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
At home, Maurice becomes irritated with his mother when she mispronounces Durham, the name of the man who means more to him than all the world. He also announces, with the bluster of youth, that he will respect her religious “prejudices” but also that his conscience will no longer permit him to attend church. “Your poor father always went to church,” his mother says. “I’m not my father,” Maurice responds. Durham and Maurice write letters to each other, and Maurice transfers Durham’s letters from pocket to pocket, even pinning them to his pajamas when he goes to bed.
By breaking from the church, Maurice is also departing from the masculine ideal of his father and charting his own path. Maurice does so, in part, because he is infatuated with Durham and wants to impress him to become closer to him. It is notable, then, that he tries to become closer to Durham by distancing himself from the church, one of the primary sources of homophobia at the time. In that sense, by breaking with the church, Maurice is also moving closer to embracing the fact that he is gay.
Themes
Gladys Olcott visits the family during the vacation. Over dinner, Maurice smiles at her, and she responds. The two smoke together, and, seeing that Miss Olcott is pleased and his family and the servants are intrigued, Maurice decides to pursue her. Things go wrong almost immediately. Maurice compliments her too insistently. Miss Olcott tries to signal her annoyance and tries to excuse herself from riding with him on the last day, but he “plays the domineering male.” He takes her to a place he considers romantic and presses her hand between his. She knows something is wrong. His touch revolts her. It feels like it belongs to a corpse. Before the end of the vacation, Maurice calls his father’s old partner; it is settled that after Cambridge, he will work at Hill and Hall, Stock Brokers.
While Maurice might be taking steps toward embracing the fact that he is gay, he is also still fettered by heteronormativity and norms of masculinity. To try and follow those norms, he even ignores Gladys’s discomfort and instead acts chauvinistically, showing how difficult the process is for Maurice to embrace his sexuality in the face of societal pressures. Similarly, while Maurice showed a willingness to break from the masculine ideal of his father by distancing himself from the church, he follows that same masculine ideal by deciding to work with his father’s former business partner after college.
Themes
