Charles Sturridge’s 1991 film adaptation of Where Angels Fear to Tread is now streaming on Yoreflix. Here, we take a closer look at England and Italy at the turn of the century, and the conflicting societal expectations of Edwardian women illustrated throughout E.M. Forster’s 1905 novel.
Where Angels Fear to Tread tells the story of Lilia Herriton, a young widow who embarks on a year-long trip to Italy, leaving her young daughter Irma and the rest of her late husband’s reputation-obsessed family behind. Accompanied by the sober-minded Caroline Abbott, she soon falls head-over-heels for the young working-class Italian, Gino, to the horror of her relatives. An attempted rescue mission sets off a series of events that quickly turn from comedic escapade to nightmarish tragedy.
Edwardian England was a time of sweeping changes. It’s no accident that our story begins on a train, an icon of the industrial revolution. Rapid political and technological upheaval had occurred throughout the Victorian era, and social and employment opportunities had increased significantly for middle-class women. Yet for the aristocratic classes, the strict social mores of Victorian England pervaded. While they could be active in the affairs of the church, charities and teaching, women were totally excluded from leadership roles and still could not vote. Women’s suffrage movements were gaining significant momentum, but women wouldn’t gain the right to vote until February of 1918, and then with strict conditions. It wasn’t actually until 1928 that the women of the United Kingdom would gain the right to vote on the same terms as their male counterparts, and it wouldn’t be until 1945 that women would get the right to vote in Italy. Though nobody had yet slashed the Rokeby Venus or defiantly walked out in front of a horse, change was in the air. Put simply: in 1905, women were getting restless.
Though at the beginning of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Lilia and her daughter Irma technically still ‘belong to’ her late husband’s family, this doesn’t stop her from dreaming of something more. For upper-class English women, continental travel was an acceptable and fashionable way to get a taste of independence, and her family welcomes this, having spent years attempting to ‘train’ Lilia to their standard to seemingly no avail.
The Herriton’s dim view of Lilia reflects the critical nature of attitudes towards willful or ‘spirited’ young women of the time. The ability to efficiently run a household was imperative for married women of means, and a lack of ability to do this, or appearing frivolous with household funds and resources, would draw a considerable amount of social ire. Being practically-minded and modest was preferred, and family matriarch and Lilia’s mother-in-law Mrs Herriton exemplifies this ideal: ‘Mrs Herriton did not believe in romance, nor in transfiguration, nor in parallels from history, nor in anything else that may disturb domestic life.’
The typical Englishman’s view of Italy at this time came from reading classical literature, atlases, and travel guides, the latter of which Mrs Herriton reads in the novel’s beginning to find out about Monteriano (a fictional town based on San Gimignano). Her information, from Baedeker’s Central Italy and Rome, is almost forty years out of date here, as, it could be said, is her attitude. Her son Phillip's imagination is captured more wholly, for him, the association with Italy, antiquity and romantic fantasy cannot be overstated. Despite Mrs Herriton’s insistence that ‘the place has nothing to do with it at all,’ upon their first trip to Monteriano our rescuers are thrust into this land of mythology. Phillip’s incredulity at Gino’s father being ‘a dentist in fairyland’ serves to illustrate this idealised view of the Mediterranean, now cheapened in his mind by something so commonplace as a pair of false teeth, later destroyed completely by his sister-in-law’s ‘vulgar’ life and death there.
For Lilia, her expectations are similarly sunk as she travels ‘into the middle ages’ in more ways than one. Though she finds herself in a newly-unified Italy, experiencing similar economic changes through industrialisation to England, the rural town of Monteriano is strange and mysterious to her. Her romanticized view of Gino and her adventurous lifestyle in Italy comes to a screeching halt as she settles into married life; she finds married women there are expected to be even more submissive and ladylike for their husbands, no matter how ungentlemanly they are. This is particularly evident through Gino and his friend’s views on women leaving the home alone, remarking to each other ‘the more precious a possession the more carefully it should be guarded’. Italian gentlemen of the early 20th century faced a more classically masculine ideal than their English counterparts, with a more ‘hands-on’ approach to managing a household. This is later shown to be a strength of Gino’s when caring for his infant son, who the Herritons, in typical Edwardian fashion, are desperate to return to England to be raised in their own image.
Where Angels Fear to Tread illustrates both the comedy and heartbreaking reality of these stifling societal expectations of England and Italy during this period. The Herriton family’s abject horror at the news of Lilia’s Italian exploits reflects an all-too-real obsession with appearances and reputation that E.M. Forster struggled with in his own family, and it influenced much of his work. Gino and Lilia’s short, passionate marriage is ultimately a struggle of their nationalities, as Forster writes: ‘generations of ancestors [...] forbade the Latin man to be chivalrous to the northern woman, the northern woman to forgive the Latin man’.