ABSTRACT
Kate Symondson examines what Virginia Woolf describes as Forster’s double vision, his straddling of both Realist and the Modernist traditions as Woolf saw it, a view which in her opinion ultimately judges Forster as a failure. Rejecting this rather reductive view of Forster which undervalues the author’s own aesthetics, the chapter argues that Forster’s double vision ‘is as significant and calculated a response to the conditions of early twentieth-century modernity Forster’s narrative dualism should be understood in terms of the impact of scientific discovery upon metaphysics because, as Symondson’s observes, science had rendered the visible world unstable, chaotic, relative’.
