A Troubling Sign of Englishness: The Country House Novels of Henry James, Ford Madox Ford and E. M. Forster
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The country mansions of gentry and aristocracy, the most prominent relics of the by-gone era, preside over the national imagination of modern England as a troubling, ambivalent sign. As actual country houses were in decline and became an economic disability, they are reappropriated as a national icon providing an imaginative space in which the English taste and spirit could revive. As early as the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, novelists commented on the bleak reality of the country house England, the death of the old order, and the aesthetic redemption of the country house. This paper aims to discuss the country-house novels by Henry James, Ford Madox Ford and E. M. Forster and investigate their disquieting and complex awareness of the troubling sign of Englishness, the English country house. The Novels of James, Ford, and Forster not only stand in the rich tradition of the literature of the country house, but also explore the myth of the English country house, the identification of the country house with a certain England and Englishness, in their own unique ways. If the English country house becomes an archeological relic of the passing English order in Ford and an exquisite architecture that houses an aestheticized Englishness in James, Forster’s Howards End tests the possibility of transforming the old country house and rural England into the home of England as a whole. James, Ford and Forster explore the old language of the country house and rural England in an attempt to create a new language for the tradition of the country house literature in the twentieth century.
Abstract
The country mansions of gentry and aristocracy, the most prominent relics of the by-gone era, preside over the national imagination of modern England as a troubling, ambivalent sign. As actual country houses were in decline and became an economic disability, they are reappropriated as a national icon providing an imaginative space in which the English taste and spirit could revive. As early as the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, novelists commented on the bleak reality of the country house England, the death of the old order, and the aesthetic redemption of the country house. This paper aims to discuss the country-house novels by Henry James, Ford Madox Ford and E. M. Forster and investigate their disquieting and complex awareness of the troubling sign of Englishness, the English country house. The Novels of James, Ford, and Forster not only stand in the rich tradition of the literature of the country house, but also explore the myth of the English country house, the identification of the country house with a certain England and Englishness, in their own unique ways. If the English country house becomes an archeological relic of the passing English order in Ford and an exquisite architecture that houses an aestheticized Englishness in James, Forster’s Howards End tests the possibility of transforming the old country house and rural England into the home of England as a whole. James, Ford and Forster explore the old language of the country house and rural England in an attempt to create a new language for the tradition of the country house literature in the twentieth century.
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