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Firstly, I liked this book. However, I had trouble really coming to grips with what Forster was trying tell me as the reader.
For me, Lucy was a focus - the pivotal character. Will she or won't she? She starts the book accompanied by the very person who will pin her down into a staid, repressed life of "society" - the travelling English cocoon that encases her protectively wherever she might be (pensions and Baedekers).
However, it doesn't take long before she stumbles into what I like to think of as "the real Florence". She clings to her Baedeker for as long as she can and feels lost without it: "There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful".
Strangely - and perhaps it is because of her youth, it takes very little time for her to relax and then run into the Emersons. Through this whole section I got to see a Lucy who wasn't yet "formed". She rather fluidly alters her outlook in the company of the Emersons even to what seemed a suggestion from Mr Emerson for Lucy to have a fling with his son.
And this was what ended up creating my tension in the book. Lucy could go either way for me. Whereas Charlotte was already fairly rigidly in control of herself there's evidence that Lucy was an unknown quantity.
I don't think she was ready in Florence however. Two particularly big events (for a young girl) occur in Florence. The stabbing death of a nameless Italian and the first impulsive kiss from George.
The setting of the death read as masculine, brutal and pagan - I almost felt like Forster was presenting a scene that was sexual in nature in the Piazza Signoria from the tower of the palace "some unattainable treasure throbbing in the tranquil sky" and the pagan statues, Neptune's "...fountain splashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge", to the raw passion between two men resulting in a stabbing. And then she sees George...and faints.
Likewise in the scene of the first kiss, once she is dismissed by Charlotte to whom she is clinging to avoid the unsheltered reality of the Emersons, she falls prey to the spontaneous affection of George. The fact that tries so hard to avoid George seems to indicate she's not ready yet. Charlotte's interference in this event does prevent us from really seeing how Lucy would respond. But I read her readiness to be whisked away to Rome in the end to be the proof that she's not ready to break free of repression.
The rest of the book was me waiting to see whether she could break free of the same prison she seemed to long for at the start of the book.
When she finally broke with Cecil and chose George, I sighed with relief.
Having said all of that though, I was a bit confused by the characters in the book that did not seem to represent the repressed English society as I expected. Lucy's family did not seem overly proper to me. Her mother seemed reasonably strong if flighty and her brother had quite a bit of spunk and playfulness. Even the favoured parson did not seem as stiff as I was expecting. Charlotte seemed the odd one out in comparison.
Regards
Caleb
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