Edwina Crane's and Barbie Batchelor's combination of great heart and inferior social position both allows them a higher moral intelligence than those who govern the Raj and ensures that each will die tragically: Edwina sets herself on fire in sympathy for the death of an Indian colleague who died protecting her from a marauding mob, while Barbie goes mad as she sees, Cassandra-like, the fabric of the Raj unraveling.

Sponsor Message.

Hari Kumar's tragedy, conversely, results from his having been raised from the age of two in England and forced as an adult to return to India by the family bankruptcy that follows upon his father's death. His inability to speak Hindi or Urdu makes him suspect to the native population, while the British are offended that a brown-skinned person should speak English and behave socially as well as they. A man with neither a country nor a place in society, Hari is eventually reduced to writing under the pseudonym, Philoctetes--a hero of the Trojan War whom the Greeks at first abandoned and then whose favor they were forced to court.

If the humanity of Edwina Crane, Barbie Batchelor, and Hari Kumar derives from their marginalization by the class-conscious British society to which they nonetheless belong, the inhumanity of Ronald Merrick results from his determination to suppress all natural feeling in order to refashion himself as a member of a class to which he was not born. A racist, Merrick is enraged by Hari's superior speech and manners. And, a repressed homosexual, Merrick sadistically exploits the younger, more attractive men who report to him, and is himself brutally murdered, finally, by a servant, his current bed partner.

Merrick's blackmailing a homosexual junior officer repeats a scene that occurs in The Chinese Love Pavilion, leading biographer Hillary Spurling to conclude that Merrick is based on the officer who humiliated Scott at the outset of his military service. But Merrick incarnates as well the repressed Scott's sexual self-hatred, putting the character in a line of military officers who are sexually obsessed with, and sadistically torment, a handsome male subordinate--as in D. H. Lawrence's "The Prussian Officer" and Carson McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye.

"Throughout the Quartet," writes Allen Boyer, "imperialism's failure is expressed by the motif of thwarted love. . . . Imperialism could have succeeded only if based upon a radically different sensibility--one as different from the actual imperial norms as homosexuality is from the heterosexual standard." For Scott, Merrick's repression of his homosexuality mirrors the Raj's suppression of all human feeling between classes and between races, thus leading inevitably to the horrific bloodshed that followed the British withdrawal from the subcontinent in 1947.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

For his time, D. H. Lawrence was a maverick in his open and adventurous discussion of all sexual issues and especially homosexuality, both male and female.

The fiction of the sexually ambiguous Carson McCullers offers uncomfortable resistance to the social ideal of neat heterosexuality.