A Room with a View Essay

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, “… 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, “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,

Cited: "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.