Peter Fulham in a recent on-line New Yorker article finds the perfect literary work to celebrate the Supreme Court’s ruling last week striking down the Defense of Marriage Act: E. M. Forster’s Maurice.
Forster’s novel about homosexual love was too dangerous to be published while he was alive and so appeared in 1971, the year after he died. Yet despite the prejudices of his society—at one pont a character in the novel notes, “There always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted”—Forster was determined to have a happy ending. In a note that he wrote in 1960 that appeared as in the novel’s afterword, he wrote,
A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it ‘To a Happier Year’ and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote.
Fulham points out that something close to Foster’s “happier year” has finally arrived in America. There are still fights ahead, of course, as “marriage equality is still non-existent in thirty-seven states, and gay people still face a lack of employment protection throughout the country.” Still, one doesn’t have to rely only on literature to imagine something better.
Up until recently, literature and the imagination were all we had to turn to. Fulham notes that “[t]he idle mind of a marginalized person spends a lot of time dreaming,” and there is a lot of dreaming in Maurice. Note the following passage where Maurice is addressing the man he will elope with:
Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.
And here as well:
There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it—love—nobility—big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend…
Bookish dreaming, however, takes one only so far, as even Forster notes. At one point in the novel, Maurice is puzzled that Clive, a potential lover, can be satisfied with the Greek homosexuals that he reads about in books:
The stories of Harmonius and Aristogeiton, of Phaedrus of the Theban Band were well enough for those whose hearts were empty, but no substitute for life. That Clive should occasionally prefer them puzzled him.
So now what was once imagined is starting to become real as “roughly thirty per cent of Americans now live in states where gay marriage is legal.” This has allowed Fulham, who is 23, to observe,
It is a surreally moving experience to grow up at the same time your country, in incremental steps, begins to validate your existence.
Insofar as novels can make dreams seem real, even if only momentarily, maybe they deserve some of the credit for the progress we have made. If we can imagine a happier year, we’re already part of the way there.
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