The Good Soldier Meets Miss Vickie

The first line of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915) encapsulates one of the major themes of the novel: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Not told. Not experienced. Not shared. Not even known. Heard is such a passive verb. Someone else is responsible for the action; you just let them do it as you listen or hear. Now, I know, heard allows him to position the story as more universal: out of all of the stories and lives in the world--not just the ones he has experienced or met--his is the saddest. But again, the word "know" would have accomplished the same task while still giving him a matter of agency over the events. But John Dowell does not want agency. Not over his past and not over his future. John Dowell wants his passive existence and that is the crux of parenthood in the novel.

When you're listening to a story about a series of scandals, you need a good snack. Yesterday, I bought a bag of Missie Vickie's Sea Salt and Vinegar chips, but I didn't eat them for whatever reason (reason: I'm an idiot). So I am pulling them out today and hunkering down for the gossipy tale of four idiots.

First of all, is there a bigger idiot than John Dowell in all of English literature? Don't answer that. I know there is probably one or two, but he has to be up there. Even his name: Dowell. A dowell is a peg. A wooden peg. Dowell is literally as dull as a door nail.

His dullness allows his wife, Florence, to conduct a nine year affair under his very nose. With one of his best friends! And the best friend's wife knows! They all know. Everyone knows but Dowell because this is just a story he has heard for Dowell. He might as well not have been there for any of this.

Except he was.

You have to wonder about Dowell's inability to notice any of this, his choice to check out so thoroughly. You have to question it. It is so unbelievable that it should not be believable. I think Dowell is not as checked out as he would like us to think he was. For instance:

For peace I never had with Florence, and hardly believed that I cared for her in the way of love after a year or two of it. She became for me a rare and fragile object, something burdensome, but very frail. Why it was as if I had been given a thin-shelled pullet's egg to carry on my palm from Equatorial African to Hoboken. Yes, she became for me, as it were, the subject of a bet--the trophy of an athlete's achievement, a parsley crown that is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness, his abstentions, and of his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value as a wife, I think she had none at all for me.

Dowell isn't ignorant. He just doesn't care. If someone else can alleviate the burden of caring for his wife, he is happy to accept. He does not want that responsibility of caring for another person--no matter how much he protests. Even when he and Florence initially elope, he chooses to overlook some major warning signs. The night that they marry, Dowell arrives in Florence's bedroom through her window at 1 a.m. He notes, "I just wanted to wake her up. She was not, however, asleep. She expected me." Why on earth does she expect him? An why doesn't he ask that himself? The questions don't stop there, though. He then departs her room and waits outside for her for TWO HOURS. He dismisses this two hour window as "the only sign Florence ever showed of having a conscience," but that is willful ignorance on his part.

His willful ignorance comes to an end when he is confronted with Florence's infidelity. After the pivotal concert, Florence returns home in a flurry and discovers Dowell speaking with Bagshawe. Florence runs upstairs immediately to her room, upon which Bagshawe turns to Dowell to inform him that he had last seen her coming out of Jimmy's room at 5 a.m. He makes it clear that she had been having an affair with Jimmy. How does Dowell respond? Does he go upstairs and confront his wife? Discuss things with her? Check on her? No. He continues to sit in his chair. We are not given a specific time frame (for once), but it is not until a "long time afterwards [that he] pulled [him]self out of the lounge and went up to Florence's room." By that time, she is already dead. Out of sight, out of mine.

But again: why this willful ignorance? Because Dowell does not truly want to care for his wife. Yes, he will take these trips to Europe for her health. Yes, he will indulge her whims and desires for the sake of her "poor heart." But Dowell does not truly care for her; he accommodates her the way Leonora accommodates Edward. They accommodate their spouses because they are bad "parents."

You see, this is a story about the changing of the guard, of shifting generations. This is one of the things that makes it such a pivotal modernist text!

So here is a list of "parents":

• John Dowell

• Leonora Ashburnham

• Edward Ashburnham

• Uncle John

• The Aunts

• Colonel Powyss (Leonora's father)

Here is a list of "children":

• Florence Dowell

• Edward Ashburnham

• Maisie Maidan

• Nancy Rufford

Florence and her aunts fight over shifting values. The aunts do not want her to receive her inheritance or her legacy. That is, they want her to remain a child under their control, living in their world.

Florence marries John Dowell to escape the confines of her childhood home. She believes she can exert her control over him to determine her own world and existence as an adult. The ritual of marriage would, in theory, allow her to enter the adult world, but it doesn't work that way. Because while Florence wants the freedom of an adult, she does not actually want to be one. Within this text, to be an adult is to be a parent. Florence wants to be an independent child so she selects John Dowell to be her new paternal figure and to replace her Uncle John (one John for another.)

Dowell cannot be a father because he is a man with no legacy. He is our narrator but he doesn't provide us with any of his own backstory. Who is his family? Where did his fortune come from? Why does he insist on being a nursemaid? He has no inheritance, no purpose, to give the next generation. He is simply an empty vessel, thus his hallow and passive masculinity.

Edward Ashburnham's masculinity is much more active, but not any more effective. In many ways, he does want to be a father. He has an affair with Maisie Maidan (I mean, come ON. With that last name? Of course, she's a virginal daughter substitute) and is drawn to his own ward, Nancy Rufford. Now it's time for some Woody Allen nonsense.

By this point, Edward's paternal instinct is revealed as a shallow sham. He is incapable of truly caring for another person, but he also is incapable of providing any meaningful legacy. We are finally given a brief--tragic--pregnancy. After Nancy departs for India, Edward resumes his philandering ways.

Edward spent a great deal of time, and about two hundred pounds for law fees on getting a poor girl, the daughter of one of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge of murdering her baby. This was positively the last act of Edward's life. . . Yet even then Leonora made him a terrible scene abut this expenditure of time and trouble. She sort of had the vague idea that what had passed with the girl and the rest of it ought to have taught Edward a lesson--the lesson of economy. She threatened to take his banking account away from him again. I guess that made him cut his throat. He might have stuck it out otherwise--but the idea that he had lost Nancy and that, in addition, there was nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary succession of days in which he could be of no public service. . . Well, it finished him.

Edward loses all ability to contribute to a next generation. He has nothing left to give: not mentorship, not financial assistance, not even his sperm is able to perpetuate a legacy. Without a means of aiding the next generation, Edward brutally erases himself.

Dowell is so hurt by Edward's suicide--much more so by Edward's death than his own wife--that it is worth a closer look. Dowell admits he loved Edward (admits he loved Edward, admits he didn't love his wife). He relays: ""I can't conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham-and that I loved him because he was just myself. . . . He seems to me like a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did 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." Dowell tries a number of times to assert commonalities between himself and Edward. Dowell does not see Edward as an older brother; he sees him as a father figure. He wants to claim Edward's legacy of active masculinity, strong emotions, and a paternalistic approach to the world.

But Dowell isn't any of that. Edward wasn't any of that either. Edward was a distortion of that--Dowell's memory of the ideal "good soldier." And Edward is a shadow of that memory. Consequently, while he tries to take on Edward's legacy by adopting Nancy, he does not do so as a heroic knight in shining armor. Instead he, like Edward once was, is manipulated by Leonora into a pseudo-relationship with the young girl. It's not a romantic relationship by any means. He is her nursemaid. A shadow of a parent. A father with no legacy.

You see, that's the point. An inactive present--a passive present--has no future at all. In The Good Soldier, the future is barren.

And that is the saddest story.

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