“The Hotel Case” Queering the Hotel in E. M. Forster’s “Arthur Snatchfold”
“The Hotel Case” Queering the Hotel in E. M. Forster’s “Arthur Snatchfold”

Summary/Abstract: E. M. Forster’s hotel literature has acquired increasing momentum within contemporary critical discourses on hotels in modernist mobilities, spatio-temporality, and geographies (Thacker 2003, Short 2019). In Forster’s critically neglected and underrepresented short story “Arthur Snatchfold” (1928; published posthumously in 1972), the hotel and its surroundings come to resemble a space of queer possibility that functions as a homoerotically-charged Foucauldian counter-site. With the story progressively acquiring the semblance of a “hotel case” (1987, 108) through the assumption of an inferred, imagined, but never really lived, queer life within the hotel premises, all normative ways of codifying sexual identity in “Arthur Snatchfold” are challenged. To exist meaningfully and move ahead with the exploration of their sexualities, the story’s sexual offenders have to resort to the green belt surrounding what the conventional morality perceives as “that deplorable hotel” (1987, 106). It is the hotel as a peculiar configuration that opens a range of possibilities for transgressive behaviours. This is also suggested in the failed attempts at policing the hotel premises. The hotel erotica in “Arthur Snatchfold” seems, by the same token, to be born out of the tension arising from the modernist urge to spatialize through the heterotopic transport of the protagonists from monochromatic domesticity towards the multihued hotel. In the immediate vicinity of the hotel and, in an illusory sort of way, within the plasticity of the hotel, the protagonists finally find refuge.

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