Social Darwinism As a Providing Theme in Howards End Novel

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Subversive Uses of Social Darwinism in Howards End

The persistent theme of social Darwinism in Howards End suggests England belongs not to those plucky, sensitive types that Forster himself idealizes in his essay “What I Believe,” but to a more practical type that Forster acknowledges in his essay “Notes on the English Character.” He begrudgingly admires the latter for their rougher, industrious spirit—the spirit that compelled life out of the “protoplasm,” (Howards End 127) and the spirit that compelled the English out of their rural simplicity and into a world power.

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Via Margaret Schlegel and Henry Wilcox, Forster injects several platitudes of late 19th and early 20th century Darwinian thought into the novel, and, although often delivered in the stern tones of Henry, these expectations of which category of human will prevail lends the novel a sense of stability and predictability: the strong will outperform the sensitive, and healthy competition will continue to weed out inferior types, like the ever-struggling Leonard Bast.

However, as several contemporary critics have pointed out, the surface stability of Howards End conceals inevitable collapse. Forster employs several devices throughout the novel that suggest the stability offered by social Darwinian thought is just more evidence that the dynamism of early 20th century England may very well end in rubble.

Social Darwinism is, however, generally considered a construct of the 19th century—what place does it have in Forster’s 20th century novel? To be fair, Howards End is structured in a way that sets up a series of contrasts between the past and the present, the rural and the modern, and similar binaries that invite critical examination.

The ideologies of the past—like social Darwinism in the Victorian era and its effects on poverty and race relations—and the more progressive movements of the Edwardian era in which Howards End is set are bridged in the novel, with expectations of the past overlapping with the realities of the present. Older ideas of “survival of the fittest” and similar platitudes continue to exist within more contemporary narratives, though for different effect. Henry Wilcox, for example, continues to subscribe to the idea that the rigorous competition of England’s capitalist economy provides all the opportunity in the world for any committed individual to succeed, and if that individual winds up in the financial gutter, it is only the most logical conclusion to the misguided efforts of a weaker specimen—that is, if the individual fails, he or she was never strong enough to succeed in the first place. He explains to the more sympathetic Helen, “‘The poor are poor, and one’s sorry for them, but there it is. As civilization moves forward, the shoe is bound to pinch in places’” (138). This conception of the necessary competitiveness of the economic and social world—or arena—of England is a carryover from social commentators of the Victorian era, of which the Wilcox patriarch is a product. Liberal political theorist Herbert Spencer, who first coined the controversial phrase “survival of the fittest,” described this sort of competition as necessary. The British Library summarizes Spencer’s beliefs as follows:

[T]he fundamental physical laws of evolution mean that progress of all kind depends on struggle and competition. Only some can survive this struggle, and to try to help the weak flies in the face of nature. Attempts to aid the weakest in society, such as improving the living and working conditions of the poorest people, [is] dangerously mistaken. (Burdett)

Henry Wilcox, with all his talk of the financial woes of Leonard Bast (one of the so-called “weakest in society”) as just “the shoe pinching,” is quite clearly carrying the torch of Spencer’s Victorian era concept of social Darwinism into the more progressive Edwardian era, where it will naturally meet with critical forces the disrupt its stabilizing power.

While clearly flawed for its lack of empathy and consideration for the more human qualities of living, the concept of survival of the fittest provides people like Henry Wilcox, and indeed English society, with a certain sense of stability. If nothing else, the idea that the weak will merely exist and the strong will continue to accrue wealth and power is a useful shortcut for understanding the Western world’s various social structures. Through the repeated platitude of “survival of the fittest” from both Henry Wilcox and Margaret Schlegel, Howards End enjoys a grim stability—for a time. Initially, the novel successfully addresses factors that lead to evolutionary success: Margaret and Henry select their partners based on a conception of “fitness” rather than obvious affection; the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes are preoccupied with acquiring shelter or places that will help them acquire a home or greater wealth, respectively; and Henry recognizes that “flux” or continuous change is necessary for improvement in society, a quality with which Margaret is initially sympathetic (186). This is not an exhaustive list—nearly every sentiment from Henry, and to a lesser extent Margaret, conform to a strict understanding of what is likely to succeed and what is likely to fail, a zero-sum battle of survival that leaves little room for the consideration of emotions.

From the perspective of modern literary Darwinists, it might seem that Howards End has completed every prerequisite of a truly Darwinian novel. However, upon closer inspection, Forster seems to be purposefully setting up this false sense of stability in order to point out its weakness. Henry and Margaret may select each other for their “fitness” as partners who provide a quality that the other lacks, but their union does not produce and is not intended to produce offspring, the hallmark of evolutionary success. Evolutionarily, the Wilcoxes’ drive to acquire houses rather than shelter is a waste of resources. And the constant “flux” of civilization may be a force of progress, but it is also a force of destabilization. Not only are these the marks of evolutionary failure, they are the marks of what Forster, in his essay “Notes on the English Character,” claims are the primary qualities of the (surface) English character: self-complacency, aloofness, and a lack of sympathy (310). The English, so Forster claims, are uniquely incomplete in that “it is a bad surface” that the English present to the world. The “bad surface” is a product of a middle-class education, in which the value of economic success and social prestige are ingrained, to the detriment of emotional development. Competition and hierarchy take precedent over empathy and compassion. In some ways, the English public school system is characterized by social Darwinian expectations. The success of the average middle-class Englishman is inextricably tied to the proliferation of social Darwinism in English society, and when one fails, the other surely crumbles.

Bearing in mind social Darwinism’s limited consideration for emotions, it is much more striking that the sympathetic Margaret conforms to this model of social Darwinism. Henry’s conception of social Darwinism is obvious, but Margaret’s is much more subtle and is more disruptive for its subtlety. The Schlegels are supposed to be more empathetic and tolerant—they are supposed to be examples of Forster’s “aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky” who value personal relations over economic success (“What I Believe” 315). They represent the opposite of the Wilcox worldview. It is somewhat upsetting, then, when Margaret subscribes to rules of social Darwinism in scenes where the welfare of the poor is being debated. Margaret argues that the poor should receive money rather than social services: “‘Give them a chance. Give them money. Don’t dole them out poetry-books and railway-tickets like babies. Give them the wherewithal to buy these things’” (93). In other words, don’t simply give the poor what they might need—give them the money and see how they spend it. The smart will spend it wisely and will become successful. The others are not worth anyone’s concern. Even before getting to know Henry and becoming more sympathetic toward his beliefs, Margaret’s practicality has a coldness that is reminiscent of Henry’s Darwinian worldview. This coldness is much more unsettling from a sentimental Schlegel than it is from a capitalist Wilcox, and its subtlety is more insidious and destabilizing. If the people who praise personal relations and sympathy cannot value the “weakest” in society, then it presents a problem to the idea of social welfare and the maintenance of social stability. Thus, rather than allowing Darwinian expectations to produce a true sense of stability in both English society and the English character or identity, Forster upends these expectations to reveal evolutionary, and therefore social, failure. He reveals England’s, and its most prosperous inhabitants’, trajectory toward an unstable future.

To a significant extent, that instability is a consequence of instances of hybridization in the novel. In strictly Darwinian terms of evolution, hybridization is generally a positive phenomenon in which compatible organisms combine genetic material, typically resulting in more robust offspring who have inherited traits that are better suited to surviving a particular environment. And in the case where each family excels where the other is deficient (76), where one family consists of capitalists, the modern “warrior,” and the other consists of softer, more emotional intellectuals (118), it might initially appear that a union between the two would be mutually beneficial. But because the hybridization of the Schlegels and Wilcoxes is complicated by the inclusion of Leonard Bast, the mixing of the two families is hardly positive. What might seem like a reassertion of personal relations is instead evidence of Forster’s own avoidance of the political in favor of the personal (Gibson 115). Rather than addressing the encroaching influence of modern urban life on the rural traditions of England’s past, Forster provides an unconvincing mix of the qualities of both in the form of Helen’s son. The hybridization of the three families is only positive until the reader steps back and perceives the context surrounding that hybridization—the “creeping” red rust of London (Howards End 240). Helen’s son strikes readers as a hasty product of provisional order, the only stability to be found by the novel’s end.

The three-way hybridization of the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and Leonard Bast provoke instability in an otherwise predictable line of inheritance of Howards End. While this is not objectively bad, it is nonetheless destabilizing due to its ambiguity. Whereas most novels that use inheritance as a plot point use it to resolve difficulties for specific characters, as Allan Hunter explains in Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism (58-59), and therefore as a way to maintain social and economic stability, Forster employs ambiguity about who will inherit Howards End to further demonstrate the instability of England’s future. By suggesting that Margaret with inherit Howards End from Mrs. Wilcox, then by showing the Wilcoxes willfully deviating from this legal decision by burning Mrs. Wilcox’s letter, then by the showing the Wilcoxes placing the unwanted house up for lease to strangers, and finally by showing all the rules of primogeniture being ignored by bequeathing the house to Margaret and her line of descent anyway, Forster illustrates a complicated, disorderly shift in inheritance, not unlike the state of flux afflicting London. Because of the complicated hybridization or mixing of types between the Schlegels, the Wilcoxes, and Leonard Bast, there is a significant lack of predictability in the line of inheritance. In this way, biological inheritance is firmly intertwined with the inheritance of economic stability, and because neither is truly stable, it suggests the condition of Howards End—the condition of England—is rife with uncertainty.

Due to the unforeseen circumstance of Helen being pregnant with Leonard Bast’s illegitimate child, the usual rules of inheritance are bent to accommodate the destabilizing Schlegel sisters. As Mary Ellis Gibson points out in her essay “Illegitimate Order…,” such illegitimacy “is an obvious subversion of legal marriage and inheritance. It disrupts the social structure that a man like Henry Wilcox defends” (112). Henry Wilcox, being the bearer of social Darwinian “order,” approaches this illegitimate child as a threat to his succession, his stability and respectability (Howards End 217-219). While the novel’s conclusion ends optimistically on a fertile field, that optimism is problematic, if not entirely false. Gibson remarks that the novel’s end is weakened by “the problem of how an illegitimate order such as this can continue itself. After [Helen’s] son inherits, who is to inherit or what is to be inherited from him? Can the very nature of inheritance be rethought?” (117). The illegitimate order of this line of inheritance lacks predictability and stability—we do not know who will inherit Howards End after Helen’s son, nor can we even feasibly predict who might eventually inherit it; the order of inheritance justified by the social Darwinism Forster employs through Henry is abandoned.

More significantly, we do not know who will inherit England, nor is Forster even willing to guess to whom the country will be “bequeathed.” The sense of stability and reconciliation, forced on us by the novel’s narrator, is thus exposed as a desperate façade. In her essay about the narrator’s failure to persuade and reassure readers of this stability, Barbara Rosecrance argues that there is a disconnect between the narrator’s surface optimism and his unsettling tone. Of his “abstract” and “hyperbolic” tone, she writes that “he is eloquent and hysterical, strained, elaborate, evasive, intimate, familiar, powerful, and unconvincing as he attempts to impose on the world of the novel a coherence that action and voice alike belie” (410-411). In addition to undercutting the stability he vainly tries to establish, the narrator controls the content of the novel. From the very beginning of the novel, we know that we are only privy to what the narrator finds relevant and useful to his own agenda. So, while not openly connecting the pervasive use of social Darwinist rhetoric to the stability (or lack thereof) of English society, the fact that the narrator sees fit to include such dialogue from Henry and Margaret is telling in how the narrator apprehends this rhetoric and, perhaps unconsciously, perceives it as a necessary condition of English social stability. The narrator’s attempts to reconcile extreme differences and reinstate social stability are thwarted by his “hysterical” tone, his frantic need to reassert some semblance of order, while suggesting to readers that that order is impossible.

More pressing than the narrator’s own inability to convey order in Howards End via social Darwinist rhetoric are the qualities of Leonard Bast and Tibby Schlegel—who subvert the aforementioned conception of “survival of the fittest.” The comparison is not immediately noticeable, since the two characters rarely coexist on a page. Leonard, despite what more privileged individuals might deem an unhealthy or exaggerated obsession with surviving, is dead by the novel’s end, succumbing to an ironic case of a diseased (i.e. weak) heart after degrading himself to the status of a beggar—something, we are told, he never would have done without the added guilt and responsibility of taking care of his wife (226). The character most imbued with gusto for life and the desire to progress beyond the mere state of survival is eventually degraded to the most basic instincts. In spite of the novel’s condescending narrator, Forster portrays Leonard as the bearer of several “masculine” virtues (hardworking and industrious), which he shares with the competitive, aggressive Wilcoxes, which are tempered by a balancing sense of morality. “Leonard—though poor and physically degenerate—upholds a deeper sense of moral virtue” than Henry, most notably by valuing people (like Jacky) that Henry dismisses (Cambridge Authors). Essentially, Leonard bears the positive qualities of both the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels. By right of social Darwinian law, the “sturdy, virtuous” and “self-educated” Leonard Basts of the world ought to be the people who survive and—perhaps—inherit world powers like England (Lago 45-47). Yet, because Forster is actively subverting expectations of stability and predictability, the character that ought to survive and thrive instead dies of a weak heart.

Case in point, the character that is most completely intact by the novel’s end is Tibby Schlegel, who exists on such a disconnected plane of privilege that the practical matters of life are almost unknown to him. Certainly they are unwelcome to him: “And I…want civilization without activity,” (82) he informs Margaret during their argument about employment. Coming off as one of the least concerned and least active characters in literary history, Tibby disregards most social conventions and is in fact indifferent to most aspects of life. The narrator tells us that Tibby “was not concerned with much” and that “he was not enough interested in human life to see where things will lead to” (179; 221). This is a man who passively exists, who is kept afloat by the wealth his ancestors worked and died for, and who has few motivating forces in life besides “seeking an escapist detachment in academia” (Cambridge Authors). Despite the pressures of conforming to the respectable, properly masculine Englishman mold, and becoming economically viable because of it, Tibby rejects the qualities of competitiveness, aggression, and ambition—the qualities that make the Wilcoxes and Leonard Bast capable of survival. Yet, despite his apathy and antagonism toward most social conventions, Tibby remains successful in his own right. While the last the novel mentions of him is that he “[finds] himself alone,” we are under no pressure from the narrator to assume that this is not exactly what Tibby desires (221). He remains independently wealthy, free of concern for both the rich and the poor, free of concern for anything he deems unworthy of his attention. Despite his overwhelming lack of the “Wilcox” qualities deemed vital for survival, the novel ends with Tibby being much more successful than the deflated Henry Wilcox and the dead Leonard Bast.

Throughout Howards End, Forster employs ideas of social Darwinism that sets up certain predictable, stabilizing expectations for the novel’s end. We expect that the overtly powerful Wilcoxes will continue to outperform the softer, “weaker” types like the Schlegels and the Basts. We expect economic inheritance, like biological inheritance, to follow predictable patterns of descent. We expect the rules of the past to continue to regulate the present and provide a solid foundation for the future. Illustrative of the destabilizing changes occurring between the late Victorian era and the progressive Edwardian era, Forster consciously fails to follow through on any of these expectations. It is one of the many reasons for the novel’s unsatisfying conclusion; furthermore, it contributes to the atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty that colors the edges of Forster’s supposed optimism for England’s future.