{"id":98224,"date":"2015-04-07T10:19:59","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T14:19:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=98224"},"modified":"2026-03-18T08:21:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T12:21:43","slug":"the-books-aspects-of-the-novel-people-by-e-m-forster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=98224","title":{"rendered":"The Books: Aspects of the Novel<\/i>: \u2018People,\u2019 by E.M. Forster"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On the essays shelf<\/a> (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!) <\/p>\n

NEXT BOOK: Aspects of the Novel<\/a>\"\", a series of lectures by E.M. Forster.<\/p>\n

In these 1927 lectures about “aspects of the novel,” Forster took an unconventional approach (discussed here<\/a>). He wanted to ignore chronology altogether, and put authors side by side who were, in actuality, separated by decades. He wanted to look at things thematically and structurally, and wanted to avoid too much compartmentalization. Putting authors\/genres\/time-periods into separate buckets means you somehow miss the grand sweep of that huge thing called English literature. Instead of moving through the timeline, he mucked it all up, and focused on what he saw were the 7 “aspects” of the English novel (and all novels, really, but he focused on English-speaking authors mainly in these lectures). The aspects were:<\/p>\n

Story, characters, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. <\/p>\n

He devoted a couple of lectures to “characters,” under the heading “People.” Forster wanted to look at the different ways authors used characters. What does “point of view” mean? What does character mean? How do you get “inside” a character’s experience? Some authors care about that, others don’t, they are up to something else. In this lecture, Forster looks at the difference between what he characterizes as “flat” and “round” characters. He does not place a judgment one way or the other, not really (i.e. “round” is better than “flat”), although he does point out that “flat” characters don’t really work in tragedies. He understands that Dickens is doing something different with “characters” than, say, Emily Bronte (whom he considered, along with Dostoevsky, a prophet. Not just a writer, an artist, a novelist, but a prophet – which he gets to in a later lecture). The approach is different, and the end-goal is different. In re-reading these excerpts it occurs to me that I stated the case too strongly in that former excerpt. Forster didn’t dismiss Dickens – although sometimes Dickens fans can be extremely defensive on his behalf (a sign of how much he is loved. I include myself in this.) Forster discusses differences – and different of course does not have to be a negative. Pointing out differences in style and intent should be instructive. George Orwell, in his huge essay on Dickens<\/a>, talked a lot about Dickens’ characters, referring to them as “grotesques.” There is a lot of truth in that, and Forster expands on it here, discussing the “flat”-ness of Dickens’ characters (they are brilliant caricatures, for the most part, although he excepts Pip and David C.), and then he moves on to a discussion of the people who populate the novels of Jane Austen. <\/p>\n

It’s hard to summarize so I’ll just hand the floor over to Forster. I would be very interested in hearing responses to all of this! (Well, I always am, but here in particular.)<\/p>\n

Excerpt from Aspects of the Novel<\/a>\"\"<\/i>: ‘People,’ by E.M. Forster<\/big><\/p>\n

For we must admit that flat people are not in themselves as big achievements as round ones, and also that they are best when they are comic. A serious or tragic flat character is apt to be a bore. Each time he enters crying “Revenge!” or “My heart bleeds for humanity!” or whatever his formula is, our hearts sink. One of the romances of a popular contemporary writer is constructed round a Sussex farmer who says, “I’ll plough up that bit of gorse.” There is the farmer, there is the gorse; he says he’ll plough it up, he does plough it up, but it is not like saying “I’ll never desert Mr. Micawber” because we are so bored by his consistency that we do not care whether he succeeds with the gorse or fails. If his formula were analyzed and connected up with the rest of the human outfit, we should not be bored any longer, the formula would cease to be the man and become an obsession in the man; that is to say he would have turned from a flat farmer into a round one. It is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length of time and can move us to any feelings except humor and appropriateness.<\/p>\n

So now let us desert these two-dimensional people and by way of transition to the round, let us go to Mansfield Park<\/i>, and look at Lady Bertram, sitting on her sofa with pug. Pug is flat, like most animals in fiction. He is once represented as straying into a rosebud in a cardboard kind of way, but that is all, and during most of the book his mistress seems to be cut out of the same simple material as her dog. Lady Bertram’s formula is, “I am kindly, but must not be fatigued,” and she functions out of it. But at the end there is a catastrophe. Her two daughters come to grief – to the worst grief known to Miss Austen’s universe, far worse than the Napoleonic wars. Julia elopes; Maria, who is unhappily married, runs off with a lover. What is Lady Bertram’s reaction? The sentence describing it is significant: “Lady Bertram did not think deeply, but, guided by Sir Thomas, she thought justly on all important points, and she saw therefore in all its enormity, what had happened, and neither endeavored herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think little of guilt and infamy.” These are strong words, and they used to worry me because I thought Jane Austen’s moral sense was getting out of hand. She may, and of course does, deprecate guilt and infamy herself, and she duly causes all possible distress in the minds of Edmund and Fanny, but has she any right to agitate calm, consistent Lady Bertram? Is it not like giving pug three faces and setting him to guard the gates of Hell? Ought not her ladyship to remain on the sofa saying, “This is a dreadful and sadly exhausting business about Julia and Maria, but where is Fanny gone? I have dropped another stitch”?<\/p>\n

I used to think this, through misunderstanding Jane Austen’s method – exactly as Scott misunderstood it when he congratulated her for painting on a square of ivory. She is a miniaturist, but never two-dimensional. All her characters are round, or capable of rotundity. Even Miss Bertram has a mind, even Elizabeth Elliot a heart, and Lady Bertram’s moral fervor ceases to vex us when we realize this: the disk has suddenly extended and become a little globe. When the novel is closed, Lady Bertram goes back to the flat, it is true; the dominant impression she leaves can be summed up in a formula. But that is not how Jane Austen conceived her, and the freshness of her reappearances are due to this. Why do the characters in Jane Austen give us a slightly new pleasure each time they come in, as opposed to the merely repetitive pleasure that is caused by a character in Dickens? Why do they combine so well in a conversation, and draw one another out without seeming to do so, and never perform? The answer to this question can be put in several ways: that, unlike Dickens, she was a real artist, that she never stooped to caricature, etc. But the best reply is that her characters though smaller than his are more highly realized. They function all round, and even if her plot made greater demands on them than it does, they would still be adequate. Suppose that Louisa Musgrave had broken her neck on the Cobb. The description of her death would have been feeble and ladylike – physical violence is quite beyond Miss Austen’s powers – but the survivors would have reacted properly as soon as the corpse was carried away, they would have brought into view new sides of their character, and though Persuasion<\/i> would have been spoiled as a book, we should know more than we do about Captain Wentworth and Anne. All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of the book seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily. Let us return to Lady Bertram and the crucial sentence. See how subtly it modulates from her formula into an area where the formula does not work: “Lady Bertram did not think deeply.” Exactly: as per formula. “But guided by Sir Thomas she thought justly on all important points.” Sir Thomas’ guidance, which is part of the formula, remains, but it pushes her ladyship towards an independent and undesired morality. “She saw therefore in all its enormity what had happened.” This is the moral fortissimo – very strong but carefully introduced. And then follows a most artful decrescendo, by means of negatives. “She neither endeavored herself, nor required Fanny to advise her, to think little of guilt or infamy.” The formula is reappearing, because as a rule she does try to minimize trouble, and does require Fanny to advise her how to do this; indeed Fanny has done nothing else for the last ten years. The words, although they are negatived, remind us of this, her normal state is again in view, and she has in a single sentence been inflated into a round character and collapsed back into a flat one. How Jane Austen can write! In a few words she has increased Lady Bertram, and by so doing she has increased the probability of the elopements of Maria and Julia. I say probability because the elopements belong to the domain of violent physical action, and here, as already indicated, Jane Austen is feeble and ladylike. Except in her school-girl novels, she cannot stage a crash. Everything violent has to take place “off” – Louisa’s accident and Marianne Dashwood’s putrid throat are the nearest exceptions – and consequently all the comments on the elopement must be sincere and convincing, otherwise we should doubt whether it occurred. Lady Bertram helps us to believe that her daughters have run away, and they have to run away, or there would be no apotheosis for Fanny. It is a little point, and a little sentence, yet it shows how delicately a great novelist can modulate into the round. <\/p>\n