The Good Soldier

FORD MADOX FORD
1915

INTRODUCTION

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915) is considered to be his best work, as well as one of the best novels of the twentieth century. The book tells the story of two wealthy couples, one from England and one from America, who befriend each other at a resort town in Germany and return there over more than a decade to continue their friendship. Over the course of the novel, the narrator, John Dowell, finds out more and more details about the complexities of his friends' marriage, and of the strains and responsibilities that life imposes on those who have been born to a life of privilege.

Ford's original title for this book, The Saddest Story, captures the sense of melancholy that surrounds the events that he relates. When it was published in 1915, however, his publishers rejected that title. The final title resounded strongly with audiences when it came out during World War I. If readers expected to find a book about war, though, they were bound to be disappointed. Though Edward Ashburnham, the English husband, does hold a commission in the army, Ford never relates any combat experience. The title ironically refers to the propensity of Edward, and of all members of his social set, to behave according to the implied rules of social behavior and not their emotions.

The Good Soldier has remained in print since its first publication. It is currently available in several editions, including one from Broadview Press published in 2003.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ford Madox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer on December 17, 1873, in Merton, Surrey, England. His father, Francis Hueffer, was a well-known music critic and writer on music. His mother, Catherine, was the daughter of the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. Eventually, after working on a biography of his maternal grandfather, Ford adapted his subject's name and took it as his own.

When he was growing up, Ford's family acquaintances included such literary luminaries as Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. Ford was educated at the Praetorius School, Folkstone. Though he never attended college, he was fluent in several languages and was a prolific writer. His first novel, The Brown Owl, was published when he was eighteen: it was a folk story illustrated by his grandfather. He was married in 1894, at the age of twenty-one, to Elsie Martindale. The marriage was not good from the start and was steeped in scandal. Ford was notoriously unfaithful, at one point having an affair with Elsie's sister, the stress of which caused him to have a nervous breakdown in 1904, leading to his hospitalization. Although he and Elsie separated in 1908, they did not divorce, possibly because of the tenets of Catholicism (Ford had converted to that religion when he was nineteen). They went on instead to lead separate lives, with little connection between them.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Ford met the author Joseph Conrad and formed a friendship. They collaborated on two books: The Inheritors in 1901 and Romance in 1903. Ford went on to write several novels on his own, most notably those in his trilogy The Fifth Queen, about one of Henry VIII's wives. He also started the English Review in 1908. Though he was able to persuade some of the country's most recognized literary stars to publish in it, Ford was forced from his position with the magazine in 1910. That same year, unable to pay child support to Elsie, he spent eight days in prison. Soon after, he started work on The Good Soldier, which was published in 1915.

Ford served in World War I until he suffered shell shock at the Battle of Somme, and was sent home in 1917. He moved to Paris and started another publication, The Transatlantic Review, working on it with the Lost Generation writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Jean Rhys, and Gertrude Stein. Ford's poetry was frequently published, and he was included in the Imagist movement that was started by Pound.

After becoming involved with an American artist, Janice Biala, Ford began dividing his time between Europe and the United States. He was a Visiting Lecturer at Olivet College in Michigan in 1937-1938, and began friendships with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Robert Lowell, and Katherine Anne Porter. It was on a trip back to the continent with Biala that Ford fell ill. He died in Deauville, France, on June 26, 1939, at the age of sixty-six.

PLOT SUMMARY

Part One

The Good Soldier begins with its narrator, John Dowell, telling readers that he and his wife, Florence, were acquainted with Captain and Mrs. Ashburnham for nine years. During that time they would all meet at the German resort town of Bad Nauheim. To the Dowells, the Ashburnhams, Edward and Leonora, seemed the ideal British couple: he owned a large estate that had been in his family for generations, and came to Bad Nauheim for treatment for his weak heart, which had recently caused him to give up his military commission in India. The Dowells had been coming to the resort for four years already because Florence had a weak heart too: she came from a family with heart problems and was too ill to travel from continental Europe.

Dowell gives details out of chronological order. He relates, for instance, the fact that he had returned to America after Florence's death in 1913, and then been asked to come to England and join the Ashburnhams at their estate; after that he tells the story of how the two couples met in 1904, at Bad Nauheim, when they were seated together in the spa's restaurant. He then tells a story about the time before he even met Florence, when she and her uncle and her boyfriend, Jimmy, traveled to Europe, careful of the uncle's own heart ailment. For years, the Dowells and the Ashburnhams associated with each other every year at Bad Nauheim, taking day trips to nearby cities and going out to restaurants.

On one such trip, Florence arranged a visit to an ancient city where Martin Luther once stayed, and where a piece of his original Protest was kept in a glass case in a castle. When they viewed it, Florence touched Edward Ashburnham on the wrist, pointing out that it was this document that separated the English from the lowly Irish, Italians, and Poles, indicating that Edward's Protestantism made him superior to others. Leonora raced from the room in tears; when John caught up with her, she blurted out that she had been insulted because she was an Irish Catholic. John was relieved to find that she was upset about having her religion insulted, having thought the problem stemmed from the touch that passed between his wife and Edward.

He explains how, as he later came to understand, the Ashburnhams came to Bad Nauheim. It was not that Edward had a heart problem after all. Their travels there came as a result of Edward's continuing pattern of infidelity. First, he had made improper advances at a young woman in a railway car, and had been taken to court, dragged through the newspapers, and paid a fine. That incident led him to an affair with an exotic dancer, which caused Edward to spend a large part of his vast estate. To save on expenses, the Ashburnhams left England for India, where Edward took up a military position. There followed an affair with the wife of an army officer, who went on to blackmail Edward. In Burma, he formed an attraction to Maisie Maiden, a young married woman with an actual weak heart. It was when Maisie went to Bad Nauheim, leaving her husband behind, that Edward made up his own heart condition, to follow her.

One morning, Leonora caught Maisie in the hall outside of Edward's room and hit her across the face, thinking that she had spent the night there when in fact she had just gone in while Edward was out to return a grooming kit she had borrowed. Florence, who was already having an affair with Edward, saw Leonora hit Mrs. Maiden, and that night, to show that they were not as wild as they might have seemed, the Ashburnhams sat at the Dowells's table and introduced themselves.

The day that they saw the Luther Protest document was the day they found out, upon returning to Bad Nauheim, that Maisie Maiden had died. She had heard Edward and Florence talking earlier that day and had come to the conclusion that the Ashburnhams had paid her passage to Bad Nauheim for her to be Edward's mistress, in effect purchasing her from her husband. In packing to leave while the party was away, she'd had a heart attack.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• A 1983 adaptation of the novel made for Granada Television under the same title was aired on American television as part of the Masterpiece Theater series on PBS. The television movie was directed by Kevin Billington and stars Robin Ellis, Vickery Turner, Jeremy Brett and Susan Fleetwood. A DVD of the film from Acorn Media includes a biography of Ford Madox Ford.

Part Two

Part Two of the book opens with rumination of the significance of August 4. On August 4, 1899, Florence set off on her world tour with her uncle and Jimmy. On August 4, 1901, she married John Dowell. On that date in 1904, Maisie Maiden died. And on August 4, 1913, Florence died.

Dowell explains that his courtship of Florence was more of a competition with her other suitors. Her aunts and uncle were opposed to their marriage, and so he came to her house with a ladder and they eloped. After running away together they boarded a ship to Europe, and as soon as the ship was out to sea it was caught in a storm: the turbulence supposedly caused a strain on Florence's weak heart. Because of her heart condition, she never slept with Dowell, and kept her bedroom door locked at night to keep thieves out. Later, though, he found out that she had lovers in her room while he was locked out, including Jimmy, who had been living in Europe and extracting blackmail money from her for years. When they arrived in Paris, ostensibly for their honeymoon, she locked John Dowell out and took up with Jimmy again.

Florence began her affair with Edward Ashburnham in 1903, and he chased Jimmy away. Knowing that he was interested in Maisie Maiden, Florence interfered, driving Mrs. Maiden to suicide. In 1913, the Ashburnhams came to Bad Nauheim with Nancy Rufford, a teen-aged girl who was the daughter of a friend. Leonora, knowing that Edward was growing interested in Nancy and that she could fall for him, was careful to not leave them alone together. She also knew that Edward was having an affair with Florence, though, so she sent Florence along with them the one time that she let them go off into a darkened garden together. Florence, thinking that she had come across Edward and Nancy in each other's arms, ran back into the hotel, upset; there, she encountered her husband in conversation with a man who looked up, recognized her, and blurted out that she was the woman he had seen years ago, coming out of the bedroom of a man named Jimmy at five a.m. Florence went to her bedroom and was later found dead. Dowell assumed that she'd had a heart attack, and that the medicine found in her hand was a heart cure: it was only later that Leonora told him that the vial in her hand contained poison. He then found out that she'd never had a heart condition.

Part Three

One of the few things John Dowell remembered from the evening Florence died was telling Leonora that he was now free to marry Nancy Rufford, whom he had not even thought about much before. After Florence's death, Dowell returned to the United States, but soon received a telegram from Edward, asking him to come to England. Right after that, he received another telegram from Leonora with the same request.

Dowell recounts much about the history of the Ashburnhams' life together, including how they came to be married and how Edward's affairs made him vulnerable to blackmail, as well as how Leonora was able to rebuild his financial stability following blackmail and scandal. The events of this section are all alluded to in other parts of the book and are gone over in greater detail here.

Part Four

The mood at Branshaw House, the Ashburnhams's estate, was grim. Leonora knew that Edward loved Nancy, and she loved him. Edward, sick in love but not willing to break social conventions, drank heavily. Nancy looked up to Edward but did not think that he, a married man, could ever think romantically about anyone but his wife. However, Nancy's understanding of marriage changed after she read a newspaper article about a neighbor couple's divorce. Once she realized that she could possibly one day have Edward, she went to his bedroom. He rejected her, and wrote to her father, a military officer in India and an abusive parent, to arrange to send Nancy to live with him. John Dowell, knowing that Nancy was being sent away, asked Leonora if he should offer to marry her, but she knew that he planned on buying a home nearby and could not stand the thought of having the girl Edward loved living so close, so Leonora persuaded Dowell to wait another year. They all said goodbye to Nancy at the train, with no mention of the underlying loves or jealousies. That night, Edward slit his throat with his pen knife.

Leonora ended up marrying a man who had been interested in having an affair with her when she was married. John Dowell traveled to India to find Nancy, only to discover that she had been driven insane when the news of Edward's suicide reached her. He moved her back to Branshaw House and, as the novel ends, he lives with Nancy and some servants, although, in her madness, Nancy never acknowledges his existence.

CHARACTERS

Edward Ashburnham

Edward's official title is Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw House, Branshaw Teleragh. He is thirty-three in 1904, when he meets the Dowells. "Teddy," as his wife Leonora calls him, is the "good soldier" referred to in the novel's title: not only has he recently been active in the military in Burma, but he also displays the characteristics one would expect of a British officer regarding his compassion toward those in need and his willingness to suppress his own desires in order to do what is considered socially proper.

Edward has a weakness for women. He married Leonora at an early age, before he understood his own desires, and suppressed his feelings for other women in order to behave as was expected of an officer. His trouble begins when he tries to console a woman he sees crying on a train and ends up being sued for making improper advances. The negative publicity puts the thought of being unfaithful into his head, and he goes on to have an affair in Monte Carlo with the mistress of the Grand Duke. He gives her large sums of money, and drunkenly gambles away even more when she refuses to see him. In order to avoid bankruptcy, Edward gives control of his estate over to his wife, and agrees to take up active military service and move to India, but there he becomes involved with another woman, Mrs. Basil, whose husband blackmails Edward for years to come. When Edward becomes protective of young, frail Maisie Maiden, he pretends to have a heart problem, and he and Leonora go to the spa at Nauheim. There, Florence Dowell, who has always wanted to marry a titled Englishman, begins an affair with him.

Edward kills himself when he realizes that he is in love with Nancy Rufford, the daughter of a family friend who thinks of him as "Uncle Edward." Unable to live without her but unwilling to corrupt her with an affair, he sends her away to India and slits his throat.

Leonora Ashburnham

Beside John Dowell, who was oblivious to most of what his wife and Edward were up to, Leonora is the one main character who survives at the end of the novel, and so Dowell learns much of what he knows from her. Leonora grew up as one of seven daughters. Her father was an Irish military captain, acquainted with Edward Ashburnham's father but not of his same social class. Edward was given the choice of which Powys daughter he wanted to marry and he chose Leonora, possibly because of a shadow that crossed her face in the group photo he saw of the seven sisters, making her look mysterious.

Because Leonora is an Irish Catholic, she does not believe in divorce. When she becomes aware of Edward's involvements with other women, she does what she can to either separate them (as in the case of Mrs. Basil) or to keep them close, so that she can control their social impact (as with his involvement with Maisie Maiden). She also takes control of his financial affairs when she finds out that he has lost large sums of money, having him sign control of his English estate over to her. She treats the tenants on Edward's estate much more strictly than he ever did. Having come from a poor family, she understands how to economize much more than Edward does.

Bagshawe

Bagshawe is the man John Dowell happened to be idly conversing with when Florence passed by: unaware that she was his wife, Bagshawe blurts out her maiden name in surprise and tells Dowell, in his amazement, that he once saw her coming out of a man's bedroom at five in the morning.

Mrs. Basil

Mrs. Basil was a woman that Edward had an affair with in India. As the wife of an army officer, she was often left alone and bored, and Edward developed a sympathy for her. After their affair ended, her husband, Major Basil, blackmailed Edward, extracting from him a sum of three hundred pounds annually.

Rodney Bayham

Early in the novel, John Dowell relates a conversation in which Leonora tells him that she once tried to have a lover, Bayham, but could not go through with the affair. When she and Edward move back to England at the end of the novel, Rodney Bayham, the man who was nearly her lover, starts giving Florence attention, and by the end of the book she is married to him. Dowell summarizes Rodney's pure ordinariness with the fact that ready-made clothes fit him perfectly.

Carter

Carter is the only relative that is mentioned by name in the book; he is a second nephew, twice removed. Dowell hires investigators to look into Carter's past because he senses that other relatives are apprehensive about it, but it turns out that they find him strange because he is a Democrat. When he dies, Dowell intends to leave his vast fortune to Carter, whom he judges to be a nice, hardworking young man.

Florence Dowell

Florence comes from the Hurlibird family of Philadelphia. She was raised by her maiden aunts, Florence Sr. and Emily. A few years before John Dowell met her, she and her then-current boyfriend, Jimmy, joined her retired uncle on a world cruise. Jimmy stayed in Paris, and Florence continued to send him money. When she returned to Paris on her honeymoon she and Jimmy continued their affair, and he ended up blackmailing her.

Her aunts tried to prevent John Dowell from marrying Florence by hinting at her sexual activity, but he only thought they meant that she was a little bit of a flirt. When they sent her away to their brother's house, he followed, brought a ladder, and Florence eloped with him. Having seen how cautious her uncle was about his own heart condition, she made up a story about being stricken during the honeymoon crossing of the Atlantic, and told Dowell her weak heart would prevent her from crossing the ocean again or ever sleeping with her. She became trapped in her lie because it prevented her from leaving the continent and crossing to England, which was her dream. When she met Edward Ashburnham she became his mistress because he was the type of British nobleman she always wanted to marry.

Having carried on her affair with Edward right under his wife's nose, Florence is destroyed by it. On the same night that she sees Edward walking in private with Nancy Rufford and thinks that he is leaving her for Nancy, she runs into her husband talking with a man whose house she once stayed at with Jimmy. Knowing that the man can make Dowell finally see how promiscuous she is, Florence swallows a poison that she has carried with her for years, ready for such an occasion. Florence lives for the excitement of lies and sexual conquest and dreams of being an English noblewoman, but her false heart disease, which keeps John Dowell attached to her, ends up breaking her lies apart.

John Dowell

John Dowell is the book's narrator, trying to piece together what happened to his wife and friends after the events have already passed him by. Dowell was independently wealthy from inherited money when he met Florence Hurlibird and decided, in a competitive spirit, to out do her other suitors and convince her to marry him. Naïvely, he did not realize that she was sexually active with other men, and he did not question her when she claimed to have come down with a heart problem on their honeymoon. For years, John lived with Florence but slept in a separate bedroom and was never intimate with her.

Dowell sees the Ashburnhams as the ideal of the English couple, and he thinks that he and his wife make a fine set of friends, not realizing that his wife has been sleeping with Edward Ashburnham throughout the nine years of their friendship. The moment in which he realizes what a sexually promiscuous woman Florence is occurs right before her death: Dowell happens to be talking to a man who recognizes her and says, unaware that Dowell is her husband, that he once saw that woman come out of a man's room at five in the morning. Dowell thinks that she died trying to save herself with heart medication, and has to be told by Leonora, much later, that his wife committed suicide.

Within hours of Florence's death, still in a daze, Dowell announces an ambition that he did not even know he had, to marry young Nancy Rufford. When he later joins the Ashburnhams at their English estate, he is as oblivious as ever, planning to marry Nancy without realizing that there is a crisis in the house, since she and Edward are in love. Even after Edward arranges to send her away, in order to prevent himself from destroying his marriage and her life, Dowell intrudes with the innocent question of when Edward thinks he should ask her to marry him. In the end, Dowell is left as a caretaker for Nancy, though she is in a catatonic state. John Dowell is used by his friends and used by his wife, and when there is nobody left, he voluntarily devotes his life to a woman who cannot acknowledge his existence.

John Hurlibird

Florence's Uncle John is a wealthy, generous man. After retiring, he takes a world cruise, and takes his niece and her boyfriend along with him. He takes cases of oranges along with him on the cruise ship, and he gives an orange to almost everyone he meets, as a goodwill gesture. Uncle John believes that he has a heart condition, and is treated for one by a number of physicians: when he dies, his body is donated to a medical college, where it is determined that his heart was fine all along.

Jimmy

Jimmy was Florence's lover when she was young and single. He traveled to Europe with Florence and her uncle, then stayed in Paris, allegedly to write. For years Florence sent him money. When she returned to Europe after she was married to John Dowell, she continued her affair with Jimmy. Dowell believes that Jimmy only went away after Edward Ashburnham became Florence's new lover and beat him up.

Julius

Julius was an old African American who worked for John Dowell when he was single. As Dowell and Florence are leaving for their honeymoon, Julius drops one of Florence's bags, and Dowell goes into a rage; for the rest of their marriage, Florence, who does not understand the relationship between Dowell and Julius, fears that Dowell can be sparked to an uncontrollable temper.

La Dolciquita

In Monte Carlo, Edward has an affair with the mistress of a Grand Duke, who is referred to in the book only as "La Dolciquita." She demands masses of money from him in payment for the money that she would not make if the Grand Duke found out about their affair and cut her off. After she stops seeing him, Edward wastes even more money at the gambling tables, drunk and in despair, until she agrees to have one last fling with him with whatever he has left.

Maisie Maiden

Maisie Maiden is a young woman that Edward Ashburnham developed a romantic interest in, with tragic results. She and Edward met in India, where her husband, Charlie Maiden (whom she refers to as "Bunny"), is serving in the army. She was too poor to go to Bad Nauheim for treatment for her weak heart, so Leonora Ashburnham, thinking that it would get her out of Edward's system, paid for Maisie's passage. Later, though, upon realizing that Edward's past affairs are causing him to pay blackmail, Leonora turns furious upon running into Maisie in the hall outside of her room and strikes her in the face. When Maisie realizes that her expenses were paid so that she could be Edward's mistress, she rushes to return home to her husband, but she has a heart attack while packing and dies. The narrator says that he does not believe that there was ever an actual affair between Maisie and Edward.

Nancy Rufford

Nancy Rufford is a young girl recently out of a convent school. Her father is abusive, and so her mother sends her to live with her old friend Leonora Ashburnham and her husband, Edward, whom Nancy is so close to that she refers to them as her aunt and uncle. While living with the Ashburnhams and traveling with them, Nancy does not realize that Edward is falling in love with her. When his lover Florence Dowell sees Edward and Nancy together, she realizes how he feels toward Nancy and runs away in tears, later committing suicide.

Living at the Ashburnham's estate after Florence's death, Nancy starts to realize that she is falling in love with her "Uncle Edward." She dismisses the idea because he is married to Leonora, but a news article about a local couple becoming divorced makes her realize that couples can break up. She goes to Edward's room one night and offers herself to him, but he turns her away. Immediately afterward he writes to her father in India to take her back. When she is in India, Nancy hears that Edward committed suicide right after she left England, and she is driven mad, unable to recognize who or where she is, repeating the word "shuttlecocks" or expressing her faith in God when she speaks at all.

THEMES

The Confines of Religion

The subject of religion comes up frequently in The Good Soldier. The most relevant place is when religion is used in a climactic moment of the first book, when Leonora, after listening to Florence talk disparagingly about Catholics, races from the room and later exclaims to John Dowell that she is upset because she is a Catholic. The most obvious significance of this event is that Florence has used stereotypes about religions to bait Leonora, insulting her subtly. In the rigid social structure of Edwardian England, Protestantism was considered the "proper" religion, associated with fine breeding and social manners. Catholics, on the other hand, were viewed as being socially inferior. Some of this came from the idea that Protestantism celebrated rationality while the Catholic Church, with its emphasis on saints, relics, and the moral authority of the Pope, emphasized mysticism. Also, Catholicism was associated with poverty: some of this had to do with the fact that Catholicism flourished in countries that had higher rates of poverty, which some viewed as being caused, at least somewhat, by the church's doctrines against birth control (Catholic families, like Leonora's, tend to have many children) and divorce.

The church's position on divorce served to make Florence's jibe at Leonora even more effective. In telling Edward that the Protest is an important part of his character, she sends her lover an implied message: that Protestants like himself are not as trapped in unwanted marriages as a Catholic like Leonora might think. Florence uses this occasion to pretend to talk about a historical document, knowing that the ability to divorce is an issue that separates Edward and Leonora.

The subject reappears later in the book, controlling Nancy's relationship with Edward. Having gone through the same Catholic training as Leonora—they were educated at the same convent—she originally views Edward's marriage to Leonora as an immutable fact. They are a couple in her mind, and so she does not even think of Edward as a potential lover. It is only after she reads about the divorce of the Brands in the paper that she realizes that divorce is in fact a part of life, that the Church of England was formed by Henry VIII to make divorce an acceptable practice. Once she goes beyond her Catholic training and sees divorce as a possibility, Nancy thinks that she and Edward could have a future together, and she goes to him in the night and offers herself to him.

Shades of Infidelity

Ford shows several levels of infidelity in this novel. The lowest level is the characters who are reluctant about breaking their marriage vows. Leonora, for example, tries to have an affair with Rodney Bayham but finds that she cannot go through with it, while Maisie Maiden is swept up by Edward's charms and nearly succumbs to him before racing back to her husband. At the other extreme are characters like Florence and Jimmy, who have an affair, leave it when it is inconvenient, and then resume it when she returns to Europe on her honeymoon, showing contempt for her new husband.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Write two stories about something that happened to you: one in direct chronological order, and the other in the disjointed style of reminiscence that Ford uses in The Good Soldier.
• One of the main causes of friction in the Ashburnham marriage stems from their different religions; namely, Leonora's Roman Catholic upbringing forbids her from being divorced. Pick a religious group that you are not familiar with and write a report on its position on divorce.
• Two World Wars involving Germany have been fought since this novel was written. Write a history of the town of Bad Nauheim, where much of the novel's action takes place, and how it has changed throughout the twentieth century as a result of World Wars I and II.
• This story takes place in a time when transportation and communications were much more limited than they are today. Choose one aspect of modern technology (such as air travel, instant messaging, or web-based medical information) that you feel would have most affected the events of the Dowells' and Ashburnhams' lives, and write a report explaining how you think the plot would have been changed because of it.

Edward Ashburnham represents the range of types of infidelity in this book. He is sentimental and caring with Maisie Maiden; he is direct and almost business-like when he is seeing Mrs. Basil; and he conducts a wild sexual relationship with the Grand Duke's mistress. When it comes to Nancy Rufford, though, he struggles to avoid an affair, even after she comes to his bedroom at night to offer herself to him. Edward's behavior might have less to do with respect for his marriage than with his respect for Nancy's purity.

Sickness, Real and Imagined

In this novel, there are four characters who are said to be suffering from heart disease, but only one, Maisie Maiden, actually does have a weak heart. Among the others, two use their supposed infirmities as excuses to manipulate others.

Florence's uncle, John Hurlibird, honestly believes that he has a heart problem. He retires from business and would like to live a life of leisure, but he feels forced to take a trip around the world so that his sisters will not view him as being lazy. Throughout the trip he takes precautions to care for his heart and follows the medical advice of his physicians. It is only after he is dead, when he leaves his heart to science, that it is discovered that his heart was fine.

Florence, on the other hand, having learned about heart disease from watching her uncle, pretends that she has a heart problem. This allows her to shut her new husband, John, out of her life immediately, telling him that the physical strain of sex might kill her. He leaves her alone at night, and her lovers come to her room. Her phony heart disease works against her, though, when she is not able to fulfill her life's ambition and cross the Channel to England because she has already spread the story that a boat ride would strain her too much.

Maisie Maiden's weak heart forces her to leave her husband in India and go for treatment to Bad Nauheim. This separation leaves her vulnerable to the romantic interests of Edward Ashburnham, who feigns his own heart disease in order to follow her to the spa. When Maisie finds out that the Ashburnhams paid her husband to finance her trip, she feels that they have set her up to be Edward's lover: in her haste to pack and leave, she strains her weak heart and dies. True illness makes one weak and vulnerable, but false illness gives the socially powerful the opportunity to be even more pampered than they normally are.

STYLE

Limited Point of View

Most of the structure of this novel stems from the fact that its narrator, John Dowell, is trying to piece together the significance of events that happened in his life. As he understood things up until his wife Florence's death, he had been involved in a stable marriage for years with a woman suffering from heart disease. Every year, at the Bad Nauheim spa, they renewed their acquaintance with the Ashburnhams, a British couple of old wealth and sturdy, dependable character. It is not until the Ashburnhams have telegrammed him to cross the ocean again and join them at their estate that he learns the realities of his life, including that during their marriage his wife was sleeping with her old boyfriend Jimmy, and had been sending him money for years; that her alleged heart disease was a willful, malicious lie; that Edward Ashburnham would have lost his money and all of his prestige if his wife had not taken control of his life; and that Florence did not die taking medicine that would save her life, but instead poisoned herself. Over the course of the book, these details unravel, forcing readers to readjust their understanding of John Dowell's situation gradually, as Dowell himself does.

Uneven Chronicle

If readers find this novel confusing, it might be because it is told out of chronological order. Ford uses the novel's structure to simulate the experience of, as the narrator describes it, a man sitting in a room and telling the events to a friend. As a speaker might do, the narrator, Dowell, skips backward and forward in time, going over the same stories again and again after details are filled in. A point like Edward's near-financial ruin might be explained once when Dowell is telling readers about how the Ashburnhams came to Bad Nauheim, for instance, and then told again, with more background, when he is talking about Leonora's personality and her need to control her husband's life.

The order is less chronological than thematic, as if the teller of the tale is being reminded of things while he is speaking. Maisie Maiden, for instance, is mentioned several times before readers know her actual place in the sequence of events. Dowell's marriage to Florence, which could be argued to be the beginning of the whole series of events, comes in the middle of the tale, after readers have seen them as a contented couple of tourists and have then had a chance to piece together Florence's deceitful nature. To some extent, Dowell's style of referring to events long before they are actually explained could be thought of as a form of foreshadowing, but he does not make them seem like clues about what is to come. Instead, the jumps in his narrative forward to the future then back to the past simulate the feeling of memory.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Edwardian Era

The Edwardian Era is that period in English history when Edward VII, the son of Queen Victoria, ruled England. It is seen as a bridge between the worldview of the Victorian Era and the harsh reality that came with the outbreak of World War I, in 1914.

Queen Victoria ruled the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for a long time, from 1837 to 1901. Characteristics of her personality came to define the cultural mood of the time. To this day, the word Victorianism is used to describe a rigid class system; vast economic chasms between the rich and poor; repressed sexuality; and a strict code of manners. While the Industrial Age took place during Victoria's reign, bringing great technological advances, the era is still characterized as one when social attitudes looked to the past and toward conserving tradition.

By contrast, the Edwardian Era is looked at as a time when England sought to shake off tradition and embrace the future. After having the same monarch for nearly sixty-five years, more than most people's lifetimes, the dawn of the new century brought a fresh face to the British Empire: although change of the country's mood was not overnight, there are still particular elements that make the Edwardian Era distinct.

Unlike Victoria, who, especially in her later years, remained very narrow in her contacts with the world, Edward loved travel. As such, newspapers reporting on his travels introduced British citizens to the ways of peoples all over the globe, and people in foreign lands became acquainted with the British. This curiosity about the world coincided with advances in travel technology that had developed at the end of the nineteenth century: rail lines were extended to remote areas that were previously unreachable; ocean liners gained in weight, capacity, and speed, culminating in the historic launch of the Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, killing 1,500. The quick development of the airplane after the Wright Brothers' first flight in 1903 further prodded interest in travel.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1915: Florence Dowell can see the coast of England from the shore of France, but she cannot go there because of her imagined heart ailment. Indeed, the only means of transportation between the coast of France and the coast of England is by taking a boat across the English Channel.

  Today: Since the Channel Tunnel was completed in 1994, trains run regularly between the two countries.

• 1915: Divorce is available, but very uncommon in upper-crust British society.

  Today: The social stigma against divorce is practically forgotten. The Prince and Princess of Wales were divorced in 1996 and the Duke and Duchess of York were divorced in the same year.

• 1915: A person could convincingly fake a chronic heart condition simply by learning to mimic the symptoms of such a condition.

  Today: Advanced diagnostic testing allows doctors to examine the heart itself, and not have to rely only on the patient's word.

While the Edwardian period was marked by social progress, it was also a time of strict class divisions. People born "of society" could expect to hold their social positions throughout their lives, barring any great catastrophe, while those who were born of the lower classes found that even the accumulation of wealth did not guarantee them admission to the upper social echelon. The unwritten rules about who one associated with and how one behaved oneself were drilled into some people from birth, leaving others to wonder what it would take to become socially prominent.

The Edwardian Era did not necessarily end with Edward's death in 1910. The mood of the times continued. Most historians use the term Edwardian to talk of the period right up to the beginning of World War I. The war changed much that had been stable about the British Empire through Victoria's and Edward's reigns. Colonies changed hands, and in the bombing of England, fortunes were lost. Children born to wealth and privilege found themselves faced with the horrors of the new weapons of war, including new, powerful bombs dropped from planes and chemical warfare. The lines between classes blurred during the war, which brought suffering to all.

The Great War

The social stability of the Edwardian Era was irretrievably broken in 1914, when the world exploded into the first of two World Wars in the twentieth century that changed western civilization. The political structure across Europe had been in place for almost a hundred years, since the reign of Napoleon. By 1914, governments across the globe had allied themselves with other governments, dividing into two basic groups: the Triple Entente, composed of France, Russia, and Great Britain, and the Central Axis, which was led by the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Tensions between these political factions was high when, on June 28, 1914, a Bosnian Serb student assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Austro-Hungary demanded that Serbia find those responsible for the assassination, and, soon, determining that Serbia was not moving the investigation along quickly enough, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Due to a mutual defense pact, Russia began mobilizing its troops, and as it did, Germany, an ally of Austro-Hungary, declared war on Russia, and then on France. Soon all of Europe was involved. By August, the navies of opposing armies were fighting each other as far away as the Pacific Ocean, and ground troops were in conflict across Africa. Italy entered the war in 1915, and the United States became actively involved in 1917.

The scope of the Great War, as it was known at the time, is hardly imaginable today. Approximately twenty million people died as a result of the fighting, and slightly more suffered serious injuries. The Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian empires were broken up. A number of countries, notably Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland, became independent states for the first time in a century. Great Britain prospered in the period after the war ended in 1918, taking control of several African colonies from Italy. But the treaties that ended the fighting were unstable and eventually led to the rise of the German Nazi party in the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in the Second World War, which was even more traumatic to international order.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The Good Soldier is generally considered to be Ford's best work, as well as one of the best novels of the twentieth century. At the time of its publication in 1915, though, there were some critics who disliked aspects of the novel. Some reviewers found the structure too confusing, while others objected on moral grounds, feeling that it promoted promiscuity. Theodore Dreiser, himself one of the enduring novelists of the twentieth century, wrote in a 1915 New Republic article (reprinted in Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage) that he feels "with all its faults of telling, it is an honest story, and there is no blinking of the commonplaces of our existence which so many find immoral and make such a valiant effort to conceal." That same year, novelist Rebecca West praised the book in a Daily News article (also reprinted in Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage), noting that "it is as impossible to miss the light of its extreme beauty and wisdom as it would be to miss the full moon on a clear night." West goes on to praise the novel's cleverness and "the obvious loveliness of the color and cadence of its language."

The novel's literary importance has grown over the years, and in 1951, there was a resurgence of interest in Ford marked by the release of new editions of all of his major works. Critic Mark Schorer, in an introduction to a reprinted edition of the novel (reprinted as a stand-alone piece in Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford),

poses the question of whether The Good Soldier should be considered a "novelist's novel," or something that would be more pleasing to writers than to members of the general public. Schorer's own answer to the question is that the book's power is not limited to writers: "The Good Soldier, like all great works, has the gift of power and remorse."

The enduring power of this book is evident in the fact that critics continue to return their attention to it. Critic and novelist A. S. Byatt wrote in Passions of the Mind (1991) that she considers the tone of Ford's prose in The Good Soldier to be particularly powerful, noting that the "combination of the precisely, evocatively lyrical, or vivid, with the flat tone of normality … is one of the glories of the book. The others are the manipulation of the time-shift, and the difference between revelation by dialogue and terrible act."

CRITICISM

David Kelly

Kelly teaches literature and creative writing at two colleges in Illinois. In this essay on The Good Soldier, Kelly examines the significance of the book's brief final segment and how it affects the reader's understanding of all that came before it.

In the last few pages of his 1915 masterpiece The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford presents a strange little coda that is not anticipated and seems unnecessary. Yet, if one thinks about it, the coda serves to give new definition to the entire story that precedes it. At this point, the novel seems over, strategically and emotionally, with nothing more to tell. The characters who are going to die have died, and the futures of those who are going to live have been accounted for. Leonora Ashburnham is widowed, remarried, and expecting a son; the book's narrator, John Dowell, is also widowed, living in his ancestral land of England, and once more caring for a beautiful invalid who can never be a true companion to him. Florence and Edward, the spouses who habitually betrayed Leonora and Dowell, have both committed suicide. The story lines have come to an end, and yet the narrator decides to add a description about Edward's death.

This abrupt turn, and the brief segment of not quite two pages that it introduces, is significant on several levels. For one thing, it would have to be significant in any story to have the death of one of the four principle characters brought up, especially when the narrator brings it up casually, as an afterthought. Of course, Edward Ashburnham's death could not be insignificant: a good case could be made that, as the character who brings the most conflict into the lives of his wife and the Dowells, Edward is the most significant figure in the book. The novel centers around him. Dowell, the passive narrator, is a man so incurious about life that his wife is able to carry on affairs for years right under his nose, without his knowledge, keeping him locked out of her bedroom. Edward, on the other hand, is thirsty for life. He goes from one woman to the next, but he also is bound by a moral code so strong that it makes him send the one true love of his life, Nancy Rufford, back to her abusive father, knowing that her fate would be even worse if she stayed with him. In short, Edward is simply not a forgettable character, and for Dowell to pretend that he nearly forgot the night that Edward cut his throat is quite a stretch of credulity.

Given Edward's prominence in the novel, it would be more likely that his suicide would be the climax of the book than an afterthought. The entire book, though, works against that effect. For one thing, there is no element of surprise about his death. Rather than keeping readers wondering what fate will befall Edward Ashburnham, Ford has Dowell talking about him in the past tense throughout the story, and he is referred to as a dead man in the first pages of the first chapter; the fact that he will slit his own throat is largely out in the open.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Written as a companion piece to a Public Broadcasting Service series of the same name, Juliet Gardiner's Manor House: Life in an Edwardian Country House (2003) provides insight into the sort of life led by Edward and Leonora, and aspired to by Florence.
• Another novel by Ford, Parade's End, is often considered one of the finest novels ever written about World War I. It is a large, sprawling book, a compilation of four distinct novels, brought together to document the vanishing pre-war generation. Originally published in separate editions from 1924 through 1928, the complete volume is most recently available in a Carcanet Press edition of 2007.
• Arthur Mizener's biography of Ford, The Saddest Story (1971), is one of the most complete chronicles of the author's life ever written.
• Ford is just one of the many towering literary figures profiled in Ernest Hemingway's memoir of life in Paris during the 1920s. A Moveable Feast (1964) was the last book published during Hemingway's lifetime.
• In his 2000 book, Modernism, Peter Childs refers frequently to The Good Soldier, as well as other works by Ford, to explain the shift in literary sensibilities that came about in the post-war era.

In the final chapters of the book, readers can see his foretold fate approaching as Edward lives his final weeks in wretched misery. The question of his death is one of "when," not "if." In this sense, his actual death is irrelevant enough to slip by without notice: not his death itself, really, but the moment that it occurred. Edward's demise is such a strong presence throughout the book that the fact of its actual arrival seems a petty, minor detail.

What the story lacks, though, up to those closing pages, is a strong display of Edward Ashburnham's dignity. He is seen throughout the book as a user of women and a pawn of women, a drunk, a blowhard, a foolish gambler and a sentimental landlord, and, most prominently, as a man who only retains his self-esteem when he submits himself to the wife he betrayed. He kills himself because of his longing for the girl who calls him "Uncle Edward." Readers know that much by the time they reach the end of the book. What they do not guess from the long journey through Dowell's narrative is that John Dowell, at their last meeting, would come to see himself and Edward Ashburnham as virtually one and the same.

In this coda of the last two pages, Dowell reveals such absolute empathy with Edward that he understands, with just a glance, Edward's intention to kill himself. Even more significantly, he knows that Edward's decision is the right one. This is not necessarily a foregone conclusion. The life of a British lord, after all, does still have its value. Edward is still very wealthy; he has his marriage to Leonora, which, flawed and limp as it is, at least is not openly hostile; he has a mission, even, in protecting the tenants whose families have been on his land for generations from falling victim to Leonora's heartless efficiency.

Of course, by this point in the novel, Edward has admitted that he will never have Nancy Rufford as his own—not because of law or social pressures or objections from his wife or even resistance from Nancy herself, but due solely to his own sense of moral propriety. Loss of a love does not necessarily, though, lead to a life that is not worth continuing. Edward apparently feels that it does. It might seem like a melodramatic view, but meek, cuckolded John Dowell, who spent years held at a distance from his own wife and will spend eternity held at a distance from young Nancy, agrees with him completely.

What this brief section about Edward's death does, ultimately, is to make the reader empathize with Edward's choice, and understand above and beyond all reason that his choice to take his life is a reasonable one. Edward, the mechanistic "good soldier," is humanized here, at last. He becomes flesh and blood, and not just a staid, repressive tool of duty. In these last two pages, Ford creates an actual scene, with descriptions of Edward's voice, his skin, his hair. Actual lines of dialog are exchanged. The handwriting on the telegram is rendered with detail, as is Edward's suit and his penknife.

The depth of this last scene is best understood in contrast to the shallowness of the narrative in the previous two hundred and seventy pages. The novel's narrative is styled to resemble the musings of a man sitting in a country cottage and telling his story to a friend, interrupted by the wind and the roar of the sea, and it does this job so well that it comes out being just as insubstantial as such a conversation would be. Lines of dialog, when they do occur, are isolated, very seldom coming in pairs or following the back-and-forth flow that a normal conversation would. Objects and people are described, sometimes in great detail, but the narrative does not stay with any of them for long, and is likely as not to jump backward a decade or two in the next paragraph.

Throughout most of the book, Ford is telling the general story of the lives of his main characters. In the last scene, however, he has an important event to relate: it is a small, quiet moment, but that is all the more reason that he tells the story of Dowell's last meeting with Edward with such care and delicacy. There is just one scene earlier in the book that can compare in its attention to detail, and to moment-by-moment attention: the scene when the two couples, Dowells and Ashburnhams, take an excursion out to the town of M—, where they visit the castle that holds a fragment of Luther's Protest. Like the final scene, this one flirts with mystery, being ruled by passions that are left unspoken. Florence's dig at Leonora is patently offensive to anyone who is aware of what it would mean to a Roman Catholic like Leonora to hear her praise the Anglican split from the Catholic Church—an awareness that Edward, apparently, lacks. For those aware of its significance, it seems just as portent, as fraught with significance, as Edward's taking out his penknife when his life is clearly over. In the first case, Leonora runs away, filled suddenly with the horrifying realization that Florence is flaunting the fact that she is Edward's mistress: it is the most spontaneous action in the book. In the final scene, Dowell is flooded just as instantly with the realization that Edward intends to kill himself, but he doesn't move a muscle. He does nothing. Dowell is as passive a character as they come.

And it is Dowell's passivity that allows Ford to make readers feel what it is like to be Edward Ashburnham. The link between the two men, as Dowell notes it in the book's final paragraph, is that they are both sentimental people. The meaning of this is unclear, though it seems to have something to do with the fact that they are each willing to behave according to emotions that they cannot, and will not, ever express. Whatever it means, the main significance is that it is something they have in common: a moral code. If Dowell had directly explained that he saw his friend's intention to commit suicide, readers could find this lack of action morally questionable, especially if the link established in the last scene was not presented. Dowell can let Edward die because he knows exactly how he feels.

If not for this final coda, the story would end at the most recently recorded point of John Dowell's life, leaving readers to think about his sad relationship with Nancy, doting on her in ways she can never appreciate, having been driven mad by love for another man. This would be a sad ending. But in bringing attention back to Edward Ashburnham, and establishing him as the man John Dowell would be if he had the courage of his convictions, Ford has made a sad story that much more depressing.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Good Soldier, in Novels for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Julie Gordon-Dueck

In the following article, Gordon-Dueck takes a psychoanalytical approach to interpreting the characters in The Good Soldier.

In The Good Soldier John Dowell, as narrator, struggles to understand what has transpired in his relationships with his wife, Florence, and their friends, Edward and Leonora Ashburnham, over a nine year period. Dowell's quest for this knowledge is precipitated by discoveries of infidelity and suicide which challenge his long-standing belief that the upright appearances of these individuals represented their genuine natures. Baffled by the incongruence between appearances and internal motives, Dowell desires to know what truly lurks in the "heart" of human nature. More specifically, however, Dowell is struggling to come to terms with Carl Jung's concept of the "shadow." The shadow is broadly known as the deepest, most primitive part of the psyche, an archetype inherited from prehuman ancestors which exists in the unconscious and contains all the animal instincts and respective tendencies toward immorality, aggression, and passion. This essay will explore aspects of Dowell's arduous journey with the shadow by discussing his initial encounter with the shadow, his experiences with the shadow in others, and the gradual synthesis of his own shadow into his psyche which provides him with greater insight into himself and others.

The nine year Dowell/Ashburnham friendship provides a natural catalyst for Dowell's encounter with the shadow, for it is a "young-middle-aged affair" which occurs while Dowell is 36-45, Florence is 30-39, Edward is 33-42, and Leonora is 31-40. Jung posited that middle-age, which he believed begins between the ages of 35-40, marked the time of life when one most fully encounters the shadow. Prior to mid-life, the individual is typically focused on establishing a role in society in order to survive. Most of one's [energy] is consciously invested in building the "persona," the archetypal public self, while stifling the instincts of the unconscious shadow. Although the shadow is frequently identified by its destructive/aggressive potential, it equally serves as a dynamic reservoir of creativity, passion, and imagination. By making the shadow conscious, enriching opportunities for improved insight, awareness of the larger world, and personality synthesis are possible. As a result, prior ideals and beliefs are often challenged and replaced by new ones. Jung compares middle-age to the sun's position at noon: "At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all ideals and values that were cherished in the morning. The sun falls in contradiction to itself. It is as though it should draw in its rays, instead of emitting them" (Jung 106).

As he begins to write his story, Dowell, at 45, is overwhelmed by his encounter with the features of the shadow he has discovered through Florence's and Edward's affair. Being confronted with the primal in these persons forces him to begin considering his own shadow, even if initially at an unconscious level. While this encounter would be difficult for anyone, it is especially difficult for Dowell, for he presents with what Jung referred to as an "inflation of the persona," the over-identification with the persona at the expense of under-developed parts of the personality, such as the shadow. John Sanford discusses the manner in which Jung compared initially facing the shadow with alchemy. When one first perceives the shadow, it is like the stage of "melanosis" in which "everything turns black inside the vessel containing all the alchemical elements" until eventually there is movement toward the creative center of the self, a more realistic self-awareness is gained, and the "false persona" begins to dissipate (qtd. in Miller 23). Dowell reflects this process through the repeated phrase, "it is all darkness," which is especially prominent toward the beginning of the story but resurfaces throughout the narrative along with continual images of darkness and light as Dowell plunges deeper into his encounter with the shadow. Dowell also acknowledges that meeting the shadow is a type of "paradise lost" when he describes the date of Florence's suicide as "the last day of absolute ignorance and perfect happiness."

Dowell's inflated persona is revealed in his lifstyle and perceptions of himself and others. Dowell is initially a rather dull and amorphous character. His personality exemplifies that when the shadow is sacrificed to the persona, there is a cessation of spontaneity, creativity, strong emotions, and deep insights. Dowell seems to have no motives, ambitions, or passions. He describes himself as having no job, no family connections, and no real passion for Florence. He simply wanders into her life and marries her. He does whatever Florence wants, and while there is some nobility in his loyalty and care for her, he does not give the impression that his commitment was an active choice, but rather something to fill his time and give him an identity within the conventions of society. Dowell's lack of awareness of his shadow and his inflated persona can be seen in his early description of himself as completely noble: "For I solemly avow that not give him an identity within conventions of society. Dowell's lack of awareness of his shadow and his inflated persona can be seen in his early description of himself as completely noble: "For I solemly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted at an impropriety in my conversation in the whole of my days; and more than that, I will vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life."

Dowell's naive perceptions of others, which he compulsively reviews throughout his story, suggest that he has spent most of his life relying on the personas of other individuals to define his world view as much as he relies on his own persona to define his total identity. Particularly in the first few sections of the novel. Dowell consistently refers to himself, Florence and the Ashburnhams as "good people." He describes the Ashburnhams as "the model couple," Florence as "too good to be true," and frequently refers to Edward as "perfect." He further confirms their civility by elaborately describing their respective backgrounds of wealth and privilege.

Several literary qualities in The Good Soldier reflect Dowell's struggle to accept and synthesize the shadow more fully into his personality. The story's full title, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, already embodies Dowell's central conflict. The word "good" connotes the concept of the persona, while "passion" suggests the shadow. Indeed, it is the confused exploration and eventual acceptance of these polarities that Dowell confronts on his journey toward self-knowledge throughout the novel. Dowell's choice to write his story signifies his willingness to take action, something he has not done before in his life. Furthermore, it is a creative process which can tap into his imagination and thereby lead him into the further depths of the shadow. The loose chronology by which Dowell conveys his story parallels the non-linear time dimension of the shadow and the unconventional manner by which its contents seep into Dowell's consciousness. The movement between different perspectives as Dowell tells his story mirrors his intrapsychic movement from complete darkness toward greater awareness and integration. The limited, first person view conveys the intimacy of Dowell's interior journey of the mind.

Dowell's use of various images describe how his confrontation with aspects of the shadow in Florence and the Ashburnhams initially disrupt his psychic equilibrium. He compares his discoveries of infidelity and suicide to witnessing "the sack of a city or the failing to pieces of a people." He notes that the "breaking up of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event," while the seeming relational stability "vanishes in four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks". Still in shock, and struggling with the cruel deception of appearance in the relationships, he states: "It was like a minuet … yet I can't believe it's gone … it was a prison—a prison full of screaming hysterics …" Overall, Dowell's distress is actually positive, for his psyche must become somewhat dismantled in order to acknowledge and begin to accept the presence of the shadow.

Dowell also asks many questions, hesitates making any definite statements, and contradicts himself several times, especially in the early stages of his story when he is experiencing the most shock and psychic disarray. He knows the Ashburnhams "with an extreme intimacy … and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them." Dowell also poses his question regarding basic human nature in dichotomous, extreme terms at the end of the first section of part one: "Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man—the man with the right to existence—a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbor's womankind?" Dowell uncharacteristically weeps "for eleven miles" when Leonora confesses, during a carriage ride in the dark, that she tried to have an affair while still married. Obviously, the revelation of Leonora's shadow greatly threatens the security of Dowell's persona and world view.

The numbers four and nine appear symbolic of Dowell's quest to comprehend the shadow. "Four" is used frequently to describe the Dowell/ Ashburnham affiliation. Dowell refers to the friendship as "our little four-square coterie," whose rational stability "vanished in four crashing days." Dowell also emphasizes the precise duration of the friendship as nine years several times throughout the story, particularly in the beginning. While his compulsive focus on time serves to help him analyze the tragic events which have occurred, the significance of the numbers cannot be overlooked. The symbolic meanings of both nine and four suggest Dowell's evolving psychic process of discovering and integrating the shadow into his personality. Nine is considered to be the symbol of truth and the "symbolic number ‘par excellence,’ for it represents triple synthesis on each plane of the corporal, the intellectual and the spiritual" (Cirlot 234). Four is symbolic of "the human situation, of the external, natural limits of the ‘minimum’ awareness of totality, and finally, of rational organization" (Cirlot 232). Taken together, these numbers suggest Dowell's limited perspective in comprehending the "hearts" of others and even his own (four), yet acknowledge his journey toward a greater synthesis of the shadow in himself (nine). Dowell's frequent statement, "I don't know," underscores the limits of his knowledge of other persons' "hearts," despite his gradual willingness to synthesize the shadow into his consciousness.

The scene in which Dowell laughs at the black and white cow lying on its back in the middle of a stream signifies the deepening of Dowell's encounter with the shadow in himself and others. First of all, Dowell is "off duty" as Florence's nurse and ironically believes she is free from excitement while educating Edward about Ludwig the Courageous. This loosening of Dowell's persona allows his shadow to emerge through his laughter at the cow. While Dowell realizes his cruelty and knows he should pity the cow, he experiences you [sic] in viewing this odd-scene, stating, "It is so just exactly what one doesn't expect of a cow." Although unaware, Dowell is actually laughing at his own unexpected and evolving internal conflict, for the cow represents both the shadow (black) and the persona (white) which are literally being turned upside down within Dowell's psyche. The mere fact that Dowell laughs at this scene indicates an emergence of his shadow, for "humor is often a manifestation of shadow truth," and laughing at another's misfortunes often indicates "repressed sadism" (Miller 42).

The black and white cow also, foreshadows Dowell's future conflicts with the shadow and persona in his wife, the Ashburnhams, and himself. Following the cow scene, Dowell's shadow rises closer to consciousness and he is more sensitized to at least a vague sense of primitiveness and evil in those around him, particularly, in Leonora. After Florence touches Edward's wrist during her lecture about the Protestants, Dowell observes, "I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, something evil in the day." During Leonora's outburst after she sees Florence touch Edward's wrist, Dowell perceives her running "her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over the forehead … her face was exactly that of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there." In regard to Leonora's vigilance over Edward's potential love interests, Dowell describes her as "watching Edward more intently and with more straining of ears than that which a cat bestows upon a bird overhead …"

Dowell develops an increasingly negative view of Leonora and admits he actually dislikes her at the end of his story. Through Leonora, Dowell senses the negative price which is paid for an over-developed persona. He seems to realize that Leonora's persona is so false and rigid that it contains a very nasty shadow personality of its own, underneath. John Sanford notes that the shadow is not inherently evil, but that the ego, or persona, "in its refusal of insight and its refusal to accept the entire personality, contributes much more evil than the shadow." Leonora's repression of her shadow impulses in the service of her religious and reserved persona is conveyed through her denial of femininity, avoidance of expressing passion for Edward, and her refusal to nurture and encourage him. When Leonora's persona falters, she is at the mercy of a ruthless shadow which is out of control from being ignored for so many years. Dowell perceives many cruel behaviors in Leonora during this time. Leonora talks to Florence about her affair with Edward in "short, explosive sentences, like one of the damned." She threatens to divorce Edward, repeatedly curses him for his past affairs, feels extraordinary hatred for Edward, tortures him with Nancy Rufford's presence, and even wishes to "bring her riding whip: across the girl's face." Her immersion into the shadow is best captured in the image of her wearing black one night and stumbling over "the tiger skins in the dark hall" on her way to Nancy's room while a "sudden madness possessed her, a desire for action, a thirst for self-explanation."

Dowell also displays more of his own shadow instincts as his story progresses. In stark contrast to his description of her as "poor" during the first part of the novel, Dowell eventually admits he "hates" Florence and calls her a "whore." Later, he refers to her as "vulgar" and as "a flirt." He moves from describing Leonora and Florence as "good people" to "good actresses" and also refers to Edward, Leonora, and Florence as "three gamblers." Following Florence's death, he makes a "slip of the tongue" and says he wants to marry Nancy, unaware that he "had the slightest idea even of caring for her." He adds, "It is as if one had a dual personality, the one I being entirely unconcious of the other." Later he admits to being greedy with certain foods and also admits that he had been attracted to Maisie Maiden.

Overall, Dowell becomes more capable of increasingly acknowledging his shadow by projecting elements of his shadow, or inferior self, onto Edward. Since Dowell's persona appears upright and unadventurous, it is likely that he projects his more masculine and passionate shadow side onto Edward. Robert Bly notes that projection is often a positive movement toward psychic growth, for it is a crucial means of finally seeing one's shadow material (Bly 12). What is unconscious must be projected outward into the world in some form before it can be owned and recognized. Dowell's projection of his shadow onto Edward seems to account for both his admiration and disdain of Edward. Until the end of the story, Dowell both admires yet criticizes Ashburnham. While he frequently refers to Edward's "perfect" features and kindness, he also refers to him as "dull," "stupid," and as a "sentimental ass." He accuses him of breaking up "the pleasantness" of his life and of killing Florence. Nonetheless, Dowell's admiration for Edward increases as the story progresses. Dowell admires the strong emotions and passion of Edward's shadow which Edward makes an effort to acknowledge, unlike Leonora. It is possible that at some level, Dowell can see that Edward's willingness to confront both the destructive and creative elements of his shadow, as seen in his affairs yet his generosity and concern for others, make him a more interesting and authentic person than Leonora. Although Edward obviously cannot cope with the middle-age task of integrating his shadow more fully into his self, and commits suicide, Dowell perceives Edward's life as the more authentic, spirited, and humane.

By the end of his story, Dowell has had much time to reflect on the tragedies which have affected him over a two year period. He moves from an amorphous, overwhelmed, defensive, and disoriented posture to an increasingly accepting, committed, and insightful individual who has wrestled with and synthesized his shadow more fully into his consciousness. The movement of his interior journey is symbolized by his outward journeys which are longer, more extensive more in depth, and more purposeful than his shallow travels with Florence, who only wanted to view sites superficially. Two of his major travels include going across the Atlantic to meet Edward during his final days, and then retrieving Nancy after her breakdown in Ceylon months later. Unlike his former passive posture, he expresses devout love for Edward and Nancy. In answer to his initial dichotomus question regarding which type of person has the right to an existence —"the eunuch or the stallion?"—Dowell seems to comprehend the inevitable existence of both the persona and shadow in all persons, but definitely sides with those who will explore their shadows, even if unsuccessfully, like Edward and Nancy. Dowell's growing acknowledgement of the inseparability of good and evil in all persons is reflected in one of his last questions: "Or are all man's lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies?"

By the end of the story, Dowell also reveals more extreme features of his shadow. He admits he is jealous of Leonora's life, and would like to be a polygamist, even if he has only pursued these fantasies vicariously through the life of Edward. He denounces society for idealizing the persona, and notes that Nancy's and Edward's formal display as she leaves Branshaw would have been "better in the eyes of God if they had all attempted to gouge out each other's eyes with carving knives." Dowell has definitely learned to value elements of his shadow by owning the inferior self he has projected onto Edward:

I love him because he was just myself. If I had the courage and virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much of what he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am just as much of a sentimentalist as he was …

While Dowell admits he can never know the true nature of anyone's heart, he has learned a great deal about his own by confronting the persona and shadow in himself. Even though his life may not have been what he would have desired, Dowell has learned to make choices, feel passion, and know himself more fully while accepting the limits of human knowledge. Although virtually alone, he achieves insight in ways the other characters in the story do not. His solitary existence also highlights the rarity of the honest introspection and insights he has achieved. As Carl Jung notes: "One does not become enlighted [sic] by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular" (qtd. in Zweig 4).

Source: Julie Gordon-Dueck, "A Jungian Approach to Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier," in Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, Vol. 25, No. 1, March 2004, pp. 40-45.

Marguerite Palmer

In the following essay, Palmer examines the significance of Nancy's use of the word "shuttlecock" to describe her situation, pointing out how the word was used to describe women's clothing with religious significance in colonial India, where Nancy lived.

Dowell, in Ford Ma[d]ox Ford's The Good Soldier, retrieves the deranged Nancy from India, and she is reduced to two utterances: "Shuttlecock" and "Credo in unum Deum Omnipotentem." Dowell casts back in his mind and constructs an explanation, which recalls a conversation with Leonora.

I know what was passing in her mind, if she can be said to have a mind, for Leonora has told me that, once, the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock being tossed backwards and forwards between the violent personalities of Edward and his wife. Leonora, she said, was always trying to deliver her over to Edward, and Edward tacitly and silently forced her back again. And the odd thing was that Edward himself considered that those two women used him like a shuttlecock.

Dowell's reflection on Nancy's meaning has aroused no critical discussion; it is generally accepted. Yet Dowell is demonstrably a most unreliable narrator of events of which he is a direct witness. His experience of colonial India is negligible and secondhand; he talks glibly of having picked Nancy up from India, but she was in fact in another country, Ceylon.

In colonial India, shuttlecock had passed into the language (Urdu/Hindi and colonial slang) as descriptive jargon for the indigenous Muslim women when they appeared in their burkahs. The burkah is a single full circle of material some ten feet in diameter, the center of which is placed over the head, thus completely covering the woman in swathes of material. A woman thus covered may look out of her confinement by means of a "grille" embroidered over a small aperture in front of her eyes. For three centimeters' depth around the sides and the back of the head, the material is smocked or rouched, giving an appearance similar to the "head" of the badminton shuttlecock; about a foot from the bottom of the garment, it is horizontally pleated, which weights it and prevents the cloth from blowing around, when windy, in any provocative way. The combination of smooth "cap," rouching, heavy pleating, and a full length of usually white material was reminiscent of the badminton shuttlecock to the colonial British. The term burkah has been retained in modern Pakistan; the garment is still commonly worn all over modern Pakistan, especially in the North West Frontier Province, which borders Afghanistan and the former USSR. The term has been claimed, and transliteration has now corrupted it to "shatal cock."

The term and the image would have been instantly recognizable to any ex-colonial of the Indian part of the Empire, and especially to both Leonora and Edward Ashburnham: Edward had served in the area of Chitral, in the sensitive border area of the North West Frontier Province, where the burkah is worn to this day.

Our understanding of the term shuttlecock as a statement of Nancy's predicament is facilitated by its context. It underlies the colonial, patronizingly humorous paternalism of the British, which Ford may have been criticizing. The burkah is also an icon of religious fundamentalism, implying adherence to religious mores and folkways, as well as the concomitant sexual unavailability, reminiscent of a Christian nun. The Nancy that Dowell is left with is a "forever-unavailable" woman. Their religious backgrounds will never overlap no matter how Dowell may fantasize about his willingness to "compromise" for Nancy. He fails to recognize the impossibility that she would ever be likewise disposed: Dowell is willing to surrender his religious heritage, and he wrongly assumes that Nancy is, too; Nancy is a Roman Catholic, to whom it is anathema to marry outside the faith. He has retrieved her only to be left alone, not comprehending the full implication of either his own actions or those of the others.

Source: Marguerite Palmer, "Ford's The Good Soldier," in Explicator, Vol. 56, No. 2, Winter 1998, 2 pp.

SOURCES

Byatt, A. S., "Accurate Letters: Ford Madox Ford," in Passions of the Mind, Vintage International, 1993, p. 104.

Dreiser, Theodore, "‘The Saddest Story’: Theodore Dreiser on The Good Soldier," in Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage, edited by Frank MacShane, Routledge, 1997, p. 49; originally published in the New Republic, June 12, 1915, pp. 155-56.

Ford, Ford Madox, The Good Soldier, Vintage International, 1989.

Schorer, Mark, "The Good Soldier: An Interpretation," in Critical Essays on Ford Madox Ford, edited by Richard A. Cassell, G. K. Hall, 1987, p. 49; originally published in The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford, Alfred A. Knopf, 1951.

West, Rebecca, "Rebecca West on The Good Soldier," in Ford Madox Ford: The Critical Heritage, edited by Frank MacShane, Routledge, 1997, p. 44; originally published in the Daily News, April 2, 1915, p. 6.

FURTHER READING

Cheng, Vincent J., "English Behaviour and Repression: ‘A Call: The Tale of Two Passions’," in Ford Madox Ford: A Reappraisal, edited by Robert Hampson and William Anthony Davenport, Rodopi B.V., 2002, pp. 106-31.

In this essay, Cheng reviews the moral complexities that Ford explores in The Good Soldier.

Haslam, Sara, "Novel Perspectives," in Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War, Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 41-64.

Haslam uses this novel as a specific example of how World War I affected Ford's writing style, and fiction in general.

Moser, Thomas C., "Impressionism, Agoraphobia, and The Good Soldier," in The Life in the Fiction of Ford Madox Ford, Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 122-95.

Moser provides a psychological examination of Ford's life and work, following his writing career from beginning to end.

Snitow, Ann Barr, Ford Madox Ford and the Voice of Uncertainty, Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

This book traces Ford's career as it evolved from the peaceful early years to the turbulence of the war, with a central climactic chapter devoted to The Good Soldier.