E.M. Forster's Tea-Table

Abstract

One may as well begin with an entry from Katherine Mansfield’s Journal. “E. M. Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot. He’s a rare fine hand at that. Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.” What we could take from Mansfield’s frustration with E. M. Forster’s thwarted climaxes is the image of the table laid for tea: the teapot warmed up, but tea never poured out, perhaps not even made. That she blended this particular image into her comment should not surprise one for, indeed, Howards End abounds with the scenes constructed around the tea-table, in which, though, the actual repast matters little since food hardly gets mentioned and might even be completely forgotten. It is not on this account that the tea-table in Forster tantalises the reader and it is not in the apparent withholding of victuals that its inadequacy inheres for when food, whether in its ugliness or exquisiteness, monopolises the table, as it does on several occasions, its centrality comes to no good. Clearly, Forster does not conceive the tea-table as a gastronomic affair and if the teatable poses all sorts of difficulties and complications, whereby it often precariously tilts, this is because it is primarily a social situation, a locus and representation of domestic and public relations, a demonstration of how people are with one another.