Kin Selection, Mendel’s “Salutary Principle,” and the Fate of Characters in Forster’s The Longest Journey

At the end of E. M. Forster’sThe Longest Journey(1907), Rickie Elliot is killed by a train as he saves his half-brother Stephen by pushing him off the rails. It is, John Colmer exclaims, an “extraordinary” ending (“The Longest Journey” 63), and it has been criticized for too neatly resolving a convoluted plot and for cavalierly disposing of its protagonist. Even queer theorists, who have so radically reread and contextualized the plot’s apparent incoherencies, see Rickie’s sacrifice as a betrayal of the text’s queerness. Accepting these concerns, this chapter takes a new look at the novel, attending to its