Abstract:
The love narration presents the cultural landscape of family ethics, opinion of values and social mentality in a particular era by describing love and marriage in daily life.
A Room with a View, a novel of E. M. Forster, is the only one with a happy ending. Ostensibly, the novel is an "Austin love story" by employing the traditional narrative of love and marriage, but actually it shows the changes of life style and aesthetic taste in this period. Due to the prevailing materialism, utilitarianism and rationalism during the Edwardian period, the taste which should embody aesthetic and cultural aspects was alienated into the instruments of manifesting class status and material wealth, thus a kind of "Philistinism taste" was developed. Forster echoes with Matthew Arnold's concept of "beauty" by stressing that gentility is an external and superficial taste, while the highest realm of taste is the drive to moral cultivation and emotional cognition. Forster's profound cultural vision can be revealed from his view of taste that he not only concerns with the individual taste for cultivation of the mind but also calls for the collective one which is crucial to the construction and maintenance of community.