“Congenital homosexuality.”
Lasker Jones has just diagnosed the novel’s protagonist, Maurice. Doctor? Psychologist? Psychiatrist? Not exactly. Lasker Jones is a hypnotist who confesses immediately after the diagnosis that he is successful with about half his patients. Successful at what? Curing homosexuality through hypnotic treatment.
"I think I shall not marry."
A young Maurice has just been treated to a kindly, instructive, and comprehensive lecture on the facts of life by Mr. Ducie, his schoolmaster. Ducie has been straightforward, but professional and by the end Maurice has become aware of God’s plan for creating man and woman…in that order. His reply draws a smile from Ducie and the promise to invite Maurice and his wife to dinner a decade later. But Maurice is being honest even though he is not fully aware of why. Like Ducie, it would be easy for any reader to assume it is merely a natural response upon being exposed to such trauma or reality.
He wished Christianity would compromise with him a little and searched the Scriptures for support. There was David and Jonathan; there was even the "disciple that Jesus loved." But the Church's interpretation was against him.
Unlike Maurice, Clive’s torturous relationship with homosexual impulses is made more complex by a belief in religion. Finding no solace or support in his desperate search to find some kind of scriptural sign to proceed, he ultimately turns his back on Christianity and goes backward in time where the classics of ancient civilization provide a much brighter hope.
"I say, in your rounds here, do you come across unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort?"
"No, that's in the asylum work, thank God.”
“Young Jowitt” is the only doctor Maurice knows and he seeks him out in a subtle attempt to discover if there is a “cure” for his “condition.” He manages to find a situation in which he can make the casual inquiry above without drawing undo suspicion only to be immediately disheartened with his friend’s reply which seem to confirm his own fears that the “Oscar Wilde sort” eventually wind up in an asylum along with the rest of those deemed incurable.
