Ford Madox Ford. The Good Soldier. 1915. Gutenberg.org. 26 Nov. 2011. E-book.
I bit. The author of the book I recently read and reviewed, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, spoke so highly of The Good Soldier that I had to read it.
Was it worth it? Yes. Very clever and pointed symbolism. Like Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Keable’s Simon, Called Peter (a book mentioned in The Great Gatsby), it deals in part with the social interactions of Mainline Protestantism and Catholicism a century ago.
Imagine a Henry James novel written in the first person. The narrator admits he rambles. He seems to spend a lot of time telling us what others told him, yet the reader can ask, “How much of this is hearsay? Why isn’t he more directly involved?”
The protective, behavior-oriented approach of the traditional Catholic Church perhaps keeps people from sin, but it also does their thinking for them. They have “mental health problems.” The Protestants were freer, but more inclined to get trapped into sins they cannot get away with. They are the people with “heart trouble.”
The narration is clever. The narrator tells us pretty early in the book that two of the main characters will die. Much of the novel describes the events that lead to that inevitable outcome. Yet, there is a real twist, a perhaps unforeseen surprise at the end as well.
The narrator is a decent storyteller, but he comes across as a real loser. He is the lone survivor in the story, but he is the person who has done virtually nothing. At first we believe he is a man of action, but he ends up more paralyzed than even the fictional Miles Coverdale, the wimpy narrator of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance.
Things happen. Psychology is analyzed. Things take time. Ford does echo of Henry James, with his social psychodrama and upper classes, but The Good Soldier has enough symbolism and universal themes that it makes one also think of another James, James Joyce, and some of his Dubliners stories, which also include recurring tales of Protestant-Catholic contrasts and symbols of paralysis.
Hello
I recently viewed the movie version of “The Good Soldier” with Jeremy Brett as Ashburnham.
There’s a scene in Marburg where Florence serves as guide and talks about a notice or letter of protest at Marburg Castle involving Luther, Bucer, Melanchthon, which is supposed to be the source of the word Protestant.
I thought Protestant derived from 1529 Speyer meeting of princes with their protest document. Does anyone know what’s what?
richard
cambridge forecast group
According to a detailed Wikipedia entry on the etymology of the word Protestant, you are correct. The protest was signed by representatives of a number of German states, including Melanchthon, one of the signatories mentioned in the novel. It would not have included Zwingli, who was Swiss and would have no cause to be at the Reichstag in Speyer.
However, later in the year, many of the Protestants met at Marburg (the Marburg Colloquy) to outline the basic beliefs of the Protestants. That is, I believe, the only time when the four men whose signatures are named in the novel would have been together. The reformers were not able to come to an agreement over the issue of Holy Communion, so they actually would not have signed any statement—certainly not Luther and Zwingli. Bucer, who sided with Zwingli but respected Luther, hoped to reach a compromise, but one never came forth. Indeed, the difference between the Lutherans and the Calvinists (whom Zwingli joined) is still one of the most persistent doctrinal differences between Protestants today.
This does tie in with the theme mentioned in my review above about the differences between Protestant and Catholic. The Catholics would have been told what to believe by the authorities and that would have settled the matter.
In the novel, our narrator John Dowell says that he believes Florence was mistaken. Of course, he would never tell her that, the coward! Besides revealing that about Dowell, I believe in part that scene is meant to show Florence as getting overcome with her enthusiasm in spite of the apparent facts. (Or perhaps altering the facts to fit her enthusiasm.)
Hello, jbair
Many thanks for cogent and illuminating comment.
Most helpful!
richard
cambridgeforecast