Free English Literature Dissertations - The Pathos Of Dowell’s Resignation To Accept The Adulterous Affair Between
The pathos of Dowell’s resignation to accept the adulterous affair between Edward and Florence, rather than rage against it, reflects the moral turpitude and loss of social confidence that characterised modern Europe on the verge of war. The fact that Dowell says, If I had had the courage and the virility to and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham, I should, I fancy, have done much what he did, underscores the extent of Dowell’s romantic self delusions.
Indeed, Ford gains great leverage by paralleling characters with physical and moral ‘heart conditions’ in this fractured narrative. While Maisie Maidan, suffers from a genuine heart complaint, Florence and Edward are presented as carrying another kind of heart condition, that of deceit, indulgence and secrecy. Moreover, Florence and Edward, as displaced westerners spending indulgent summers in Germany, epitomise the abandonment of moral boundaries, which typified the rejection of the Victorian age.
Witkowski (1998, p 1), notes that when Dowell is attempting to reinvent Stamford in the guise of Cranford, Dowell is indulging in a fantasy quite consistent with what we already know of him. For him, it serves as a symbol of the romantic yearning for which he is notorious. Yet, at a more subtle level of reading, it is evident Ford not only uses this segment of the text to underscore Dowell’s self delusion, but also to indulge in parodying aspects of Mary Gaskell’s acclaimed 1853 novel ‘Cranford’, to signify the extent of social shift since that time.
As Ford appropriates and then subverts a number of Gaskell’s scenes, distorted collective memories bluntly show that Victorian sentimentality is dead. Witkowsky contends by 1915, at a time when Cranford was enjoying a renewed popularity, Ford’s subtle rehandling of both character and incident, affords what is at best a hollow replica of Gaskell's community. Beneath the surface, it is as empty as the flask, "apparently of nitrate of amyl, but actually of prussic acid," that the dead Florence clutches - indeed, as "empty" as Florence herself must have been during all those years that she lied about her condition (117). Witkowski’s point is if we are to appreciate fully Ford's novel, we can neither ignore this emptiness nor fail to sound its depths. He contends that the Stamford/Cranford episodes serve in The Good Soldier both as positive proof of Dowell's romantic delusion (and, hence, his unreliability) and as one of the most reliable measures of Ford's own deep anxiety about the status of Western culture on the eve of the First World War. (1998, p1).
Virginia Woolf’s Joycean post-World War 1 depiction of Clarissa Dalloway, in the novel titled Mrs Dalloway, (1925) manifests a second wave of literary modernism.
Dissertations - Free English Literature Dissertations
