A. S. Byatt’s “On the Day that E. M. Forster Died” and the Ambivalence of Connection
In her short story “On the Day that E. M. Forster Died,” first published in 1983 and included in her 1987 collection Sugar and Other Stories, A. S. Byatt uses her narrator, Mrs Smith, to examine the limitations of Forster’s famous exhortation “only connect.” Byatt’s reservations stretch back to her...
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| Vydáno v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Hlavní autor: | |
| Médium: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jazyk: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2022
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| On-line přístup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Shrnutí: | In her short story “On the Day that E. M. Forster Died,” first published in 1983 and included in her 1987 collection Sugar and Other Stories, A. S. Byatt uses her narrator, Mrs Smith, to examine the limitations of Forster’s famous exhortation “only connect.” Byatt’s reservations stretch back to her earliest days as a writer, from the scepticism she expresses about the formal restrictions of the modernist novel in her 1991 introduction to The Shadow of the Sun, to her reflections on her longstanding struggle with the assumptions of Leavisite criticism that shaped her early mindset as a literary scholar. What is particularly irksome for her about this philosophy is that it imposes on the reader (especially the female reader) an imperative to connect that leaves no freedom to disconnect, to choose and develop a space of one’s own. Using Byatt’s short story as its starting point, this essay examines how Byatt develops a pointed contrast, as she sees it, between the connective imperatives of Forster and D. H. Lawrence, on the one hand, and George Eliot and Iris Murdoch, who open up a space for freedom and disconnection, on the other. |
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