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A Room


. . capable of being tested by an extremely honest yet sympathetic mind." Forster developed a taste for freedom and following his instincts. He relished breaking from the traditional Victorian style and took pride in writing freely and openly. He emphasizes in several of his novels the importance of relying on imagination (J.B.B.). Forster's life depends upon the freedoms provided by romanticism, and his novels reflect this thematically.
             The themes of Forster's 1908 novel A Room with a View demonstrate his beliefs in romanticism very well. One theme of this novel is that women are important in their own right (J.B.B.). Forster demonstrates by portraying his character Cecil Vyse as a man who finds women unimportant ("Cecil laughed at her feminine inconsequence" [Forster 96]), and then has this man completely shattered by the obvious importance of a woman when Lucy finally asserts her independence (" 'Tired!' she retorted, kindling at once. 'That is exactly like you. You always think women don't mean what they say.' " [Forster 165]).
             Another predominant theme in many of Forster's works, including A Room with a View is that if men and women are to lead a satisfactory life, they need to keep contact with the earth and cultivate their imaginations (J.B.B.). This is exactly why the Emersons are not accepted well in the Pension Bertolini. They are not shallow like their companions, but they are completely free in their relation of emotion: " 'From far, from eve and morning, /And yon twelve-winded sky, /The stuff of life to knit me /Blew hither: here am I.' George and I both know this, but why does it distress him? We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a know, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness. . . Let us rather love one another, and work and rejoice. I don't believe in this world sorrow." (Forster 25-26). Forster writes the characters of the Emersons and Lucy Honeychurch so they will coincide in their "down to earth" perception of the world as opposed to the "lofty" societal views of the Pension Bertolini, Cecil Vyse, and the dowagers of Windy Corner.


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