Howards End · Chapter
XXVIII explained
Margaret struggles with her feelings after learning of Henry's past infidelity with Jacky Bast.
What happens
Margaret struggles with her feelings after learning of Henry's past infidelity with Jacky Bast. She writes letters to Henry and to Leonard Bast, attempting to manage the situation practically while grappling with her own moral and emotional turmoil. She decides to forgive Henry and marry him out of pity and love, hoping to make him a better man.
Themes in this chapter
Love, Marriage, and Compromise
Margaret decides to marry Henry despite his past, driven by pity and a desire to reform him through love, highlighting the compromises in marriage.
Gender Roles and Women's Independence
Margaret reflects on the different moral codes for men and women, and feels constrained by feminine propriety, yet acts independently in her decisions.
Social Class and Inequality
The Basts are dismissed as 'no good' and 'not the type we should trouble about,' illustrating class prejudice and the power dynamics between the Schlegels/Wilcoxes and the Basts.
Characters to notice
- Margaret Schlegel
Struggles with her feelings about Henry's past, writes letters, and decides to forgive him out of pity and love.
- Henry Wilcox
Margaret reflects on his degradation and his past with Jacky Bast; he is seen in the hall and later goes to quiet the servants.
- Helen Schlegel
Margaret writes to her about the Basts and asks her to come to the hotel; Helen is seen looking out of the coffee-room window.
- Leonard Bast
Margaret writes him a letter saying Henry has no vacancy; he is seen with Helen at the George hotel.
- Ruth Wilcox
Margaret thinks of Mrs. Wilcox's wrong and her ghost, leaving her to her own wrong.
- Jacky Bast
Mentioned as the woman Henry found drunk on the lawn, and as a 'Mrs. Bast' in Margaret's thoughts.
Key passages
“She could not command voice or look, and the gentle words that she forced out through her pen seemed to proceed from some other person.”
Margaret felt so emotionally numb that the kind words she wrote felt like they came from someone else.
Margaret's emotional detachment as she writes to Henry.
“Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality, and their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going?”
Margaret wonders if men and women are fundamentally different, with separate moral standards, and if love is just nature's trick for reproduction.
Margaret's philosophical questioning of gender and morality.
“Pity, if one may generalise, is at the bottom of woman. When men like us, it is for our better qualities... But unworthiness stimulates woman.”
Margaret believes that women are motivated by pity, and that a man's flaws actually draw out a woman's deeper nature.
Margaret's reflection on gender differences in love and forgiveness.