A Room with a View Essay Essays

A Room with a View Essay Essays A Room with a View Essay Paper A Room with a View Essay Paper Italy Enables Lucy to Change and Become Her Own Individual in A Room With a View Lucy is presented with an opportunity to become her own person and look at things differently in Italy. This concept is used throughout the novel A Room With a View by E. M. Forster, in which a young girl named Lucy is able to see the world with a different eye and become a new person. She is surrounded with a culture and way of life that is much different than the one she is used to back at home. The free and open Italian setting enables Lucy to start a new life and find her love. In Italy, the city of Florence shows Lucy a life with much more freedom. This is illustrated throughout Lucy’s stay in Florence, Italy. She is unfamiliar with the new setting and all of the new culture overwhelms her. According to the Twayne Author series, â€Å"†¦ the ‘magic city’ of Florence elicits all that is unpredictable. Passionate, vibrant, violent Italy all but overwhelms Lucy. † (304) This emphasizes that this new setting is influential for Lucy because of all the new ideas surrounding her. It makes her aware of the possibility of this new kind of life that she can decide what she wants to do. Another example of Italy showing Lucy a more open life is when she arrives at the hotel, she was promised a room with a view, but instead she was given a room that did not have a view and she became angry showing her anxiousness for a new world. For instance Lucy says, â€Å"The rooms the Signora promised us in her letter would have looked over the Arno. The signora had no business to do it at all! † (Forster 3) This illustrates that Lucy becomes distressed by the fact that they did not get a room with a view and this supports the idea that she was excited to get free of her old childhood home and experience a new setting in Italy. The Italian landscape also helps Lucy experience a more free life by enabling her to become her own person and not having to conform to restrictions. This is observed when Forster says, â€Å"Italy was offering her the most priceless of all possessions – her own soul. † (90) The Italian setting took Lucy away from all the restrictions she had in her life before. She was free to think whatever she wanted about something and she could truly be her own person. Italy’s free and open setting clearly influences Lucy to change and become her own person. Lucy is held back by many social restrictions but Italy shows her around them and helps her become independent and find her love. To illustrate, in England, Lucy found that social classes were significant in society while she finds that in Italy, they are not significant at all. This is acknowledged when Forster says, â€Å"But in Italy, where anyone who chooses may warn himself in equality, as in the sun, this conception of life vanished. She felt that there was no one whom she might not get to like, that social barriers were irremovable, doubtless, but not particularly high†¦She returned with new eyes. (Forster 90) This is to say Lucy is able to see things with a new perspective in Italy. She sees that social restrictions and levels are not necessary. She realizes that people from all social classes should interact and that she doesn’t want to only interact with people in her social class. Similarly, Italy is free of discrimination while in England there was much discr imination. Lucy realizes she was taught many different views. A literary critic says, â€Å"Italy and the English countrywide encourage a free and open existence as compared to the cramped, stereotyped, middle-class British life. (Twayne 302) This confirms that when Lucy is in Italy, she discovers that there is no discrimination and people are a lot more open towards each other in the sense that they do not form false opinions about people by their background. She realizes that many of the distorted views she learned back in England about this are false. Furthermore, Italy gives Lucy the opportunity to become her own true self because there are no more restrictions that were there in England. For instance, Mr. Beebe says, â€Å"There was simply the sense that she had found wings, and meant to use them. (Forster 75) This asserts that in Italy Lucy’s ‘wings’ are now open and she has a lot more independence to do whatever she wants or think whatever she wants unli ke in England where they could be considered ‘clipped’. It is clear that Lucy’s progress of becoming more open and free is aided by the reduced amount of social barriers in Italy. Lucy is able to experience things she has never before in Italy with its more opportunistic culture. Technological advances in Italy enabled different social classes to intertwine and become more uniform. The creation of the trams enabled people to go out in other places where only higher-class people had gone. This is determined when critic Jeremy Hubbell says, â€Å"While in Florence, Mr. Eager notes the way in which trams enable people of the lower classes to take outings in the countryside†¦ Still, trams enable the â€Å"poor† to walk where only the rich had previously† (301) Lucy is able to experience life to the fullest, as she isn’t limited to a lower standard of living with the newer technology in Italy. The tram is only one of the many examples of how Italy greatly helped Lucy to her full potential. Next, we see Lucy’s affect to experiencing music. Forster illustrates the scene with Lucy going through a dramatic phase while listening to music. While Lucy listens, Forster articulates, â€Å"†¦Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summers evening with the window open. Passion was there, but it could not be easily labeled; it slipped between love and hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style. † (Forster 23) Music in Italy introduces Lucy’s actual feelings inside of her, which are concealed by a fake personality. She is a completely different person with music bringing out her real self from her heart. Another thought is that Italy has brought Lucy to witness murder and also experience love. These experiences have caused her to change greatly. Cecil explains, â€Å"But Italy worked some marvel in her. It gave her light, and – which he held more precious – it gave her shadow†¦She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci’s, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us. † (Forster 72) He describes how Lucy has changed so much because of her experiences in Italy. A person that has been kissed passionately and witnessed a murder is bound to change significantly. With aspects of Italy ranging from the arts to technology, Lucy has greatly been affected by the distinct culture of this new environment. When Lucy arrives in Italy, she is bewildered by its distinctive nature. Lucy utilizes Italy’s entirely different lifestyle to achieve her independence and find her love. She is able to transform her self by experiencing many new things, one of them being, finding her love. Often, a person’s life can be completely altered by the environment in which they reside in. A Sense of Deities Reconciled: A Room With a View in Twaynes Authors Series: Twayne English Authors (Twayne, 1999); excerpted and reprinted in Novels for Students, Vol. II, ed. Elizabeth Thomason (Detroit: Gale, 2001), pp. 302-308. Hubbell, Jeremy. Critical essay on A Room With a View. Novels for Students. Ed. Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2001. 299-302 Forster, E. M. A Room With a View. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1995.