(South Bay Poly Newsletter, June 2012)
It’s a bit of cliché by now: If polyamory were accepted, we’d lose the
conflict in a large percentage of popular books and films.
Where
Angels Fear to Tread, based on the 1905 E. M. Forster novel, would
make a beautiful poly movie. Phillip
travels to Italy to retrieve the baby son of his dead sister-in-law from its
Italian father. Charlotte, a family
friend, accompanies him. Phillip’s upper
class English family despises the father for being Italian and socially
“inferior.” But Phillip loves Italy and
the Italians, who seem so “alive” compared to his own stuffy English background.
In the process of trying to retrieve the baby (an
attempt which ends in disaster—the accidental death of the baby), Charlotte
falls in love with the Italian. She
returns to England to avoid the possibility of ever seeing him again and acting
on her feelings. In the film (and this
is apparently a bit different than the novel), it is hinted that she may marry
Phillip. Indeed, Phillip seems quite
taken by Charlotte. Charlotte feels
ambiguous towards Phillip—but admits to being in love with the Italian.
But so is Phillip, perhaps! When Charlotte says “I love him—Gino,”
Phillip immediately replies: “I love him
too.” What did this mean in 1905, when
the book appeared, just ten years after the Oscar Wilde scandal? We know now that Forster was gay. Of course, the British of the time thought of
male-on-male sex as always “perversion,” never love.
So the three characters might have lived happily
together in Italy! But Forster couldn’t
have written that ending in 1905!
Indeed, he never “came out.” Only
after his death was his gay novel, Maurice, published, with the
assistance of Christopher Isherwood.
