Book Review: Where Angels Fear to Tread

Book Review

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This is a book review on Where Angels Fear to Tread written by E. M. Forster. Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) was E. M. Forster’s first published book. It is a tragic-comedy telling the price of the marriage of Lilia Herriton, an rash young widow, to the son of an Italian dentist, Gino Carella, whom she meets while on tour in Tuscany, uselessly chaperoned by ‘charming, sober’ Caroline Abott.

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) was E. M. Forster’s first published book. It is a tragic-comedy telling the price of the marriage of Lilia Herriton, an rash young widow, to the son of an Italian dentist, Gino Carella, whom she meets while on tour in Tuscany, uselessly chaperoned by ‘charming, sober’ Caroline Abott. The novel is set in Italy and England with the dissimilarity between the two countries and cultures a main theme. The English location is Sawston, a neighborhood of London, while the Italian setting is the small Tuscan town of Monteriano, Forster wanted to name the novel by that name. The title, however, also plays with the plan of the English as a race of innocent “angels”, as the tribe of “Angles” were once thought to be.

In Forster’s novel, the Herritons’ family system compels the development of a series of relationships to defend the family’s upper-middle-class morals of social self-discipline and  the decorum between the different characters. As the way by which Mrs. Herriton preserve her family’s stiff sense of decency and goodness, the course of  triangular relationship determines the nature of many of the novel’s human relations. (Roberts 213-216) Family members are under the watchful gaze of Mrs. Herriton, the actual guardian of the family’s value system maintain their relationships and behavior by turning on each other each other for pledge to values that conflict with the narrow and lofty social standards of Sawston, the London suburb where the Herritons live.

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