Home and Real Estate in Howards End: Marx, Mauss and Ruqaiya Hasan

The epigraph of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, “Only Connect,” is a transitive verb without a direct object or even a subject: the verb connect is a connector, but there is no person to connect and nothing to connect to. Here I source the mysterious Connector and its Connect-ee by using three theories, all connected to historical materialism in one way or another. First, I use the concepts of C-M-C’ and M-C-M’ in Marx’s historical materialist study Capital to distinguish between characters concerned with the eponymous Howards End as home (typically uncountable) and those who treat it as “a house”, that is, a unit of real estate. Marx’s concepts, however, explain commodity circulation, not gift-giving. So I then link Marx’s historical materialist study to Mauss’s exploration of gift-giving in so-called “primitive societies”, which can be used to situate Forster’s argument in pre-capitalist times going back at least as far as Beowulf. But Marx and Mauss are neither literary nor linguistic theorists. So, finally, I apply Hasan’s understanding of three levels of patterning in verbal art: verbalization (text), symbolic articulation (patterns of text that realize characters, events, situations), and finally theme (some theory of human social being). In this way, I try to explain Forster’s textual choices by his symbolic articulation into a contrast of two value forms and his symbolic articulation by the theme of connecting real estate and home.