With the emergence of Modernism in literature, E.M. Forster's Howards End, projects the crisis of liberal humanism and globalized violence, wherein--by Forster's analysis of Freud--difficulty in understanding the subjectivity inherent in every person's fractured psychology can be resolved by emphasizing interpersonal relationships and dissolving preconceived notions of loyalty to country, class, the scientific establishment, secrets, intellectual hierarchy, and all other institutions historically deemed tantamount to personal identity. In his essay following the novel, Forster writes, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." The ultimate significance of personal relationships reminds readers of Dante's Inferno; in Canto XXXIV, Dante describes, "The soul up there who is punished the most...is Judas Iscariot, who has his head within and flails his legs outside. Of the other two, with their heads below, / the one who hangs from the black snout is Brutus...The other is Cassius" (170). The reason Forster subscribes to these ideals, and reinvents them for the modern audience, relies on the coded language of human sexuality by which Forster closeted his own homosexual identity. Howards End relies mostly on the viewpoint of Margaret Shlegel in an attempt by Forster to ascribe his narrator to the feminine perspective, evident by future historical realities, wherein liberal humanism becomes associated with a failure of nerve, effeminization contrast to the tough western way of being in the world (to fight fascism, communism, and to win cold and hot wars). In America, liberal humanism attaches itself to Cold War discourse and eventually disappears; the term itself is used to vilify political opponents, particularly on the left (who now describe themselves as progressives, invoking the early twentieth-century idealism). Forster knew this then, in the first decade of the 1900s, and articulates the classic liberal humanist statement in terms of personal relationships complete with the aforementioned coded human sexuality, mostly writing, again, from the viewpoint of Margaret Shlegel; Forster aestheticizes most of the men--and traditional masculinity, by extension--as personally threatening to his own life, as well as in the cultural-social-political-economic mode of capitalism. But how do we link this crisis of Forster's to our discussion of Foucault in terms of formulating self-identity?
Goldstein explores the tools by which humans define and produce identity and how Foucault's technologies of the self apply. Goldstein introduces what technologies of the self are, as "'the procedures, which have doubtless existed in all civilizations, that are proposed or prescribed to individuals in order to fix, maintain or transform their identities with particular ends in view' and which operate by means either of 'a mastery of the self by the self or a knowledge of the self by the self'" (42). So if Howards End predicts the effects of capitalism--as reliant upon monetary gain above all other endeavors, but supported by traditional notions of family and sexuality, national identity, and loyalty, through the progress of technology--Forster himself has no home, as a homosexual with liberal humanist tendencies. And, "Like all good concepts...Foucault's technologies of the self enables us to discern less than obvious affinities among particulars, to form groupings where none existed before" (Goldstein 52). And that is precisely Forster's projected. But as a closeted homosexual, the author limited himself, never able quite to describe directly the homosocial condition, afraid of its implications on his own life. For Forster, his own limitations evidence further the Modernist crisis (and maybe the universal crisis) of individuals (as members of, or distancing themselves away from their traditional social responsibilities) struggling to utilize technologies of the self to define and maintain or transform their selfhood.
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