Clive’s journey leads him away from Maurice. After a trip to Greece, Clive suddenly announces that he is “cured” of his homosexuality. He falls in love with a woman, marries her, and settles into a conventional aristocratic life. Maurice is devastated. He loses not only a lover but his anchor.
Forster’s own diary entry from the time is telling: “I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows.” maurice by em forster
This is explicitly highlighted in the novel’s famous closing line, spoken by Maurice to Clive: Clive’s journey leads him away from Maurice
This union forces a final, crucial choice. Forster brilliantly structures the climax around two acts of “crossing.” First, Maurice must cross the rigid line of class. He abandons the safe, neurotic world of Clive—his class, his friends, his career—to join Alec in the “savage” world of the lower orders. Second, and more importantly, he must cross the line of the law and social convention. The novel’s most famous lines capture this: “He had lived in the darkness for so long… He had heard the phrase ‘a happy ending’ but had not conceived that it could be prefaced by the word ‘a.’” Forster argues that happiness is not a generic, universal reward for virtue, but a specific, singular, and often defiant act of claiming one’s own truth. Maurice is devastated
Forster was a master at dissecting the British class system, and in Maurice , he links homophobia with classism. Maurice’s greatest barrier to happiness is not just his sexuality, but his identity as a "gentleman."