By Dimitra Karydi
After lunch Harriet would get out Baedeker, and read in injured tones about Monteriano, the Mons Rianus of Antiquity, till her mother stopped her.
“It’s ridiculous to read, dear. She’s not trying to marry any one in the place. Some tourist, obviously, who’s stopping in the hotel. The place has nothing to do with it at all.”
“But what a place to go to! What nice person, too, do you meet in a hotel?”” (Forster 18)
Thus react Mrs. Herriton and Harriet upon discovering that their now widowed daughter and sister-in-law, respectively, is engaged to be married to someone she purportedly met at a hotel. Entrenched in high-class British ideals, they have yet to even conjecture that this stranger might hail from Monteriano, or, for that matter, be anything but upper-class. As they are soon to learn, however, Lilia Herriton is about to wed Gino Carella, the son of an Italian dentist, and live out the rest of her rather unhappy days in Italy.
The idea for Where Angels Fear to Tread[1] (1905), E. M. Forster’s debut novel, sprang from a rumour of marriage between an English lady and a much younger and lower-class Italian man which Forster overheard during his stay at Pensione Chiusarelli in Siena, Italy (Fordoński 24). Yet, the majority of the novel’s plot unfolds in the fictional town of Monteriano, whose topographical features allude to the medieval hill town of San Gimignano in Tuscany.[2] In the likewise fictional hotel of Stella d’Italia, the Herriton siblings, Philip and Harriet, the newly married couple, Gino and Lilia, and Lilia’s travel companion, Caroline Abbott, convene and encounter not only one another, but more vitally, themselves, disrobed of the limitations and boundaries of their quotidian lives.
Where Angels Fear to Tread offers a prime example of the hotel’s capacity to “bring cultures and individuals into proximity, across nation, language, and class, and trace the tense dynamics of such encounters” (Despotopoulou et al. 2). Stella d’Italia becomes the catalyst for Lilia and Gino’s love affair and subsequent marriage; it becomes a bridge, a dissolvent of the national, socio-economic, and, even, linguistic barriers between them. It further propels the core character transformations of the story, those of Philip and Caroline, whose friction with the hotel space drives them towards unprecedented directions: reticent Caroline into becoming a desiring subject, and Philip, who by his own admission begins the story as a mere observer of his life, into an active participant—albeit briefly.
Prior to witnessing Lilia and Gino at the hotel, the readers encounter the impact of Lilia’s transgressive behaviour on the Herriton household at Sawston. The letter bearing the news of Lilia’s engagement reaches Harriet and Mrs. Herriton while they are methodically sowing peas. So beset with shock and fury at this revelation is Mrs. Herriton that she abandons her planting and neglects to cover up the peas lest they be eaten by birds. When, much later, she realizes her mistake and hastens to amend it, she finds that “[t]he sparrows had taken every one. But countless fragments of the letter remained, disfiguring the tidy ground” (Forster 20). The image here is one of rootlessness. The failure to properly sow the peas (and their loss) mimics the English diaspora, like Lilia herself, who abandons England, seeking belonging elsewhere. The hotel becomes a threshold for their integration into the broader Italian society. What’s more, the phrase “disfiguring the tidy ground” gestures to the fact that Lilia’s engagement literally and tangibly upsets Mrs. Herriton’s adroit control over the household, and, by extension, the family’s repute. The carefully manufactured idyllic image of upper-class Edwardian domesticity and poise is ruptured, as the realisation that the family now harbours intimate relations with the Other (i.e., the ambiguously lower-class Italian Gino) seeps into the ground. Sawston, indicative of this well-ordered, picturesque British ideal, is momentarily thrown off-kilter. Although physically absent, the hotel’s influence permeates the scene. Its fluidity unbalances the Herritons and dislodges the fixity of their domestic sphere.
Ironically, it is the Herritons who initially encourage—if not, coerce—Lilia to embark on her year-long journey through Italy with Caroline, with a view to refine her. It is Philip’s adamant belief that “Italy really purifies and ennobles all who visit her” (Forster 8), as well as his advice to stray from the beaten track (3) which engender Lilia’s ultimate act of debasement and betrayal, of marrying and having a child with Gino.
A “wry self-portrait” of Forster himself (Otani 3), Philip’s issue with Lilia’s engagement lies primarily in the threat it poses to his own idealised view of Italy. Philip’s classical education, fed on Baedeker and shallow tourism, is challenged; “A dentist in fairyland!”, he thinks, disturbed by the invasion of the mundane into the Italian mythos (Forster 26). His horror is rather philosophical in that “he fear[s] that Romance might die,” (26) as he himself admits (Buzard 173). The hotel brings Philip in uncomfortable proximity to the real Italians, who are far removed from the Baedeker descriptions with which he has fallen in love (Otani 5).
His arrival at the Stella d’Italia constitutes a rather succinct moment of boundary dissolution:
He was stunned and knew not what to do. At the hotel he received no ordinary reception. The landlady wrung him by the hand; one person snatched his umbrella, another his bag; people pushed each other out of his way. The entrance seemed blocked with a crowd. Dogs were barking, bladder whistles being blown, women waving their handkerchiefs, excited children screaming on the stairs, and at the top of the stairs was Lilia herself, very radiant, with her best blouse on.
“Welcome!” she cried. “Welcome to Monteriano!” He greeted her, for he did not know what else to do, and a sympathetic murmur rose from the crowd below. (Forster 29)
Both Forster’s terse, paratactic sentences and the sensuous imagery here produce the feeling of disorientation in a scene that reads like an affront to the senses. Most prominent of these images are the descriptions of tactile, bodily interaction, conveyed through apposite verbs (e.g. “wrung,” “snatched,” “pushed”), and the auditory images (dogs barking, children screaming, whistles being blown). The barking dogs and screaming children heighten the sense of overwhelming cacophony and further imbue the setting with both an innocent freedom and a wild ferocity. Philip now faces the real Italy in earnest. His personal space is invaded, his property is taken, and he is presented, not with a private audience with Lilia as he anticipated, but with a miniature town, consisting of hotel staff, guests, and Monteriano residents alike. Instead of a quiet British microcolony, he finds a bottled Italy. The liveliness and polyphony of the hotel enforces the stillness and sterility of Sawston and the fixity of the Herriton household. In this space, “freed from the responsibilities of the domestic role,” Lilia emerges as a brilliant and spirited hostess (Short 22). While he is yet to share in her delight, by the end of the novel, Philip will undergo transformation and similarly come to revel in the vigor of the place.
The lively, social hotel space grants Lilia the impression that she belongs in Italy, away from the Edwardian values imposed on her by the Herritons. However, the semblance of fluidity and boundarylessness of the hotel belies the deeply embedded cultural disparities between herself and Gino. It is only when they leave the hotel to settle in a house in Monteriano that these differences begin rearing their head in earnest, begetting tension and misery.
Here, one locates Forster’s ambivalent stance towards the hotel space and Italy as a whole. While positioned to criticize the stifled high-class propriety of Edwardian Britain, the hotel is nevertheless the breeding ground of tragedy in equal measure to freedom. Monteriano “allows for wholeness and a range of human emotion and experience that Sawston does not,” yet Lilia, who chooses to reside there permanently, meets an early death (Colletta n.p.). It is instead the ones who visit it in transience, who occupy the hotel and leave transfigured, that survive somewhat whole. As Otani writes, for Forster “Italy is not a place to live but a place to learn love and passion” (9). Thus, Forster uses the hotel to advocate for a kind of transculturalism that transcends class boundaries, even as he unconsciously succumbs to the imperialist stereotyping of Italians. The question then remains: is it the hotel’s alluring call for transformation and freedom that begets tragedy, or does the unrelenting grip of English conformity stifle the hotel’s promise of change in its infancy?
Notes
[1] Originally, Forster wished to entitle the novel Monteriano or Rescue, but these were dismissed by his publisher in lieu of the prevailing title. For more, see the introduction by Lisa Colletta in the 2006 Barnes and Noble edition of the novel (n.p.).
[2] For additional information on Monteriano’s conception and a further look at the Pensione Chiusarelli, visit the Hotel Atlas: https://hotems.enl.uoa.gr/projects/hotel-atlas/
Works Cited
Buzard, James Michael. “Forster’s Trespasses: Tourism and Cultural Politics.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 34, no. 2, 1988, pp. 155–79. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/441075.
Colletta, Lisa. “Introduction.” Where Angels Fear to Tread, Barnes & Noble, 2006.
Despotopoulou, Anna, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, and Efterpi Mitsi, eds. Hotel Modernisms. Routledge, 2023, doi.org/10.4324/9781003213079.
Fordoński, Krzysztof. “Tourism as a Destructive Force in E. M. Forster’s Early ‘Italian’ Fiction.” The Linguistic Academy Journal of Interdisciplinary Language Studies, vol. 2, 2012, pp. 21–34.
Forster, Edward Morgan. Where Angels Fear to Tread. Random House, 1920.
Otani, Erika. “Interaction between Hosts and Guests: E. M. Forster’s Representation of Modern Tourism in Where Angels Fear to Tread and ‘The Eternal Moment’” Kyushu University English Review, vol. 57, 2015, pp. 1–19, doi.org/10.15017/1560536.
Short, Emma. Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature: Passing Through. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, SpringerLink, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22129-4.
Dimitra Karydi is a final-year undergraduate student of English Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is an aspiring literary critic with a keen interest in postmodern and contemporary literature and queer studies. She harbours a particular passion for drama and poetry.
Cover Image: Laplante, Charles, and Hercule Catenacci. San Gimignano: Piazza Cavour (woodcut by Charles Laplante based on a drawing by Hercule Catenacci). Wikimedia Commons, 1895, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Gimignano_Piazza_Cavour.jpg.
Pennell, Joseph. “San Gimignano [Graphic] / Jo Pennell.” Library of Congress, 1883, lccn.loc.gov/90712876.
