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
Maurice goes to Penge late that same night and finds Clive busy with work. “I’m in love with your gamekeeper,” Maurice tells Clive. Clive says that it is a grotesque announcement and begs Maurice to “resist the return of this obsession.” He tells Clive that Alec slept with him in their house, and again in town. Clive invites Maurice to dinner the next week, hoping that he will find a way to extricate Maurice from his relationship with Scudder and keep Scudder silent so that no gossip affects his election chances. Maurice laughs then promptly leaves, and the two never see each other again. Clive goes back to work and begins to think of a way of “concealing the truth from Anne.”
Maurice goes out of his way to tell Clive that he first slept with Alec at Penge, challenging the homophobia and heteronormativity that Penge represents. By challenging Penge's homophobia, Maurice also suggests that Clive, by compromising to inherit the estate, betrayed himself. In a way, when he confronts Clive, Maurice is also confronting the version of himself that wanted to give up—the version that hoped to find a way out of being gay so he could exist without conflict in a bigoted, punitive, and homophobic world. In this ending, the novel roundly rejects the kind of complacency exhibited by Clive. In this final scene, Clive is presented almost as a villain, the kind of person who, in Forster’s telling, we should all guard ourselves against becoming. Clive, it seems, is a person who has lied so often and so thoroughly that he no longer remembers the truth.
Themes
