English Language and Literature Commons^™

Maurice's Love, Peggy Wood

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

“By linking their love to the past he linked it to the present” (Forster 745).

E. M. Forster’s Maurice is a widely read and taught text that features homosexuality in Edwardian England. The focus of this thesis is an in-depth analysis of Maurice’s character, with a specific emphasis on the character’s coming out process. The coming out process is still a significant issue in today’s world. Hate crimes, ostracism, and many other negatives can be associated with the coming out process that is not entirely different from what Maurice Hall faced. This statement is easily supported by historical accounts and …

“A Brutal, Indecent Spectacle”: Heterosexuality, Futurity, And Go Tell It On The Mountain, Mason Stokes

English

In this essay I argue that Baldwin’s depiction of queer possibility depends on the spectacular failure of heterosexuality to ensure the future, a failure that ultimately severs heterosexuality from its procreative logics and justifications. Gabriel is torn between competing drives: his desire to ensure the Grimes line and desire itself. Ironically, the latter troubles the former, as the excess of sexual desire threatens to overrun the marital and procreative logics that make the heterosexual normative. Gabriel models heterosexuality as both desire and procreative engine, highlighting the ways in which heterosexuality contains within itself the seeds of its own undoing.