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The Stakes of Victorian Political Criticism Today
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2018
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As Mrs. Herriton contemplates the fate and future of her wayward daughter-in-law, Lilia's baby born to the Italian Gino Carella in E. M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread, she surmises reluctantly, “Let us admit frankly … that after all we may have responsibilities.” Without limiting ourselves to Forster's responses to and articulations of these “responsibilities,” the notion nonetheless of having such responsibilities usefully encapsulates some of the central issues at the heart of political criticism both in Forster's time and in our own. Who is the “we” with responsibilities and for whom or what is that “we” responsible? What exactly are these responsibilities? How local or global are they? How do they bring together the ethical and the political, the moral and the legal, duty and obligation, redress and hope for the future? How do the past, present, and future come together within this matrix of responsibilities? What kinds of political stances, posturings, or attitudes are in play? And what is the desired outcome or aim of political criticism? “We may have responsibilities”: in Forster, an equivocal or subjunctive “may” coupled with a frank admission and an expansive claim to amorphous “responsibilities” not only captures how open-ended and contradictory such assertions can be but also how tenuous their very ground always is. After all, Mrs. Herriton's sense of responsibility is highly disingenuous, the baby a pawn in her own power games.
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