Somewhere In Malta...

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.

‘Maurice is a revelation … a candid, lucid, passionate film.’

Very nice indeed to see a great  5-star review for Maurice from Peter Bradshaw, following his rather mysterious dismissal of it in his 5-star review of Call Me By Your Name last year. :)

PSA about the women of Maurice: Anne isn’t ‘Maurice’s sister’! And it’s a shame Bradshaw doesn’t namecheck the great Billie Whitelaw, Kitty Aldridge and Helena Michell (as Maurice’s actual mother and sisters) along with Judy Parfitt and Helena BC..

@a-different-equation​ This may be a moment for ‘The Dean of Sass’, © the much-missed @mathemata​ ;D

More seriously, I’m genuinely happy that Bradshaw has had second thoughts and given Maurice a 5* review.

@fermencja​ I think what’s good in his review is that he gestures towards Forster’s broader, scathing social critique: ‘a certain kind of unformulated English discontent’, and the conformist dullness of the future which England-with-a-capital-E has lined up for its Cambridge-educated ‘finest’, until Maurice rebels and demands something else.

This aspect of Bradshaw’s review could be better developed (it’s no match for Claire Tomalin’s timelessly insightful 1987 piece which I shared yesterday) – but he is pointing towards something important of continuing relevance for brutal 2018 neoliberal/Brexit/austerity Britain. But, beyond that, you’re so right about the factual errors (obviously it’s Featherstonhaugh who ‘construes Plato’)! And (yet again!) we get this curious reframing of Maurice as the ‘story of two young men forced to deny their love’ who BOTH ‘retreat further into lonely respectability’ – when Forster’s (and Ivory’s) whole bloody point is that Maurice and Clive take different paths.

How do critics manage to react like this, as if Maurice/Alec’s physically fulfilled love, and their optimistic, egalitarian ending, were of no consequence? It beats me. Unless, perhaps, classist, radically unequal 2018 Britain is giving us classist film criticism – even, in this case, in an ostensibly left-wing newspaper.

Having said all that, this review is still an infinitely better-thing that some of the Guardian’s past treatment of Maurice and Merchant Ivory.