Watching the Orchards Robbed: Dowell and The Good Soldier

Abstract

John Dowell is an unlikely hero — the least likely, perhaps, of any of the narrators of this study. A cuckold of extraordinary blindness, by all indications a virgin though twelve years married, his personal history begins and ends with the role of nursemaid for women unwilling or unable to return his affection. A catalogue of critics decrying his supposed spiritual as well as physical impotence would be substantial; Mark Schorer, for example, claims that in The Good Soldier ‘passionate situations are related by a narrator who is himself incapable of passion, sexual and moral alike.’² And John G. Hessler in a more recent article dismisses the possibility of Dowell’s moral growth: ‘His narrative does not represent any progress of the heart, any coming to insight.’³ Yet albeit lame and isolated, Dowell is very much what my first sentence posits — a hero — both in the context of Ford Madox Ford’s other novels and as a narrator who undergoes a moral education, tells his tale as a means of imposing order on chaos, and makes a final heroic gesture of human responsibility and love.

And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities?¹