Buttoned-Up Gentility & Boundless Sensual Pleasure: James Ivory’s A Room With a View

In his 1908 novel A Room with a View, British novelist E.M. Forster probes the conflict between middle-class manners and sensual passion; his alliances lay entirely with the latter. Forster’s protagonist, young Lucy Honeychurch, finds herself in a “muddle” between her engagement to the socially acceptable, but stiff and snobbish Cecil Vyse, and her love for the uninhibited George Emerson, who is of a lower class position and ignores the codes of propriety. Of her attempts to snuff out her...