Alec Scudder Supremacy @wildechild3 - Tumblr Blog

Why do people keep trying to tragicize Maurice?

I mean this criticism lightheartedly, but I am starting to think that some queer people just yearn for tragedy and will bend over backwards to find it in any story. I see the take so often that Maurice is a sad movie or a sad story. I very firmly feel that it is not. It is a movie with sad moments, but ultimately the whole point is that Maurice gets a happy ending. He just doesn't get a happy ending form the start.

I find people trying to rewrite the story a little frustrating because, given the the time period that the book was written in (and honestly the period the movie was made in), it's very important to preserve the fact it is a queer story where the main character gets a happy ending. That was a big deal and it's a big part of why I love the story so much. We have plenty of tragedies, y'all. If you love tragedies, I get it! As You Are, Brokeback Mountain (two of my all-time favorites), Portrait of Dorian Gray, Fellow Travelers, the list goes on. We've got those in surplus, no need to make one where there isn't one just because it's set in the past.

I honestly think that some people just prefer the younger, more carefree, and aesthetically-pleasing-in-a-dark-academia-way sort of chemistry that Clive and Maurice had and for some reason they let it turn into this weird pseudo-erasure of Alec. At the beginning of my engagement in the fandom (before I knew the story), based on how people spoke about it, I didn't even realize that the story continued after Clive. I just think that SOME fans of the movie/book do Alec kind of dirty and it rubs me the wrong way. One of the greatest things about the story (I think the book does it extra well) is getting to watch Maurice grow and become himself. The "himself" that we spend the whole movie getting to is the adult him that falls in love with Scudder and finds the courage to truly love him. I just think it's bizarre that people try to take away from that, but at the end of the day it's not really that serious. I just wanted to present this to the class and see what y'all thought. :)

canesact

I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now commissions open

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

#alec scudder supremacy #maurice 1987 #maurice 1914

#to be clear: my response is the last one but I use my real name on insta so I didn’t want to blast myself out there on tumblr lol #and I know it’s probably not the most thorough but I’m at work rn and that was shooting from the hip #anyways - the best way to trigger me is by saying Maurice 1987 had a bad/sad ending #I believe in Alec scudder supremacy!!!!#and also. if you legit think this I don’t trust that you understand the novel at all.#maurice 1987 #maurice 1914

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

#maurice 1914 #maurice 1987 #e. m. forster #maurice #he’s just a loverboy #he wants to be a househusband so so sooooooo bad #I could tell the second he told Alec he would throw away his entire life for him #he was out on this earth to fall in love with a man and by god did he achieve that goal

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.