E.M. Forster's Female Musicality: Inconclusive Counter-romance in A Room with a View

Abstract: E.M. Forster's A Room with a View (1908) musically animates a "self-reflexive gender consciousness" to expose the limits of romantic female life. Employing music to confront the logics of the heterosexual marriage plot, the novel embodies a counter-romantic subtext about the desire for female independence. As such, Forster's music moves attention away from marriage and toward female hesitation about domestic identities in early twentieth-century society. Forster's own late-in-life considerations of A Room also signal that post-war disruptions provide backgazing clues to the novel's inconclusiveness over nuptial anxieties, further highlighting how ideals of heterosexual love and social inheritance obscure the aims of unrealized female selfhood.