Does Your Room Have a View?

E. M. Forster's A Room With A View Analysis

At the beginning of the movie, when the viewer gets the first glimpse of the characters staying in the guesthouse at Florence, he/she may think that all of the characters belong to the same social class. Some facts that support that thinking would be that they dress and look pretty much the same and that they get along nicely, which, as one thinks, would not happen if they were from different social classes. What the viewer does not know is that his/her mind is about to change.

As we get deeper into the story, we can see that Lucy Honeychurch, our protagonist, belongs to an upper middle class, while her cousin Charlotte, who acts as her chaperone, belongs to the servant class. We are also introduced to the Emersons, who are a little more difficult to classify, since we know that they live well, maybe not as well as Lucy, but they certainly do not belong to the lower classes, which would be the servants and the laborers. Personally, I would classify them in the intellectual thinkers class because throughout the movie, we can learn the Mr. Emerson knows a lot of history and is quite liberal, which makes us think that he is probably an intellectual. Another character that truly calls the attention of the viewers would be Miss Lavish, who can be described as an eccentric writer that probably belongs to the intellectuals’ class also, and who thinks she knows the “true Italy”. This thought is the one that introduced us to the lower classes in the first place. One day Miss Lavish takes Lucy to what she claims to be the “real Italy” which ends up being in the poorer place of the city, where we can see some of the lifestyle of the lower classes.

Now dear reader, you are probably asking yourself: what about the upper class? Well, let me introduce you now to one of my favorite characters of the story. His name is Cecil Vyse and he is, at least for me, a very awkward character. Clearly, he belongs to the aristocracy. We can see that in the way he behaves around the people of Lucy’s town and how he often refers to people as if they were below him. The reason I like Cecil is because I find him a very funny being. The fact that he practically lives in a crystal bubble with a perfect world amuses me, and even though he can be seen as arrogant he is a character I cannot stay mad at, I do not know why.

Since you are probably bored by now with all of my talk about Cecil Vyse, the only thing left to say is that, as said in the beginning, social classes can look alike sometimes but it is the little things, even the way of thinking or behaving that help us tell one class from another and that, in my opinion, the whole idea of defining a person by their possessions is as dumb as saying one M&M is better than another one just because of the color.