Comedy in “Where Angels Fear to Tread”: through the lenses of Gricean intention-based semantics
Comedy in “Where Angels Fear to Tread”: through the lenses of Gricean intention-based semantics

Summary/Abstract: “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (1905), the first novel by E. M. Forster, hovers indecisively between comedy and prophecy. On the surface, the novel revolves around a widow Lilia Herriton who falls in love with a man named Gino, a handsome Italian much younger than herself on her journey to Tuscany, Italy. But in its deeper sense, it is a depiction of the conflict between the English bourgeois and the Italian villagers; a conflict subsequently turns out to be a class conflict rather than a conflict between North and South. Even though the novel itself is considered a social comedy, what is most intriguing about the novel is its ambiguity in its comedy. Correspondingly, this paper aims to unveil the comic aspects in the novel by the use of H. Paul Grice’s intention-based semantic perspectives, a title previously attributed as ‘non-natural meaning’. In order to shed psychological light on the semantic realm of the conversations among individuals, Grice proposed the Cooperative Principle and the Maxims of Conversation, a norm governing all cooperative human interactions. Since all four conversational maxims such as maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relation and maxim of manner deal specifically with communication itself, the comic conversations of the characters in the novel will be exposed in terms of their covert meaning. In conclusion, the ambiguous comic aspects in the novel will be unveiled in terms of Gricean perspectives.

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