr Emerson was in the Rectory that evening. The ending does not suppress the defence. It shows the window taken, with the person who would have stopped it still easy to imagine. The view was never the difficulty. The difficulty was saying, in an English room, that she wanted it.

Readers still know this filing system. A desire that arrives on a trip can be called the trip. A partner who is clever, presentable, and wrong can be called a reasonable future. A private moment can be told back to you in someone else's voice, in a room or in public, before you have a sentence of your own. The anxiety is not only love. It is reputation: the fear that wanting, said plainly, will make you the person the pension has already decided is ill-bred. Forster's word is muddle. It names a confusion that feels like virtue, because it protects everyone present except the one who was kissed. The laughter at the tenants, the bad novel, and the cousin who begs for a room with no view is how a house keeps a true thing in circulation without having to believe it.

This reading treats the muddle as a defence. Forster writes a social comedy in 1908, and the instruments are rooms, accents, calling-cards, and who may be a tenant. Charlotte's panic is not only an inner fear. It is how a woman with little power enforces the only safety she trusts. To call Lucy repressed is fair only if the repression is seen as shared, taught, and useful to the house. The comedy matters. Cecil's joke and Miss Lavish's prose are how the forbidden afternoon is allowed to travel. A reading that keeps only the kiss and the window can miss the pension, the landlord, and the mother who does not like excitement. The word muddle is Forster's, not a diagnosis. His own later honesty about his life is not required to see the pattern, and it should not be used to explain Lucy as if she were a case.

Sense and Sensibility is the psychology of a lost house, in which one sister carries the feeling the family will not govern and the other treats volume as the only honest proof. Lucy is asked, for most of this book, to do the reverse of that carrying. She lets the house hold the feeling, and she calls her own clarity a muddle. The Picture of Dorian Gray shows a man who keeps the face other people love by storing age, cruelty, and shame where they need not be seen. Cecil's harm is quieter, and it is the same refusal in a drawing room. He is safe with books and pictures, and he loves Lucy as a Leonardo who will not tell a story. The story arrives anyway, in a library book left on the gravel, and he reads it aloud without knowing it is hers.