Where Angels Fear to Tread: Analysis of Setting
"Where Angels Fear to Tread" is a novel by E.M. Forster that contrasts two distinct settings: the repressive English town of Sawston and the vibrant Italian region of Tuscany. Sawston is depicted as a dreary place characterized by middle-class conformity and a strict adherence to social propriety, serving as a representation of English repression. This contrasts sharply with Tuscany, which is imbued with beauty and cultural richness, as captured in the towns of Monteriano and Poggibonsi. Monteriano, inspired by San Gimignano, symbolizes a life full of passion and spontaneity, allowing characters to experience a transformative journey away from English constraints. The narrative highlights the stark differences in social norms, particularly through the experiences of characters like Harriet, who embodies a strong sense of English chauvinism. Through its settings, Forster explores themes of liberation and identity, inviting readers to reflect on the dynamic interplay between culture and personal growth. Ultimately, the novel presents a rich tapestry of contrasting landscapes that illuminate broader societal issues related to class, gender, and cultural identity.
Where Angels Fear to Tread: Analysis of Setting
First published: 1905
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Social realism
Time of work: Early twentieth century
Asterisk denotes entries on real places.
Places Discussed
Sawston
Sawston. English town that is home to the conventional middle-class Herriton family. E. M. Forster modeled this dreary, repressive town on Tonbridge, Kent, southeast of London, where he himself had attended school. A gray place preoccupied with duty, respectability, and tradition, Sawston represents the worst of English repression of self and others.
When family friend Caroline Abbott later dreams of the Italian town Poggibonsi as a “joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended,” she recognizes it as Sawston. At the end of the novel, Philip Herriton’s growth is evident in his decision to move from his hometown to London. (Forster also uses Sawston to symbolize English middle-class deadness in his second novel, The Longest Journey, 1907.)
*Tuscany
*Tuscany. Region of west-central Italy along the Ligurian and Tyrrhenian Seas that includes the provinces of Firenze (Florence), Pisa, Livorno, and Siena. Forster’s depiction of the Tuscan landscape draws on a long holiday he took there in 1901. Particularly close echoes of his travels come in his description of Philip and Harriet Herriton’s tourist hardships in several cities while they are on their way to Monteriano. Harriet, to whom “foreigners are a filthy nation,” embodies strong English chauvinism and is the only traveler unresponsive to the magic of Italy.
Monteriano
Monteriano (mahn-teh-ree-AHN-oh). Hill town in Tuscany modeled on San Gimignano southwest of Florence and northwest of Siena, which is one of the best preserved medieval towns in Italy. Forster invents a description of his fictionalized town for his characters’ tour book, which characterizes Monteriano as a town with 4,800 inhabitants, a Siena gate, walls, a magnificent view from the fortress at sunset, and Giotto frescoes that earn it “one star.” Later, the narrator’s comment that the town’s Piazza has “three great attractions—the Palazzo Publico, the Collegiate Church, and the Caffè Garibaldi: the intellect, the soul, and the body” recalls the model, San Gimignano, with its Palazzo del Populo and its Collegiate, a former cathedral. However, Forster also clearly elevates Monteriano into symbolizing a full, integrated life.
Monteriano’s overall role in the novel resembles that of Florence in Forster’s A Room with a View (1908). Both Italian settings overflow with the beauties of nature and Renaissance art, as well as passion and spontaneity, and both are enchanted places of transfiguration and liberation—almost Forster’s version of the regenerative “green world” of Shakespearean comedy. In A Room with a View, Forster explicitly links these Italian locations by having two English tourists in Florence gossip about Monteriano as the site of an ill-fated Anglo-Italian marriage.
*Poggibonsi
*Poggibonsi (po-jee-BON-see). Town east of San Gimignano and of its fictional counterpart Monteriano. In the novel, Monteriano is described as having thrown off Poggibonsi’s rule in 1261—much as Lilia, Caroline, and Philip liberate themselves from the tyranny of English propriety.
House opposite the Volterra gate
House opposite the Volterra gate. Stuffy two-story house outside Monteriano in which Lilia spends her short married life with Gino. Confinement of Italian women to their homes leaves Lilia feeling alienated in the Italian culture that initially seemed her refuge from oppressive English norms.
Stella d’Italia
Stella d’Italia. Hotel in which Philip, Caroline, and Harriet stay. Formerly a palace with Gothic windows, the hotel represents a guiding star on Caroline’s and Philip’s journeys to self-realization.
Collegiate Church of Santa Deodata
Collegiate Church of Santa Deodata. Monteriano’s church, decorated with Giotto’s frescoes of the death and burial of a patron saint of the Dark Ages who denied herself everything. In Monteriano, which simultaneously affirms art, nature, and passion while honestly embracing pain and death, Caroline and Philip question their modern, English abstention.
Caffè Garibaldi
Caffè Garibaldi. Café in Monteriano where men enjoy freedom and camaraderie while their wives stay home or go to church. Forster depicts this café, where Philip and Gino cement their friendship, as the locus of male privilege in a patriarchal Latin culture, indicating that although England is generally more constrained, it nevertheless offers its women a freedom of movement alien to Italian custom.
Theater
Theater. Tiny garishly decorated building that houses Monteriano’s opera. There Philip and Harriet confront Italian crudity, vitality, joy, and kindness at a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor, which, as an Italian opera based on a romance by Sir Walter Scott, harmoniously merges Italian and British cultures.
Bibliography
Furbank, P. N. E. M. Forster: A Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. An exhaustive biography of Forster that also serves as a source of cultural information concerning Forster’s settings in England, Italy, and India.
McConkey, James. The Novels of E. M. Forster. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957. McConkey attempts to judge Forster’s fiction in relation to the critical principles outlined in Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster’s book-length study of the genre.
Trilling, Lionel. E. M. Forster. 2d ed. New York: New Directions, 1964. Appreciative readings of Forster’s works that are intended to elevate the novelist to the artistic status he deserves. Forster is seen as a practitioner of what Trilling termed the “liberal imagination.”
Wilde, Alan. Art and Order: A Study of E. M. Forster. New York: New York University Press, 1964. Focuses on Forster’s practice of and contribution to the aesthetic view of life. The value of beauty in human existence, and art’s role in defining beauty, are the motivating issues in Wilde’s first chapter, which begins with a discussion of Where Angels Fear to Tread.