Dowell's Passion in The Good Soldier

281 DOWELL'S PASSION IN THE GOOD SOLDIER By Robert Micklus (University of Delaware) Fresh from slaughter, the character Anthony Perkins portrays in Psycho sits passively in his ward as the film concludes. A fly buzzes irksomely about his face, but he refuses to swat it, hoping his attendants will think him too gentle to hurt even a fly. He might have fooled most critics of The Good Soldier. Regardless of whether they have viewed the novel as a burlesque of feudalism and courtly love, a comedy of manners, a study of religious dissolution , or a tragedy of man's futile search for meaning in a baffling world of appearances,! critics have almost unanimously perceived John Dowell as a man who "lacks all capacity for passion." "Without passion himself," one critic writes, Dowell "has immense difficulty in understanding [Leonora's] frustrated passion." Without passion himself, he is a "naive, bewildered, myopic" sentimentalist , a "triumph in absolute ineffectuality" who leads us through a maze of "pointless frivolity." We have been duped. Too often, we have minimized the fact that the man narrating The Good Soldier is writing from a different perspective than the man acting in the story. As Arthur Mizener suggests, the ironic wit in the novel stems not from Ford's exposing Dowell's dispassionate nature, but from "the discrepancy between Dowell's attitude as a participant in the events and Dowell's attitude as a narrator of them."3 To interpret the novel accurately, therefore, we need to focus our attention more closely upon the distinguishing characteristics of Dowell-the-narrator. Granted, Dowell's own focus upon his role as a passive, effeminate bystander tends to obscure his role as narrator. Yet a careful analysis of his narrative voice reveals that he is more than just a passive observer« he is an aggressive, vengeful narrator obsessively carrying out a verbal vendetta against those who have deceived him. Critics generally assume that "the book's controlling irony lies in the fact that passionate situations are related by a narrator who is himself incapable of passion."^ But The Good Soldier is, as Ford subtitled it, "A Tale of Passion," and its passion stems directly from Ford's disclosure of Dowell's passion for vengeance. Still, it is easy to see why the image of Dowell as a passionless fool has been so widely accepted, for no one has encouraged this view more than Dowell himself. He often reminds us that during his marriage to Florence he was "just a male sick nurse," an "ignorant fool" who had become "a sort of old maid" (69; 93; 122). He also informs us that Edward unveils his past to him largely because he regards Dowell as a "woman or solicitor" (28). Worse than that, Leonora listens to him "as if she were listening, a mother, to the child at her knee" and treats him like an "invalid" or a "patient" (33; 28; 49). Even now that he no longer needs to con- 282 cern himself with Florence and the Ashburnhams, Dowell finds himself in similar circumstances with Nancy« "So here I am," he admits , "much where I started thirteen years ago. I am the attendant, not the husband, of a beautiful girl, who pays no attention to me ... . [W]hat I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse-attendant . Well, I am a nurse-attendant" (236-37). Here, as throughout his narrative, Dowell deprecates himself to such an extent that when he asks, "Am I no better than a eunuch?" (12) we are certainly tempted to answer, with a host of others, no. By constantly stressing his effeminacy, Dowell impresses us as a man worth our pity at best, and; at worst, barely worth our attention . Indeed, he is used to being ignored. "[SJmall amongst the long English," he fears that those dining with him will not leave him a sufficient helping to satisfy his appetite (23; 4-7). While viewing a cow struggling in a stream, Dowell "burst out laughing. But," he recalls, "no one noticed me" (4-2). Florence, of course, hardly cares whether he comes or goes» "I dare say," he explains, "she never took sufficient interest in me...