Henry Wilcox’s garden party for his daughter’s wedding s reveals Edwardian hypocrisy and predatory sexuality. It’s a turning point in Foster’s Howards End.
Forster scants the dinner itself, but when it is about to end, the guests are in stages of departure. The messy dinner table becomes a metaphor for future unhappiness, anger, and dismay with unfinished foods, desserts, and wines. In what otherwise might have been a happy ending, jacky Bast, Henry Wilcox’s former mistress ten years before, appears. As the garden party has broken up and the guests are dispersing, Helen Schlegel and the Basts (in tow) arrive. Helen cannot know that years before, Jacky was Wilcox’s mistress. Innocently, Margaret persuades Helen and the Basts to back off, but as they leave, Margaret good-naturedly offers something to eat, after all the Basts are starving.” Won’t you have something to eat?” said Margaret. “I don’t know what to do. It isn’t my house, and though Mr. Wilcox would have been glad to see you at any other time–as I say, I don’t know what to do, but I undertake to do what I can for you. Helen, offer them something. Do try a sandwich, Mrs. Bast.”
When Wilcox recognizes her, he demands that she leave. But Jacky, cake in one hand and champagne in the other, is in no mood to vanish. It’s a disaster when Henry Wilcox’s former mistress appears (uninvited) at his daughter’s party. Unabashed and slightly drunk on champagne, Jacky Bast familiarly addresses him. Wilcox’s fiancé, Margaret Schlegel, is perplexed: “Why does she call you ‘Hen’?” said Margaret innocently. “Has she ever seen you before?” But Jacky is persistent, “Seen Hen before!” “Who hasn’t seen Hen? He’s serving you like me, my dear. These boys! You wait—Still, we love ’em.” Wilcox is mortified at being found out and, thinking this is Margaret’s doing, replies, “Are you now satisfied?” Surprised at his anger, Margaret is frightened and says, “I don’t know what it is all about. Let’s come in.” Too late, the party is undone.
James Ivory’s Howards End (1992).
Featured Image: Jacky Bast (Nicola Duffett) smiles at her former lover Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins).
See E.M. Forster. Howards End. London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1910; James Ivory. Howards End (1992). Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala based on E.M. Forster’s novel (1910). Also Picnicsonfilm.org.
Forster’s other disastrous picnics appear in Passage to India, A Room with a View, and “The Story of a Panic.”