How can the Edwardian A Room with a View be toe-curl-inducingly disgusting and corset-swooningly romantic at the same time? I let the novel have it in my critique, a move I should've planned out better considering it was assigned because my (totally awesome) British professor actually likes the book. Not that I don't like it. I'll probably read it and watch the movie numerous times in the future, each time (probably) feeling both grossed out and wooed. Come on. Daniel Day-Lewis as Cecil? Rockstar. Besides, A Room with a View and A Clockwork Orange now have me listening to an obscene amount of Beethoven, which comes in handy when I'm trying to drown out the obnoxious elevator music played at Glazers.

It's almost saccharine and unrealistically romantic that E M Forster's A Room with a View begins and ends in the Pensione Bertolini. The star-crossed lovers transformed and finally united--and enjoying the view from their room, no less--is perhaps the most unsubtle aspect of the novel, remedied only by the intrigue and ambiguity surrounding Charlotte's part in their union. Concern over rooms with views itself makes for an obvious analogy for the theme of repression. Nevertheless, seeing the characters (particularly Lucy, albeit constantly shooed away) staring out of windows and through curtains in the film emphasizes the extent to which social/sexual repression can stifle or kindle personalities and desires. Still, more sophisticated is Lucy’s relationship with music. While “Ludwig van” symbolizes violence in A Clockwork Orange, “too much Beethoven” in A Room with a View stands for both Lucy’s potential and her restlessness. It is only in the first part of the novel that she plays Beethoven. In the second, though she still plays the piano, it is for others instead of herself (even once embarrassing Cecil when she denies his request to hear Beethoven). Music and specifically the piano seem to be a personal outlet, for it is when Lucy plays that she is the most impassioned. Moreover, it is also the means by which she can best connect with others: her playing is admired by the pensioners, Mr Beebe and Cecil himself, and even when the music is comical instead of Beethoven, it is something shared with her family members. Indeed, the music used adds drama and gravity to the film adaptation to counter the fanciful nature of the story--rooms adorned with violets (or in the case of the film cornflowers), vicars bathing with young men in sacred lakes, half-hysterical declarations of running away to Constantinople.