Our very talented Chelsea Allen on tumblr has written a brilliant and in depth character for Maurice Hall.
See a short taster below:
Maurice Hall is brave, so declares his friends at school. ‘A great mistake—he wasn’t brave: he was afraid of the dark. But no one knew this.’
In Edwardian England, Maurice grows up in the suburban upper middle class, with a bright, friendly face, and a good build, although he is not too colossal at games nor at schoolwork. As a boy, he has a distinct sense that he’s being lied to, when his teacher, drawing diagrams on the sand, explains to him the sacrosanct matter of sex. While at his next school, he moves in a most tormenting darkness. What his subconscious hints at makes him believe it’s a lone curse that’s befallen him: a dream, wherein he plays football with a naked George, once a garden boy for the Halls. And a second dream, which speaks to him of a friend whom he does not find in waking. To conceal his mind full of carnal thoughts—his mind which he believes to be most vile, to present himself as a rather empty creature, he’s unkind to his sisters and, because he believes school necessitates it, unkind to his schoolfellows, even the boys therein around whom ‘he would laugh loudly, talk absurdly, and be unable to work.’
Once in Cambridge however, Maurice discovers that in leading others to see he’s dimensionless, he’s been deceiving himself about their nature. People are alive, he sees, with real insides, not vile as his own but insides all the same. And now he softens. It was against his nature to be cruel. He finds Risley, his senior, to be a man with an eccentric inside. Upon meeting him, Maurice, still in undiminished, inarticulable darkness, feels not a want of him as a friend, but that he might be able to help him in some way. And it is in search of him one evening that Maurice Hall meets Clive Durham, and finds himself dwarfed by an intellect which bares his own pretenses, thereby igniting both admiration and self-doubt. Over the terms, he feels the growing intimacy of their friendship, and, to impress Clive, bluffs about Christ’s doctrines to demonstrate that he thinks too. When Clive challenges his beliefs, his defense falls short, but he scarcely minds it, as all this successfully lets Clive maintain an interest in him. The reason why he cares for this interest Maurice desists asking himself. But he does face it, in a most agonizing revelation showing him the beauty he could have had, after Clive has professed his love for him, and he’s acted coldly: ‘Durham! a rotten notion really—’. He faces that he loves, has always loved, men.
For the Maurice movie page click here
