The Good Soldier_ A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford [15]
woman: ‘I never came across such a perfect expression before and I never shall again.’ On one occasion he tells us he ‘cannot think of Edward without sighing’ and at another he admits: ‘I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself.’ ‘It would be merely glib to argue that Dowell’s protestation of concealed love for Ashburnham reveals a homosexual impulse’, Max Saunders has cautioned. ‘But it would be slightly deceitful to deny that the thought crosses the reader’s mind as Dowell makes his revelation.’26 All we can say with any certainty is that in a novel packed tight with images of incarceration – Jimmy confined to Europe by Florence’s uncle; the ‘imprisonment’ of Dowell and Florence on the same continent; Leonora’s ‘immense’ blue eyes ‘like a wall of blue that shut [Dowell] off from the rest of the world’ and her gold circlet in which ‘she locked up her heart and her feelings’; Leonora and her six sisters ‘interned’ in their convent and then immured ‘behind the high walls of the manor-house that was almost more cloistral than any convent could have been’; ‘the never-opened door between’ Leonora’s and Ashburnham’s rooms; the two couples like ‘a prison full of screaming hysterics’ – the most imprisoned thing of all could be Dowell’s love of Ashburnham. And if this is the case, then the fervour and frequency of his eulogies to Ashburnham’s ‘public side’ may be explained, along with his flippant interpolations and his tone of ironic disengagement: as a secretive and deeply conventional ‘gentleman’, Dowell would indeed have a great secret to hide. Significantly, Dowell describes himself as ‘a sort of convent’, and one of the last glimpses we have of him is sitting in Ashburnham’s gun-room in a state of solitary confinement: ‘All day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in me, for I have no interests.’ As Martin Stannard has shown, Dowell even writes his story using the kind of hunting and equestrian terms which an accomplished horseman like Ashburnham would have used all the time.27 By the last chapter of the novel there will be readers who feel authorized to construe Dowell’s purchase of Ashburnham’s place at Bramshaw Teleragh as the ultimate act of love in this ‘Tale of Passion’, but if the novel has taught us anything it has taught us to be wary of all ‘black and white’ readings of the text – or, indeed, of any ‘black and white’ image in the text, such as Dowell’s vision, ‘in black and white’, of God’s judgement on Leonora, Edward and Florence. To be dogmatic about Dowell’s sexuality would be to lose touch with the spirit of a novel which generates questions rather than answers (to whom, for instance, does the epigraph refer?). But by the very end of the book, when Dowell tells us, almost as an afterthought, that Ashburnham has killed himself, his casualness barely holds back his passion. If ‘Dowell’s offhand manner is his defence against breaking down with grief, as one critic has argued,28 then it is a glaringly vulnerable defence. The truth is that Ashburnham, the slightly priggish and very sentimental Tory Englishman, is everything Dowell, the slightly priggish and very sentimental conservative American of old English stock, desires to be.
Rather than trying to pin labels on Dowell and searching for consistency in his words, it is probably best to accept his fundamental slipperiness. During the course of the novel, for instance, he tells us on a number of occasions that he loathes Leonora and yet he also says, more than once, that he loves her. Even as he sits alone in Bramshaw Manor he states that he would ‘very cheerfully lay down [his] life… in her service’. And it would be possible to assemble a whole dossier of statements in which Dowell’s feelings for Nancy, Florence and Edward, and Edward’s feelings for Florence, Nancy and Leonora, and Leonora’s attitude to Dowell, Florence, Edward and Nancy could all be shown to be equally contradictory. But to make too much of this would