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
The vacation pulls Maurice backward. When he returns to college, he again behaves as he is supposed to behave. The insincerity that led him to pursue Miss Olcott is still there, and he has—unbeknownst to him—been heavily influenced by his family and their expectations. He doesn’t notice anything is different until Durham returns. Ultimately, he confesses that he had a rotten vacation and never knew it. The sincerity in his own voice gives Maurice pause. Maurice and Durham embrace one another. Someone calls Maurice’s name, and “absurd people” come booming up the stairs. In the aftermath, Maurice thinks their conversation was too sentimental, and he resolves to guard himself against that in the future.
Maurice continues to wrestle with his identity. He feels pulled between the conventional norms of his family (which he believes are inauthentic) and his sincere feelings for Durham. When he lets Durham see those feelings, though, he castigates himself for being too sentimental, slipping back into the kind of conventional judgments that he identifies as belonging to his family. Without fully realizing it, Maurice is caught in a web of societal pressures and norms, and he must break free of that web to pursue his authentic desires.
Themes
After six more meetings, Durham tells Maurice that he knows Maurice read The Symposium over vacation. So, Durham reasons, Maurice must know what he means without him having to say it out loud. Maurice says he doesn’t know and asks Durham what he means. People are all around them, but with his eyes radiantly blue, Durham whispers, “I love you.” Maurice is horrified. He tells Durham that they’re both Englishman, and he’s not offended because he knows he doesn’t mean it. You must never mention it again, Maurice says, and without another word, his friend is gone, the echo of his door slamming reverberating through the sounds of Spring.
Throughout the novel, The Symposium serves as a symbol for a time when romantic relationships between men were more widely accepted, and, therefore, as a way for the characters to talk about being gay without explicitly saying it. In The Symposium, Aristophanes tells a story about how each person is searching for their other half, and that this other half is love. This calls to mind Maurice’s dream—the one that leads him to search for a true friend. Notably, when Durham tells Maurice that he loves him, it seems that he could be his true friend, but Maurice reacts with internalized homophobia and pushes him away, indicating that Maurice is not yet free enough from the pressures of heteronormativity, homophobia, and masculinity to acknowledge who he really is, even to himself.
Themes
