In Maurice, Plato’s Symposium serves as a symbol of a time and place—Ancient Greece—where being gay was more widely accepted. What’s more, the famous philosophical work also functions as a symbol of the kind of love that Maurice seeks throughout the novel.
When Maurice comes back to Oxford after a pivotal vacation, Clive says to him, “I know that you have read the Symposium over break,” meaning that Clive knows Maurice has been curious about what it means to be gay. The reference to the Symposium in particular, though, also points to a specific understanding of love. In the Symposium, Plato presents a passage, spoken by Aristophanes, in which Aristophanes says that humans were originally formed of two people put together. There were men joined with other men to form a whole, women joined with other women, and men and women joined together. The gods found these “whole” humans threatening, so they split them all in half. Love, then, Aristophanes says, is our desire to be reunited with that other half of ourselves, to try and make one of two and heal the rupture at the heart of human nature. Aristophanes also says that men who were split from other men are now attracted to other men, and these men, he says, are “the best of boys and lads, because they are the most manly in their nature […] because they are bold and brave and masculine, and they tend to cherish what is like themselves.”
With this in mind, the mention of the Symposium in Maurice evokes Maurice’s dream in which he hears a voice saying, “That is your friend.” Throughout the novel, when Maurice searches for this friend (that is, for his true love), it’s as if he’s searching for another half of himself—something he eventually seems to find in Alec.
The Symposium Quotes in Maurice
He scarcely saw a voice, scarcely heard a voice say, “That is your friend,” and then it was over, having filled him with beauty and taught him tenderness. He could die for such a friend, he would allow such a friend to die for him; they would make any sacrifice for each other, and count the world nothing, neither death nor distance nor crossness could part them, because “this is my friend.”
“You’ve read the Symposium? … It’s all in there—not meat for babes, of course, but you ought to read it this vac.”
No more was said at the time, but he was free of another subject, and one that he had never mentioned to any living soul. He hadn’t known it could be mentioned, and when Durham did so in the middle of the sunlit court a breath of liberty touched him.
“I knew you read the Symposium in the vac,” he said in a low voice.
Maurice felt uneasy.
“Then you understand—without me saying more—”
“How do you mean?”
Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whispered, “I love you.”
Maurice was scandalized, horrified. He was shocked to the bottom of his suburban soul, and exclaimed, “Oh, rot!”
Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.
He saw only dying light and a dead land. He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards
Well, he had written to Maurice at last … “Against my will I have become normal. I cannot help it.” The words had been written …
He descended the theatre wearily. Who could help anything? … μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικᾷ λόγον, sighed the actors in this very place two thousand years ago. Even that remark, though further from vanity than most, was vain.
The Symposium Symbol Timeline in Maurice
