From Minuet de la Cour to Cri de Coeur: Movements of the Heart in Ford's The Good Soldier

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Title:	From Minuet de la Cour to Cri de Coeur: Movements of the Heart in Ford's The Good Soldier
Authors:	Rodden, J.
Contributors:	Department of Foreign Languages and Literature,Tunghai University
Date:	2011
Issue Date:	2013-05-21T09:05:46Z (UTC)
Abstract:	In the phrase of its subtitle, The Good Soldier is "a tale of passion" featuring an extraordinary series of fantastic accidents, a chaotically digressive plot structure, several puzzling narrative omissions, and abrupt alterations in mood and tone. This essay contends that such features invite critical reflection on the novel in the language of psychoanalytic theory. Within the framework of libidinal development as described by Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, Dowell's narration of causally disconnected events and his deep-seated ambivalence toward his friend Captain Edward Ashburnham gain coherence when viewed as a storytelling process conducted by a fundamentally narcissistic personality. On this view, Dowell is engaged in an unconscious homosexual identification with his exalted father figure. The world ofThe Good Soldieris the narrator's attempt to create his ideal family romance and to recapture his paradise lost. Ford has written a dream-narrative that invites scrutiny of Dowell's self-admitted "dual personality" as storyteller and daydreamer. Dowell is in fact a narrative function: he is a collage of impressions operating according to the dream mechanisms of secondary revision, disguise, distortion, and displacement. This psychoanalytical approach to the novel's narratology also illuminates other significant issues, such as its national and religious motifs, whereby both the power struggles among the leading characters and Dowell's anguished outcries about his godless world may be viewed in the psychosocial, phylogenetic terms of "repressive civilization" as developed by Freud inCivilization and Its Discontentsand his other cultural investigations. ? 2011 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
Relation:	English Studies Volume 92, Issue 8, December 2011, Pages 868-895
Appears in Collections:	[Department of Foreign Languages and Literature] Periodical Articles

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