For Maurice, the “greenwood”—the half-historical, half-mythical setting of the Robin Hood legend—symbolizes freedom from societal constraints. The fantasy first appears in connection to Maurice’s sense that he too is an “outlaw”: “He was an outlaw in disguise. Perhaps among those who took to the greenwood in old time there had been two men like himself—two” (135). Maurice’s wistfulness reflects the thought’s seeming impossibility; although his being gay places him at odds with English law, it’s the nature of modernity that no person or place can physically leave society and its laws behind. As he tells Lasker-Jones, “England [is] all built over and policed” (212).

In its idealization of a bygone era, Maurice’s greenwood fantasy therefore parallels Clive’s Hellenism. There are significant differences between the two, however. Clive’s interest flows from the fact that Classical Greece condoned certain kinds of romantic and/or sexual relationships between men. This was not true of premodern England, at least after its Christianization; in fact, as Lasker-Jones notes, sex between men was a capital crime throughout much of English history.

It’s therefore all the more striking that the novel favors Maurice’s fantasy over Clive’s; Forster depicts Maurice’s relationship with Alec as an escape into “big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach […] full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky” (191).