The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [13]
The list of casualties in this novel is worthy of a ‘melodrama’ (as are many of its scenes, such as Florence creeping up on Ashburnham and Nancy in the park; her sensational re-entry into the hotel lounge, and the sardonic ‘happy ending with wedding bells and all’), but who bears most blame for its cumulative suffering and sadness? Who is the real ‘villain of the piece’? At one point Dowell calls Florence a ‘whore’, and elsewhere he refers to her as ‘a cold sensualist’, a ‘Tartar’, ‘a contaminating influence’ and ‘a common flirt’, but is she the root cause of the tragedy? Florence is undoubtedly coquettish and unprincipled, but Dowell surely brings about his own misfortune through his mulish resolve to marry her. ‘I just drifted in and wanted Florence’, he states in Part One, Chapter 2. ‘I determined with all the obstinacy of a possibly weak nature, if not to make her mine, at least to marry her’, is how he puts it at the beginning of Part Two, and almost immediately afterwards, in another of his remarkably offhand similes, Dowell says that in his bunkered pursuit of Florence he was ‘like a chicken that is determined to get across the road in front of an automobile’. The Misses Hurlbird try to talk him out of his plan, hinting that their niece is not quite the unsullied young maiden they would wish her to be, but Dowell concludes his interview with them by declaring: ‘I don’t care. If Florence has robbed a bank I am going to marry her and take her to Europe.’ Even after a further interview, this time with Florence’s Uncle John, Dowell still goes ahead and marries her, in the face of all reason and seemliness, at about four o’clock in the morning. ‘I suppose it was my own fault, what followed’, he ruminates. No less capricious is his conduct immediately before the ceremony. Florence receives him at the top of the ladder with ‘an embrace of warmth’:
Well, it was the first time I had ever been embraced by a woman – and it was the last when a woman’s embrace has had in it any warmth for me… I fancy that, if I had shown any warmth then, she would have acted the proper wife to me, or would have put me back again. But, because I acted like a Philadelphia gentleman, she made me, I suppose, go through with the part of a male nurse.
If Dowell’s idolization of Ashburnham is one salient feature of this novel, his vilification of Leonora is hardly less evident. Dowell says Ashburnham found her ‘cold and unsympathetic’ and tells us, near the end of Part Three, Chapter 3, that Ashburnham ‘seemed to regard [Leonora] as being not only physically and mentally cold, but even as being actually wicked and mean’. ‘She had no conversation with Edward for many years – none that went beyond the mere arrangements for taking trains or engaging servants’, we read in Part One, Chapter 5, and on one occasion, when Ashburnham says to Leonora: ‘By jove, you’re the finest woman in the world. I wish we could be better friends’, his wife just turns her back on him. At one point Leonora is glimpsed ‘watching [Ashburnham] as a fierce cat watches an unconscious pigeon in a roadway’ and at another she is observed ‘watching Edward more intently and with more straining of ears than that which a cat bestows on a bird overhead’. By Part Four, Chapter 2, Leonora has become ‘a cold fiend’ who tells Nancy all about Ashburnham’s extra-marital affairs and urges her to have a physical relationship with her husband, while two chapters further on, Dowell asserts, ‘Leonora with her hunger, with her cruelty, had driven Edward to madness’. When Nancy is brought back to Bramshaw from Ceylon, Leonora does not even make the effort to drive over from her new home to see her.