This research examines the novel Howards End by E.M. Forster as a story of social critique from the critical vantage point of the ethics writer Martha C. Nussbaum. The research will set forth the context in which Nussbaum's views achieve relevance for the pattern of social criticism in Forster's novel and then discuss how those views intersect with the means by which Forster brings out his ideas and elaborates on various novelistic themes.
In her development of the concept of poetic justice, by which she mainly means a theory of modern industrial society that is imbued with economic and political fairness and social justice, Nussbaum argues that social and economic experience that aims for equality in whole must give an account of features of society that, within the whole, may be foster particularistic, deviant, and/or unequal experiences of social goods. This leads her to assert (12) that the literary imagination may have something insightful and even important to say about the political, ethical, and moral content of a society supposedly predicated of reason, economics, and laws. She uses Dickens's novel Hard Times, which deals with appalling social inequities fostered by the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the great influence of Victorian rationalist utilitarianism to illustrate how fiction can foster criticism of the injustices of industrial society, in particular the maldistribution or highly variable access to public goods, based on a utilitarian model that looks at and privileges social structure in which "the proper aim of both personal and social choice is the maximization of the sum total of . . . human happiness" (Nussbaum 15). As Nussbaum makes clear, there is also moral content to Hard Times that derives from the emotional impact exerted by environment on life experience.
A similar dynamic is readily observable in Forster's Howards End, although Forster speaks less to social and economic cond...