in a very real way though it’s deeply frustrating for Maurice’s happiness, in so many ways, to hinge on his overcoming his own class-based prejudices - which are disguised, even in his own head, as being about “intellect” or “education” - to actually find happiness with alec scudder, to love and be loved in equal measure, to pursue genuine adoration and also liberty to express that adoration
and for people to abandon all of that and instead pedestalise the relationship he had with clive, which was constantly about suppressing his instincts and desires, and about ensuring he never forgot how unnatural their union was. clive! was an elitist!
like, alec is beautiful, full to the brim with love, eager to learn, eager to think about maurice’s feelings, but to see him get ignored bc clive/maurice strokes the dark academia boner more is Unpleasant and i dislike it
*Nods* However … these ‘people to abandon all of that and instead pedestalise’ Maurice’s relationship with elitist Clive are, I’m guessing, a product of dark-academia fandom’s appropriation of Maurice, and that’s a very recent thing. The Maurice/Alec erasure you describe is not, and never has been, the dominant view in the Maurice fandom over the past decade, or in most of the Maurice fandom spaces I frequent on Tumblr. Here, celebrating Maurice/Alec is the norm, and Alec, especially, is deeply beloved as a mould-breaking working-class, stubborn, canonic gay-or-is-he-bi character who wonderfully combines love, resourcefulness, instinct, sensuality and self-worth. In the novel, even Clive concedes that Alec is ‘decidedly intelligent’, too.
So your particular experience derives from moving in particular, Clive-elevating, circles, and it’s significant that you mention ‘dark academia’. (Is DA fandom classist and elitist? Consciously, or not?) There is a Maurice fandom beyond it where almost everyone values Alec! And – it barely needs stating – Forster would have been appalled by readings/responses which ‘pedestalise’ Clive: to do so more or less erases his purpose in daring to write Maurice at all.
I love your descriptions of Alec: ‘full to the brim with love, eager to learn…’ In Forster’s schema, Alec also teaches Maurice – in the sense that Clive represents only Stage 1 of Maurice’s life-education as a gay man (or Act 1 of the novel). Maurice’s education can only be completed by and with Alec; and by attaining mind–body wholeness (rather than the Cartesian split, the intellect rejecting the physical, ‘taught’ by Clive): in Forster’s own words, ‘the flesh educating the spirit.’ So, yeah, readers who elevate Maurice/Clive and blank Maurice/Alec very much missing the point … whether consciously, or not.