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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Maurice, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Sacrifice
Sexual Orientation, Homophobia, and Self-Acceptance
Masculinity and Patriarchy
Religion
Class
Summary
Analysis
The whole school is out for a walk, a once-per-term tradition that students and faculty alike look forward to. Mr. Ducie, the senior assistant to the schoolmaster, plans to have a “good talk” with Maurice Hall, who is about to graduate and head to public school at Sunnington. While Maurice and Mr. Ducie are walking by the ocean, Maurice tells Mr. Ducie about the conversation he recently had with the schoolmaster, Mr. Abrahams. Mr. Abrahams, Maurice tells Ducie, has said that Maurice will make them all proud when he enters Sunnington and that, to ensure success, he should copy his father. Maurice says that Abrahams also told him, “I am never to do anything I should be ashamed to have mother see me do.” Maurice’s father attended this same school, then went to public school before he married, had a son and two daughters, and died (recently) of pneumonia.
By telling Maurice that he should behave just like his father, Mr. Abrahams highlights certain norms of masculinity. These norms are intertwined with ideas of class; Abrahams issues his advice as Maurice is leaving prep school to enter public school (similar to private school in the U.S.), taking the first step toward an upper-class life. In his advice, Abrahams also implies that departing from his father’s path would lead to failure for Maurice. Maurice spends the rest of the novel wrestling, in part, with those norms of masculinity, especially as they relate to his sexual orientation. Maurice’s father, who is presented as an ideal of masculinity, looms even larger for Maurice because he has just passed away.
Themes
While they are on the beach, Ducie says he is going to share something with Maurice that his father told him. He begins to talk about “the mystery of sex,” men and women, the beginning of the earth, and God. When Ducie talks about sex, Maurice cannot relate to it. The ideas don’t add up to him, like an impossible-to-calculate sum. When Ducie, who is engaged to be married himself, finishes expounding on how the world hangs together through the union of male and female, Maurice says to him, “I think I shall not marry.” After they have walked away, Ducie becomes worried that other people walking on the beach will see the diagrams of sex he drew in the sand, and for a moment, Maurice despises him. “Liar,” he thinks. “He’s told me nothing.”
Ducie’s discussion of sex with Maurice exemplifies the prevailing heteronormative worldview in England at the time. Ducie does not mention the possibility of men being attracted to men, or women being attracted to women, because the idea would have been too taboo to speak of. “Homosexual acts” were still outlawed in England at the time. Though Maurice might not be able to pinpoint why, Ducie’s speech leaves him cold and confused. Later, Maurice will come to the conclusion that he was “fed lies” during his boyhood about how the world works, and Ducie’s speech is an example of one of those lies.
Themes
