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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
A Room With a View is very much an Edwardian novel, just as Forster was very much a Bloomsbury author. The Bloomsbury Group was a circle of British writers, philosophers, and artists who associated with each other from the first decade of the 20th century until the early 1930s. Whether through the medium of visual art or writing, members of the Bloomsbury Group sought to use innovative ideas and methods to break with the bourgeois conservatism of Victorian tradition. As most of them came from upper-middle-class families, these privileged and highly educated intellectuals seemed somewhat hypocritical in their liberal aims and projects. Nevertheless, they were influential in their critique of British society and their development of modernism.
Forster was a core member of the group from before its inception, having been a member of its precursor—a secret intellectual society at Cambridge known as the Apostles. However, similar to how Lucy needed to go away to take charge of her life, leaving England and his friends was when Forster began to develop his style as a novelist. In the year after he graduated from Cambridge, he travelled through Italy with his mother. Although it took him years to write the novel, he already began to conceive of this novel while on his trip, modeling several of its characters off of British tourists he encountered during his travels. In the novel that came of the notes from this trip, Forster reveals his interest in satirizing British society while remaining sympathetic to individual characters. His background made it possible for him to simultaneously conform to and find fault with the world he lived in—all while imagining something new. This can be discerned in his style as a novelist; it was both necessary for Forster to be a member of the class of people he sought to ridicule and to be able to see them from the outside.
His language and storytelling are witty and playful. Throughout the novel, he makes frequent references and citations, revealing that he was a well-read man who saw connections between poetry, literature, philosophy, and the world. Although he was clearly well-educated and smart, his style nonetheless remains unpretentious and welcoming to the reader. Forster's style is also very poetic: A Room with a View contains a great amount of beautiful imagery, as well as a substantial mix of humorous and touching similes, metaphors, and instances of personification.
