Every year, incredible amounts of time and money are spent on sexual harassment and divorce court cases. Perhaps a male supervisor made an unwanted advance on a female employee because he thought her body language or clothing invited a sexual encounter. Or perhaps a married couple couldn't understand each other's wants and needs, so their relationship didn't work. Ultimately it all boils down to one simple observation: Since the beginning of time, men and women have had difficulty communicating with each other. Whether it's spoken words, written words, body language, songs, or other methods, sometimes messages just don't get through from one person to another. Although these problems are not specific to communication only between males and females, they tend to occur especially between the sexes. In fact, communication difficulties are so common that writers often include them in novels written in both the past and present. E. M. Forster's early 20th century novel, A Room with a View, is no exception. In his novel, Forster does more than simply present the lack of communication between two specific people. Indeed, by including the failed musical communication between Cecil and Lucy, it ultimately proves that communication is an essential part of a healthy relationship between a man and a woman in general and without it love simply cannot develop. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To begin with, Cecil was the main cause of the failure of communication with Lucy in A Room with a View, ultimately causing the breakdown of his relationship with her. Cecil always saw Lucy as a work of art and to him she was an object, not a living person; she was always something, not someone in his mind. Because of Cecil's selfishness in his relationship with Lucy, he never truly understood the connection she had to his music, particularly Beethoven. Music had the incredible ability to clear Lucy's mind of all her problems and see and evaluate her life more clearly. Music played an important role in the communication between Cecil and Lucy at Cecil's mother's dinner. "The grandchildren asked her to play the piano. She played Schumann. 'Now a little Beethoven,' she called Cecil... She shook her head and played Schumann again. The melody rose, uselessly magical. It broke; it was taken up again broken..." (Forster 140). Cecil simply couldn't see that the music Lucy played on the piano was her passion, and as exemplified in the passage, Cecil asked Lucy to play something that was very dear to her: Beethoven. Lucy couldn't expose herself to people at the party; he couldn't let strangers see his true self and his passion for music. In fact, Schumann's least invasive piece could hardly have been played at the party. Therefore, Cecil's inability to understand Lucy's primary method of communication, piano music, demonstrated that he did not understand her as a person. This made Cecil the root cause of communication failure between the two because a relationship, much less love, cannot thrive without mutual understanding, and understanding cannot come without extensive communication. Not only was Cecil the root cause of the communication problems in his relationship. with Lucy, his inability to see these issues ultimately damaged their relationship irreparably. Speaking to his mother after the party, Cecil unknowingly demonstrated that he did not understand that Lucy's small act of defiance in not playing Beethoven for her friends was actually a communication problem: "'But his music!' he exclaimed. “His, 1989.