Alec Scudder Supremacy

Y’all can call me River | She/Her | Lesbian | Queer History and Literature | Main blog: @lil-lesbian-historian

[wildechild3]

[wildechild3]

I’m going to crash out. THE👏STORY👏IS 👏 NOT👏ABOUT👏CLIVE👏

There’s valid opinions to be made about the pacing of Alec and Maurice’s relationship. Personally, it’s a romance novel and ‘love-at-first-sight’ is a common trope in the genre. It’s giving “it’s a cow farm, there’s going to be cows outside”. But COME ON. MAURICE IS HAPPY AT THE END THATS THE WHOLE POINT. THATS THE WHOOOOOLLLLLEEEEE POINTTTTTT

[wildechild3]

[annoyed-axolotl]

Maurice (1987) centers a gay love story that took 74 years to reach film and more mainstream audiences.

E.M. Forster began writing his novel Maurice in 1913-14. It was only published posthumously in 1971, and I wonder if Forster could ever have imagined it developed into such a beloved film.

What we see as a period drama in the film, to Forster was about his contemporary experience with queerness and class differences in his own circle, especially inspired by early Gay Rights and socialist activist Edward Carpenter and his working class partner George Merrill. Carpenter and Merrill lived together openly at their home in Millthorpe from 1898 until Edward's passing in 1928, despite male homosexuality being illegal.

Carpenter used his upper-class background and Cambridge education to help found the Labour movement and set out to change hearts and minds alike with his writings and advocacy for the Queer community but also for Women's rights, environmentalism, labour law, and anti-imperialism. He warned of the alienation and ill-effects of heavy urban industrialism- himself preferring rural life, a vegetarian diet, and even nudism, believing simplicity to bring real richness to life.

Edward and George are interred together and their work inspired the gay rights movements of the 1970s, the decade when Maurice was finally published ❤️

[m0nt3cr15t0]

all maurice ever wanted was love ALL maurice ever wanted was LOVE ALL MAURICE EVER WANTED WAS LOVE

ALLMAURICEVERWANTE

[indigolagooncauldron]

The paralel of maurice telling his teacher he is never getting married and the teacher responding with "we'll see 20 years later when I invite you and your wife to dinner", and then he introduces himself as mr.scudder when he sees his teacher at the museum with alec

[enbymoomin]

Thinking about how out of Maurice and Clive, Clive is the one who mythologizes and clings to the Platonic ideal for how to express his romantic/sexual attraction to Maurice and what their relationship should manifest as. A philosophical, transcendent, intangible ideal that he imagines as a meeting of the minds beyond what feeling can put into words, much like how the idea of "romance" is mythologized today as some transcendental feeling "beyond" friendship that you can't describe, "you just know it when you know."

Meanwhile, Maurice is the one who describes what he is searching for as a friend, with all the earthiness of the word's Germanic roots, "someone you can share your whole life with." And sometimes---he acknowledges (unlike Clive)---he wants to have sex with that Friend. Maurice's conception of his own romantic and sexual attraction (a friend who you have sex with) is much more aligned with an asexual or aromantic's conception of romance or lifelong partnership that has deconstructed amatonormativity. Rather than pedestalizing romance as some intangible, supreme ideal that transcends the physical or mundane, Maurice is simply looking for a friend, in all the simplicity of the word, and given that he obviously has other friends that he is NOT romantically/sexually attracted to, it is clear that he implicitly (if not explicitly) recognizes that sex and romance are not inherently co-contingent upon each other and sex is separated from (though can be compatible with) both romance and friendship in his mind. This is not to say that Maurice is aromantic: he clearly feels romantic and sexual attraction to both Clive and Alec, but notably, he conceptualizes his attraction and desired relationship as platonic, not Platonic. His partner is his Friend first AND he is his Lover. On the other hand, Clive chases a romanticized Platonic ideal that allows him to sublimate/repress his romantic and sexual attraction into an ideal that is more tolerable to society AND slowly destroys his friendship with Maurice in the process.

All this is to say is that E. M. Forster's vision of love and romance as "a friend that you have sex with" manages to capture an understanding of love that breaks down amatonormativity, challenges the conflation of romantic and sexual attraction, and grounds the idea of partnership in something that is tangible and real. Its conceptual construction places friendship, genuine human connection, and affection at the heart of such a relationship without necessitating or denying physical or sexual expression of that attraction. In a heteronormative, amatonormative world where so many straight couples are together who consider romantic relationships more important than platonic ones, and often don't seem to have anything in common with their opposite sex partner or see them as a human being (see: jokes about how one partner "doesn't understand how men/women work" or "you can't tell what women are thinking", seeing their partner as part of an inscrutable class, not as an individual), Forster's conception of partnership through Maurice stumbles across a radical, queer vision of relationship that puts friendship first without denying the existence of romance or sex, whereas the idealized amatonormative vision of relationship expressed through Clive based on intangible, divine, mysterial connection ultimately fails because it is not based on anything real and represses everything that is real.

[deomercurio]

me every afternoon when I get home

[stellinator]

Maurice (1987) Colored pencil

[milfmaekar]

starting some kind of collection

[blowuponabruise]

I just think she’s neat

[the-tenth-arcanum]

🗣🗣🗣 free youtube premiere of the national theatre the importance of being ernest announced!

nationaltheatre

[ring-of-key]

HOT GROUNDSKEEPER PROPAGANDA!!!!

Edit: he’s a gamekeeper. In my defense he’s always Keeping something on them grounds (it’s game).

[addictivecontradiction]

Maurice, 1987

[lost-in-golden-light]

If you believe that Clive and Maurice were better than Alec and Maurice, I’m gonna assume you don’t know ball

[homocommunist-propaganda]

Happy birthday to E. M. Forster.

You can watch the 1987 film version of Maurice here.

[weepylucifer]

e. m. forster literally, in a time where being gay was completely illegal in england, wrote a novel with the central premise being "gay sexuality and sensuality is natural and not disgusting, gay men [in our context: allo gay men] need sex with other men as a component of a fulfilled, happy life. this should not be suppressed, rationalized away or shamed" and the internet media analysis brigade went on to churn out takes like "clive was better for maurice than alec because clive and maurice had pure uwu platonic love and all alec and maurice did was have icky yucky gross sex with each other"

[maezanilla]

Gideon Nav, the first flower of her house.

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