a rousing sentiment

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford is an absolute disaster. It’s a flurry of impressions that jostle for prominence with little organizing structure or sense of coherence, all contradicting each other more often than not. Even the narrator, Dowell, has no control over his own perceptions, trying in vain to find a common thread that will make his experiences coherent. Edward Ashburnham is the only person with any semblance of power over the story. He draws in every character in the book and whirls them around in his orbit, driving both the narrator and his last lover Nancy to insanity, even after his death. The relational power dynamics Edward establishes with the characters and the way these dynamics play out end up as what little interpretive framework can be found for the story.

The way Edward wields this power is through the liminal space between appearance and reality. This is the central theme of the story, both in the information Dowell gains from the other characters, and in the writing of the story itself. Edward and his wife, Leonora, are obsessed with maintaining the appearance of a level, even-tempered English family. They carry this to the point of never speaking in private, but rather operating entirely from subtle impressions they gain from what polite interaction they have in public. This profound lack of communication is largely responsible for Dowell’s narrative confusion, which is based entirely off of his own impressions of the characters and the he-said-she-said testimonies they provide about each other. Edward masterfully shapes his image as a noble Englishman with every appearance of virtue, greatness, and overwhelming passion. The reality of his situation, though, is underwhelming. He is a rather pathetic man with little impulse control, chasing after his various women with seemingly no thought about the consequences. In his first recorded affair, he is bribed out of thousands of pounds by a Spanish dancer who “did not care two buttons for Edward” (187). In fact, despite the “manly” impression that Dowell emphasizes time and time again throughout the story, Leonora is the one who plays the traditionally masculine role of breadwinning and managing finances. She rents out their estate, handles their finances, pays off the requisite mistresses, and single-handedly saves their livelihood. She gives Edward 500 pounds a year to keep him happy and out of trouble, like one would give an allowance to a small child. In one of the narrator’s more clear-sighted moments, he exclaims, “Good God, what did they all see in him; for I swear that was all there was of him, inside and out; though they said he was a good soldier” (33). 

“How,” he goes on to lament, “could [Edward] rouse anything like a sentiment, in any body?” (33) Though Dowell proceeds to spend an entire confessing his own sentiments about Edward, the question is valid. It soon becomes obvious that any personality Edward appears to have comes from other characters’ reactions to their own impressions of him, rather than some inherent quality. Dowell nearly worships the nearly perfect quality of English indifference he details in the beginning of the book, and then worships Edward’s grandiosity as the narrative progresses. He sets out to tell a story about the tragic events surrounding his wife’s suicide, but it ends up as a frenetic attempt to justify Edward’s actions and tease out his motivations. Leonora stakes her entire Catholic faith and understanding of religion in Edward, to the point that she describes Edward’s potential affair as “the whole sorrow of the world[,] and… the eternal damnation of you and me and them” (54). Nancy sees him as a protector and father figure, and desperately craves his approval and admiration. As the story escalates, she is willing to give him her body to save his life, even after she has lost all affection for him.

Edward wields power throughout the narrative by actively maintaining these impressions of him and feeding off of them, until these impressions become a matter of life and death for the other characters. In relation to Dowell himself, Edward bolsters his perceived grandiosity with a façade of inscrutable manliness. He provides a pristine, elegant, well-dressed front, but alternates it with emotional outbursts that, in contrast, read as sincere and truthful. These outbursts exaggerate the sense of tragedy Dowell reads into Edward’s psyche, and they provide just enough emotional justification that he can rationalize Edward’s actions favorably. Edward assaults a 19-year-old woman on the train because he is too compassionate; he falls in love with his young ward because he is too passionate; he pursues affairs without any mind to consequences because he is too truthful. These ideas dictate the collections of impressions that Dowell picks up on, and they provide a sense of structure to Edward’s otherwise senseless personality that Dowell clings to. Leonora has equally strong stakes in proving structure to her relationship with Edward, though she frames it in terms of religious principles. Her sense of the religious sanctity of marriage, and her religious leaders’ encouragement of this sense, provide a sense of control and dictate her actions throughout the story. She is determined to maintain an iron-clad appearance of virtue in their relationship, and Edward is freed to do what he likes under this cover, even as he hates her for being “cold.” Edward attempts to strengthen her conviction that her virtue can win him back by trying to convert to Catholicism early in their marriage. This attempt can be read as a way of binding himself to the religious system that serves his interests and guaranteeing that Leonora’s convictions will continue protecting him.  

Nancy is the one to break this cycle, despite Edward’s best attempts to use her impressions of him to bolster his image. Nancy is in a position where she needs Edward, both within the power dynamic of being his ward and the practical consideration of being left to her abusive parents. Edward’s primary need in his sexual relationships is this need to be needed, whether in the case of the crying woman who needed comfort, or of Florence who (presumably) needed passion, or even of Leonora who needed an authority figure to obey according to her Christian duty. He confesses all of his feelings to Nancy, but in a way that she mistakes it for a deep fatherly affection. Since he refuses to act on it, he is able to preserve the existing dynamic of protector and ward between them and bolster her existing impressions of him as heroic. Closer to the end, he manipulates Nancy’s sense of duty; his illness on her behalf brings her to the point where she feels like she has his heart in her hands. His only desire, he confesses to Leonora, is for Nancy to want him even when she’s gone. But after Leonora divulges Edward’s history to Nancy (in one of her only moments of clear communication), Nancy no longer wants him. This is what ultimately breaks Edward; he finally commits suicide in a darkly comical scene when Nancy’s first letter back indicates that she is not miserable without him. 

Though Edward’s control over his magnetic image is broken in his last affair, it continues to shape Dowell’s understanding of the tragic events that befell him. His continued attempts to justify Edward’s actions shape the way he structures his story. He uses the heart as a framing device, setting up a dichotomy between normality and grand passion. Dowell recognizes his own envy for Edward along these lines; Dowell is thoroughly normal, oblivious, and asexual, while Edward has “courage, virility, and… physique” (291) and therefore is entitled to grand passions. Edward maintains his grandiosity in Dowell’s eyes by framing himself as a tragic, manly figure and demonstrating his power over the women Dowell loves. He sets Edward as the center of the story’s orbit, identifying him with the qualities he wants for himself in the face of his own powerlessness. His impressions of Edward, and the impressions Edward encourages, become the central standard by which all other characters’ motivations are determined. The narrator himself barely exists outside of Edward’s story; he is almost an abstraction, defined entirely in terms of his understanding of Edward and what Edward has that he does not. In that sense, Edward continues to wield power over the narrator and everyone involved, even after his death.