Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Maurice, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Sacrifice
Sexual Orientation, Homophobia, and Self-Acceptance
Masculinity and Patriarchy
Religion
Class
Summary
Analysis
When Saturday comes, Maurice goes to Southampton to see off Alec’s ship, a risky and impulsive decision. Alec is nowhere in sight, but Maurice locates the Scudder family. Maurice is surprised when Mr. Borenius, the rector at Penge, calls his name. He says he has come to give Alec a letter of introduction to an Anglican priest in Buenos Aires, hoping Alec will get confirmed when he arrives. He asks how Maurice knew when the ship would depart, and Maurice senses that Mr. Borenius knows why he is actually there. Once Alec arrives, Maurice thinks, he’ll be caught in the trap too and that Mr. Borenius will use the power he has to destroy him.
In this chapter, Mr. Borenius, an agent of Penge, serves as a personification of the church’s homophobia and, by extension, the prevailing attitude of homophobia present in England at the time. Borenius plans to catch Maurice and Alec in the act of being gay and then use whatever authority he has to punish them. This gives Maurice and Alec something concrete they can fight against (and therefore can win against) instead of trying to battle abstract concepts like heteronormativity.
Themes
When the last train pulls in, they wait for Alec, but he doesn’t arrive. Maurice knows Alec must be waiting for him at Penge, and he goes to shore elated. Maurice thinks that to be together, he and Alec will have to live outside of the class system, “without relations or money.” Mr. Borenius is flummoxed when Alec doesn’t arrive and doesn’t know how to interpret what has happened. Alec has defeated Borenius, Maurice thinks. Without hesitating, Maurice sets out for the boathouse. When he arrives, he calls Alec’s name, but there is no response. I must have miscalculated, Maurice thinks. He goes in, though, and finds Alec asleep. Alec then wakes up and asks if he got the wire. Maurice respond, “What wire?” Alec says he sent a wire that morning to Maurice’s house, and then he says, “And now we shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished.”
By defeating Borenius, Alec has helped Maurice overcome homophobia—both the homophobia of English culture in the form of Borenius and the internalized homophobia that has, for so long, kept Maurice from embracing who he is. Maurice is ecstatic. For one of the first times in the novel, Maurice is free, but this time, the novel suggests that the freedom will be lasting. Maurice has finally found, and can allow himself to pursue, what he actually wants: the kind of love for which each person would sacrifice everything.
Themes
