Maurice

“‘Good Heavens...thank God...the tide’s rising.’ And suddenly, for an instant of time, the boy despised him. ‘Liar,’ he thought. ‘Liar, coward, he’s told me nothing.’”

The sex education Mr. Ducie provides Maurice with sets the tone for much of the novel. Maurice struggles to “relate” to what Ducie tells him, presumably because he already dimly senses his attraction to men. Furthermore, Ducie’s panic when he realizes he didn’t scratch out the diagrams he’d drawn belies his earlier claim that “one mustn’t make a mystery of [sex]” (14) and implies that there’s actually an enormous amount of secrecy and shame surrounding the topic. Taken together, these two facts largely account for Maurice’s later struggles with his sexuality, which society treats as so taboo that Maurice initially lacks the terminology to even understand or articulate his orientation.

“[T]here were so many boys of his type—they formed the backbone of the school and we cannot notice each vertebra. He did the usual things—was kept in, once caned, rose from form to form on the classical side till he clung precariously to the sixth, and he became a house prefect, and later a school prefect and member of the first fifteen. […] Having been bullied as a new boy, he bullied others when they seemed unhappy or weak, not because he was cruel but because it was the proper thing to do. In a word, he was a mediocre member of a mediocre school, and left a faint and favourable impression behind.” 

Maurice is by design an unremarkable character whose only real distinguishing feature is his sexual orientation. Since Maurice only realizes that he’s gay while at Cambridge, he’s especially unremarkable in the novel’s early chapters, where he’s indistinguishable from any other Sunnington student. The passage therefore strikes a cautionary note on the societal pressure to conform, and the unresisting way in which most people do conform, even when it hurts themselves or others; it’s only Maurice’s inability to conform that ultimately shakes him out of his complacency, and most people lack that incentive.