Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as Detective Story: Is Dowell a Murderer?

Abstract

The voluminous criticism on The Good Soldier’s John Dowell has made his thinking a focal point. No one much studies what Dowell actually does in the novel because he presents himself as such a nonentity. One action of his in particular needs consideration—the possibility that Dowell murdered his wife. When one looks closely at the things Dowell actually says about himself, a strong pattern of misdirection and even violence is revealed. The contemporary audience would have known the effects of prussic acid poisoning and wondered if Florence was arranged on her bed or died another way. Only the ignorant would have believed that she accidentally drank prussic acid and then arranged herself on the bed. Ford leaves the true method of Florence’s death up to the reader, but if she died of prussic acid poisoning or a true heart attack, she was cleaned up and “arranged.”

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of The Good Soldier, the novel has been the delight of the proponents of ambiguity. John Dowell is a goldmine for modernist critics, for his knowledge of the actual happenings in the novel is at best unclear. Critics have argued the question of his reliability for several decades, but there has been no real consensus; the reader cannot know for certain what Dowell knew and whether or not he is telling the truth. ¹ One of the interesting things about criticism of Dowell is that his knowledge is a focal point while his actions are not. No one much studies what Dowell actually does in the novel because he presents himself as such a nonentity. However, one action of his in particular needs consideration—the possibility that John Dowell murderedhiswife.

Florence Dowell’s death is suspicious at the very least. After supposedly dosing herself with prussic acid, Florence is found lying peacefully on her bed with her arms crossed over her chest. Victims of prussic acid poisoning do not look peaceful in death; convulsions and vomiting are the actual result. Despite the unlikeliness of her peacefulness, this quality alone is not enough to implicate her husband in her death. If Dowell is to be seriously considered as a murderer, he must meet certain criteria. He must have a motivation for murder, the opportunity to commit the crime, and the possibility of such an action within his character. John Dowell fulfills all of these requirements.

Although the role of the narrator and his reliability or lack thereof have been extensively criticized, almost nothing has been said about his actual character.² Dowell himself confuses this issue greatly because he presents himself as an unwitting victim. However, when one looks closely at the things Dowell actually says about himself, a strong pattern of misdirection and even violence is revealed.

Dowell emerges very early in the novel as a different person from the one he shows in public. He convinces everyone around him that he is one of the good people of the earth by merely following the behaviors that good people follow. Yet he reveals to us that his preferences lie elsewhere:

For it is really nauseating, when you detest it, to have to eat every day several slices of thin, tepid, pink India rubber, and it is disagreeable to have to drink brandy when you would prefer to be cheered up by warm, sweet Kümmel. And it is nasty to have to take a cold bath in the morning when what you want is really a hot one at night. And it stirs a little of the faith of your fathers that is deep down within you to have to have it taken for granted that you are an Episcopalian when really you are an old-fashioned Philadelphia Quaker.³

This is one of the longest speeches that Dowell makes on a single subject, and it proves that Dowell presents a face to the world that is not his own. In spite of his true feelings, Dowell manages to perform these tasks in such a way that the other characters do not doubt him.

Dowell describes himself as a man without motivation, an emotional eunuch. He describes his actions as drifting: “And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to have done something but I didn’t see any call to do it. Why does one do things? I just drifted in and wanted Florence.”⁴ But it is curious that whatever Dowell drifts in casually and desires, he possesses. He admires the English leisured classes and sees their homes as a sort of paradise. He reveals this in his own rambling, confused way, and we almost dismiss it. Florence’s desire for an English establishment is much clearer, as is the desire of the Ashburnhams to live quietly on their English estate. But at the end of the novel, it is Dowell who owns Bramshaw Teleragh.⁵ Dowell reveals that he is in love with Nancy, and he possesses her at the end of the novel. She is certainly diminished in capacity, but he has her in the same position that he had Florence; he is in control of her life.

Dowell presents himself as a victim of the connivings of various people to whom he is an insignificant player. Edward speaks to him “as a woman or a solicitor.”⁶ However, Dowell is quite clearly at the top of the social structure. He is a Dowell of Philadelphia. He is a rich, leisured, upper-class American man. No one can look down on him for his lack of anything that society considers important. He has breeding, wealth, and land. In fact, he admits to carrying a deed to land given to his ancestor by an Indian tribe. He hosts dinners for royalty. He is the sort whose vituperative letters about trains are actually printed in The Times. None of these characteristics indicates a victim.

Dowell has a certain need for control. He has a great capacity for subduing himself to his own ends, and he is vindictive. Though Dowell presents the story of Florence’s heart condition as her way of continuing an affair in Europe with Jimmy while avoiding her marital responsibilities, the actual behavior of the various characters reveals a different story. First, he “drifted in and wanted Florence.”⁷ This was his own decision, and he says that he simply wore her down until she was willing to take him.

After Florence develops her “heart,” he rigidly proscribes what she is allowed to do. Dowell presents this information as the orders of the doctors. He says that he is only concerned with Florence’s welfare and that the job of his life “was to keep that bright thing in existence.”⁸ However, Dowell directly informs the reader of the care he takes of Florence and the corresponding control he exerts over her. He steers her conversation into certain topics. He allows her no excitement at all. He walks her to and from her baths and even goes so far as to count the steps. This behavior is controlling, whether or not he presents it as a function of boredom.

Despite being controlling, Dowell manages to present himself to the Ashburnhams as ineffectual. Dowell presents Edward’s view of him as something less than manly:⁹ “You see, I suppose he regarded me not so much as a man. I had to be regarded as a woman or a solicitor.” It is very clear that Dowell regards Edward as an utter idiot, and so Edward’s view of Dowell can be discounted as false. He describes the look in Edward’s eyes as “perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid.”¹⁰ Therefore, Edward’s view of Dowell as ineffectual is less than reliable.

Unexpectedly, when Dowell compares himself to anyone or tells a side anecdote, he compares himself to the violent figure in the tale. One of his first actions after marrying Florence is to beat his black servant.¹¹ One of the first stories he tells is that of a love triangle. Since we have been been informed that Florence and Edward carried on an affair that Dowell may or may not have been aware of, the characters of the tale are fairly obvious representations of Dowell, Florence, and Edward. In the tale, Peire Vidal is a bard who pays court to a woman with the personality of a wolf. These are clear representations of Edward and Florence, but it is more interesting to note the husband of La Louve. He is “a most ferocious warrior.”¹² The husband in the tale, rather like Dowell, spends his time being solicitous and respectful of the bard because the bard holds a position of respect in society. Edward, as a good soldier, holds the same kind of position, and Dowell respects the position while ridiculing the man to the reader. It is interesting that the husband is “a most ferocious warrior.” This is the way Dowell sees himself. People like Edward, the idiots of the world, mistake him for “a woman or a solicitor,” but he is in fact quite different.

If nothing else, Dowell is clearly capable of vindictiveness. He positively gloats over the fact that Leonora knows more than Florence does. There is a deep sense of satisfaction in his statement that Leonora “gave somehow the impression of really knowing what poor Florence gave the impression of having only picked up.”¹³ Dowell is also pleased to block Florence’s one desire of getting to England. For all the criticism on Dowell’s knowledge or lack of it, he gives very strong hints that he knew what was going on between Florence and Jimmy. And if she is going to cuckold him, he will get his revenge by using her own ruse to prevent her from achieving her one goal in life:

It must have rattled poor Florence pretty considerably. For you see, the main idea—the only mad idea of her heart that was otherwise cold—was to get to Fordingbridge and be a county lady in the home of her ancestors. But Jimmy got her, there: he shut on her the door of the Channel; even on the fairest day of blue sky, with the cliffs of England shining like mother of pearl in full view of Calais, I would not have let her cross the steamer gangway to save her life. I tell you it fixed her.¹⁴

Dowell’s knowledge of Jimmy gives him the opportunity to block Florence, and he both uses and enjoys it.

Dowell takes his revenge on Edward in a very subtle way. Edward’s one ambition is to be the bountiful benefactor of his land. He wishes to spend all of his money on his people, an act that Leonora finds incomprehensible. Edward wishes to be a proper lord of a country house and all that that entails.¹⁵ He wishes to be a philanthropist. Dowell is the only character in the novel who actually manages philanthropy, and he does it in such a way that we very nearly miss Dowell’s casual ability to succeed in the one area in which Edward fails so abysmally. He goes back to America after Florence’s death to oversee her uncle’s money, and he establishes a trust for heart patients. He says himself that he “was quite ready to spend a round million dollars on the relief of sufferers from the heart”¹⁶ because he did not want much money for himself. And surely he mentioned his philanthropy when he visited Edward in England.

Florence is the only one who seems to have a clear view of Dowell, and she claims to be afraid of him. Dowell reveals the source of Florence’s fear as a misunderstanding, but Dowell is merely trying to hoodwink the reader. Florence sees Dowell beat his black servant Julius. He tries to explain that there is nothing in it, but Florence does not believe him. Dowell’s willingness to attack a sixty-year-old dependent with no ability to fight back is indicative of his capabilities. As a female under his protection, Florence has no rights and has it demonstrated clearly that Dowell is not always kind to his dependents. And this incident comes just after Florence has declared herself a heart patient so that she can continue her affair with Jimmy. Dowell is merely showing Florence what she can expect for misbehavior. Florence’s fears for her life were entirely justified: “For that was really the mainspring of her fantastic actions. She was afraid that I should murder her.”¹⁷

The suspiciousness of Florence’s death is not noted by any of the characters in the novel. Leonora thinks that Florence committed suicide; Dowell presents the impression that he thinks Florence drank poison accidentally. However, Ford plants the idea Dowell has the capability of murdering Florence. This is what many readers of The Good Soldier have missed, and that suspicion is worth exploring.

We know that Dowell is capable of great evasions. He convinces the Ashburnhams that he really likes all the things he is supposed to like. He convinces Edward that he is unmanly and can be discounted. He convinces Leonora that he is an innocent dupe of Florence. The only one he really fails to convince is Florence, and she claims to be afraid of him. Dowell even manages to convince the reader that he is ineffectual. He attempts to pull the emotion out of a very emotional story and presents himself as an objective witness. He does such an excellent job of this that we almost believe him, and most critics have concentrated on his impressionism rather than on his personality because of the excellence of his evasions.

While critics have said a great deal about the futility of the characters’ lives and principles in the novel, there is a strong thread of violence that runs through the narrative.¹⁸ If nothing else, the title of the novel evokes an image of violence. A good soldier is one who fights and often dies for his country. That there is an aspect of impending violence in the very title is a critical fact often overlooked.

Most major events in the novel happen on August 4, the day Britain declared war in 1914. Ford disclaimed purpose in his choice of this date, but many critics doubt his fidelity in this matter. It seems too great a coincidence that the violent breakup of Europe and of the Ashburnham/Dowell roundtable should occur on the same date. Florence is very superstitious about this date. It is the date of her birthday, the loss of her virginity to Jimmy, her marriage to Dowell, Maisie’s heart attack, and her own death. All of these are actions of violence of some kind.

In addition to these August 4th occurrences, there are other acts of violence. Leonora attacks Maisie physically, boxing her ears, when she catches her outside Edward’s room. This act of violence leads to Florence’s hold over Leonora and the verbal assault that is carried between them for the rest of Florence’s life. Late in the novel Leonora and Nancy conduct a verbal assault on Edward that is almost physical in its violence. There are several premature deaths—Maisie, Florence, and Edward—and one descent into madness. Edward surrounds himself with implements of violence in his library; he stacks guns where books would naturally go. The sports that Edward enjoys are polo and hunting, both of which require violence. And there is that defining action of Dowell’s tale—his beating of the servant Julius.

There are just too many violent actions in this novel for them to be coincidence. Dowell tries to underplay them. He uses throwaway lines to inform the reader of Florence’s and Edward’s deaths. Of Florence, he says, “She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs. Maidan, on her bed. She had a little phial that rightly should have contained nitrate of amyl, in her right hand.” It may take a moment for us to comprehend that Florence is dead. Edward’s death is revealed much the same way, almost as an anticlimax: “It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward met his death.”¹⁹ Edward’s death has been mentioned before, but not the method, and his own throat-cutting is described quite calmly and almost in passing. Dowell cushions the reader from the horror of a man cutting his own throat with a small penknife by explaining the action very casually. Nonetheless, it is a horrifying and violent action.

The clear thread of violence in the novel combined with Dowell’s personality are reasons to question whether Florence died by her own hand. In detective fiction, the reader follows the detective, searching for clues, knowing already that there has been a murder. This novel is also structured as a hunt. In a traditional reading, Dowell is searching for the truth of his life and attempting to make meaning out of nonsense. He is passing through the stages of grief, from denial to acceptance.²⁰ He is giving the reader an account of what he remembers, and we search with him for truth and meaning.

However, if the reader takes a nontraditional view of Dowell as a murderer, he or she must reconcile the normal detective fiction ideology with this novel. In The Poetics of Prose, Tzvetan Todorov explains the normal working of the genre, which The Good Soldier closely parallels. In all good detective fiction, there are two stories. There is the story of the actual murder, which happened before the book opens and which the detective uncovers, and there is the second story of the detective’s progress. The Good Soldier is structured in much the same way. All of the violence has occurred before the book opens, and the reader must interpret Dowell’s clues to discover what actually occurred.

In much detective fiction, the story is related as a book, and the narrator reveals himself as an objective observer of the events writing to an interested audience. That narrator is almost always a close friend of the detective’s: both Holmes’s Watson and Poirot’s Hastings perform this service. Dowell performs this service for readers, setting himself up as an objective observer merely trying to uncover truth; but in this case, the reader is in the position of detective. Dowell takes a similar position of detective’s friend, telling us that he writes to a friend sitting across from him before a warm fire. And like any good detective, the reader must weigh the value of Dowell’s statements.²¹ Most critics are loath to do this because Dowell’s impressionism has always been more interesting than his character. In fact, as Ann Barr Snitow puts it, “The difficulty in discussing Dowell is that to take a final view of him obscures the effect Ford has labored to produce.”²²

Dowell does such an effective job of making himself a collector of impressions rather than an actor that the reader overlooks the details of his personality. He has tendencies toward violence. He has the ability to control his expression and convince those around him that he has feelings other than his own. He is a controlling and vindictive man. He has both motive and opportunity to murder Florence.

Florence herself is reason enough to doubt Dowell’s account of her death. She seems so unlikely to commit suicide. Florence loved the good life. She had goals for her life: “She wanted a gentleman of leisure; she wanted a European establishment. She wanted her husband to have an English accent, an income of fifty thousand dollars a year from real estate and no ambitions to increase that income. And—she faintly hinted—she did not want much physical passion in the affair.”²³ All of these things she had achieved, barring her husband’s English accent. She enjoyed this part of her life very much.

In addition to these things, Florence had money of her own. She was an heiress and could have gotten away from Dowell had she really wanted to. She could not have remained respectable, but she could have gotten away had she been truly desperate. On the night of her reported suicide she had realized that Edward was in love with someone else and that she had lost her hold over him. She returned to the hotel only to find her husband speaking to a man who knew of her affair with Jimmy. Dowell reports that this combination of events—Edward’s loss, Dowell’s knowledge, and the date—caused Florence to despair and take her own life. This action seems unlikely. Florence had eluded difficult situations before. When her uncle removed her from Europe and Jimmy’s company, she found a way to return to him. When Dowell attempted to control her every movement, she found a way to carry on affairs with Jimmy and with Edward. Florence was a resourceful woman.

Florence was afraid of Dowell’s violence. Her fear of Dowell’s finding out “that she was not what she would have called a ‘pure woman”²⁴ motivated her to pay the blackmailing Jimmy. She saw Dowell beat Julius and was convinced that Dowell would murder her, not so much for infidelity or she would not have continued her affair with Jimmy and begun another with Edward, but for public exposure and ridicule. Dowell presents her ideas as “imbecile fears,” but it is curious that Florence meets her death very shortly after Dowell finds out for certain that she was seen coming out of Jimmy’s bedroom.

Dowell tells the reader directly that he would have turned on Florence for forcing him out of his emotional cocoon. Dowell did not want to be undeceived, and so long as Florence maintained a conventional and acceptable restraint, he could play the part of the willing dupe, however tiring that role. The only time he seriously fears for his role is during the trip to M—when Leonora has her outburst. His reaction is interesting: “And I verily believe too, that if my suspicion that Leonora was jealous of Florence had been the reason she gave for her outburst I should have turned on Florence with the maddest kind of rage. Jealousy would have been incurable.”²⁵ He is happy, or at least not angry, so long as Florence does not take her affairs too far. But if she had been so indiscreet as to make Leonora jealous, Dowell would be forced to acknowledge the situation and come out of his pose of indolence. This he is unwilling to do.

Florence gives Dowell a perfect motive to remove her. She threatens his peace. If Florence were to inspire jealousy in someone like Leonora or be exposed publicly as an adulteress, Dowell would have to come out of his peaceful cocoon and deal with public riducule. This would not only disturb his peace, it would tarnish the image he had gone to such lengths to produce. And he would have turned on Florence with “the maddest kind of rage.”

The method of Florence’s death contributes to the idea that she did not take her own life. Why would Florence the hedonist drink prussic acid, another name for cyanide, as a means of suicide? Why would she have such a thing anyway? If she had drunk cyanide, she would have gone into strong convulsions, foamed at the mouth, and died agonizingly.²⁶ When Dowell finds her, she is lying neatly on the bed: “She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike Mrs. Maidan, on her bed.”²⁷ I believe Dowell’s use of the word “arranged” is significant. A person who dies of cyanide poisoning does not do so quietly and respectably, tucking her skirts in neatly and holding her vial of poison. Convulsions and vomiting are more normal symptoms. If Florence were found lying respectably on her bed, she would have to have been “arranged.” Maisie Maidan, who died of a real heart condition, did not do so nearly as neatly as Florence, who supposedly died of cyanide poisoning.

None of this information would cast suspicion on Florence’s death unless Ford knew the effects of prussic acid poisoning. There is strong evidence that he did. The idea was common knowledge in England because of a particularly gruesome poisoning case that was tried in 1845. In February of that year, John Tawell was arrested for the murder of his mistress, Sarah Hart, by prussic acid poisoning. The details of her death were reported at the trial, and the evidence of Sarah Hart’s neighbor was particularly damning: she had come to Hart’s aid when she heard Sarah’s screaming. She found Sarah having violent convulsions and foaming at the mouth. The reactions across London were predictable: “Newspaper sales rocketed, ‘Penny Dreadfulls’ detailed the gruesome facts of prussic acid poisoning.”²⁸

There were multiple cases of poisoning in the succeeding years. In 1865, Dr. Edward Pritchard poisoned his wife and was tried and hanged for it.²⁹ In 1898, Walter Horsford poisoned his ex-mistress with strychnine. At the trial, evidence was presented that he had also purchased prussic acid for the purpose. In 1905 a man named Devereux poisoned his wife and children with morphine and was sentenced to death. In 1911, John James Hutchinson poisoned his parents. When the police came for him, he drank prussic acid.³⁰

It is logical to assume that Ford was familiar with the common knowledge of the effects of prussic acid poisoning. Why, then, is there no mention of it in the novel? Is the reader to assume that Ford did not know? Ford is continuing his general obfuscation of the facts. Ford wants the reader to wonder if, but not know for certain that, Dowell killed his wife.

It is very interesting that Dowell’s first comment after Florence’s death is “Now I can marry the girl.”³¹ Florence was standing between Dowell and something he wanted, and his first statement upon Florence’s death reveals the state of his mind. He protests that he does not understand why this extraordinary statement came out of his mouth, but I think it is an obvious expression of his state of mind. He could not have divorced Florence for her affairs without revealing that he knew about them. As a dupe, Dowell commands the sympathy of his set; as an openly cuckolded husband, he is only worthy of pity, and his pride would not allow him that public image.

Leonora is the one who suggests suicide. Dowell says that until Leonora suggested it, he had no idea of suicide. He even reveals his relief at Leonora’s suggestion: “And then she turned round to me and said without any adornment at all, for I remember her exact words: ‘I think it was stupid of Florence to commit suicide.’ I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of leisure that we two seemed to have at that moment.”³² Dowell’s impressions and rambling style prepare the reader for random changes of topic, and on first glance this appears to be one. However, Dowell is remaining on topic and feels a vast relief that Leonora does not suspect him of murder.

Edward does not suspect either suicide or murder. Dowell has continually dismissed the idea of Edward as an intelligent being in multiple snide comments, but Edward has good reason for not believing that Florence committed suicide. Edward really believes that she died of a heart attack, just like Mrs. Maidan, because of her silence: “He had not any idea that Florence could have committed suicide without writing at least a tirade to him. The absence of that made him certain that it had been heart disease.”³³ Dowell has emphasized Florence’s enjoyment of playacting throughout his descriptions of her, and Edward’s reasoning here is sound. Florence would certainly write a suicide note full of drama and pathos, and this is another reason that her silent suicide is so unlikely.

Dowell could dismiss Edward’s ideas as silliness, but he was truly and profoundly relieved that Leonora did not suspect him. Leonora and Dowell are a great deal alike, and if anyone could have reasoned that Florence died by his hand, it would have been Leonora. There are strong parallels between these two characters. Both Leonora and Dowell play nursemaid to spouses who fake heart conditions. They both conceal their true thoughts—Dowell because he is establishing himself as ineffective, Leonora because of her Catholicism: “In that silent watching, again, I think she was a Catholic—of a people that can think thoughts alien to ours and keep them to themselves.”³⁴

Both Leonora and Dowell fear public exposure and seek peace from these fears. Leonora would be content with Edward’s falling in love with Maisie Maidan (“I think she would really have welcomed it if he could have come across the love of his life. It would have given her a rest”)³⁵ because Maisie could be counted on not to “rook Edward for several thousands a week” and could be trusted to remain faithful to her own husband. Her heart condition made it impossible for her union with Edward to be consummated. Dowell would be equally content for Florence to find the love of her life and for much the same reason—peace: “As God is my Judge, I do not believe that I would have separated those two [Jimmy and Florence] if I had known that they really and passionately loved each other.… I believe that I should have given them money to live upon and that I should have consoled myself somehow. At that date I might have found some young thing, like Maisie Maidan, or the poor girl, and I might have had some peace.”³⁶ He does not mind Florence’s affairs, but he will not tolerate public ridicule and a disruption of his insulated existence.

It is even possible that both Leonora and Dowell “pimp” for their spouses. Leonora is accused of this by Dowell because she seeks a safe person for Edward to fall in love with. She does, after all, pay all of Maisie’s expenses. But Dowell does much the same thing with Jimmy. He does not fear Jimmy as a threat to his marriage because he knows Jimmy is penniless, so Florence will not run off with him. It is in Florence’s best interests to keep the affair a secret, and he does not particularly want to sleep with Florence himself. When the doctors on his Atlantic passage tell him to cease marital affections, he does not really mind the restriction. In both cases, Dowell and Leonora are seeking a safe channel in which to turn their erring and emotional spouses. And they each see the other’s spouse as a safe possibility. During the trip to M—when Leonora at least realizes the affair between Florence and Edward is inevitable, she says: “Oh I accept the situation … if you can.”³⁷

In addition to these similarities, they both murder their spouses, one physically and the other verbally. When Edward confesses his love for Nancy, Leonora launches a verbal assault on him, and she and Nancy between them make Edward’s life hell:

Those two women pursued that poor devil and flayed the skin off him as if they had done it with whips. I tell you his mind bled almost visibly.… Leonora and Nancy banded themselves together to do execution.… They were like a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache and had him well tied to a stake. I tell you there was no end to the tortures they inflicted upon him.³⁸

And after Edward has suffered enough for his infidelity, Leonora removes Nancy from his presence.

Edward’s objectionable infidelity is emotional rather than physical. While Dowell presents himself as an emotional eunuch, Edward is presented as an emotional cripple, a man incapable of constancy. Leonora does not mind that Edward sleeps with vulgar mistresses so long as he keeps himself away from blackmailers. She does not mind his having a fairly shallow romance with Maisie Maidan. She does not even particularly mind his union with Florence. However, what she truly cannot stand is his falling desperately in love, to the point of self-sacrifice, with Nancy. The one time that Edward puts someone else’s feelings above his own, Leonora regards the situation as dangerous to her, and she puts a stop to it.

She also makes certain that Edward’s desire of having Nancy suffer for him from afar is not realized. Edward tells Leonora “that he could pick himself together again and go on with his daily occupations if—the girl being five thousand miles away, would continue to love him. He wanted nothing more.”³⁹ And since he broke down and told her, Leonora managed to make sure that was the one thing he did not get. She had Nancy wire home that she did not even miss Edward and was not in the least miserable, and he promptly committed suicide. She also removes his identity as a generous landlord by threatening to take his bank account.⁴⁰ Leonora killed him as effectively as if she had held the knife herself.

Critics consistently show the passionate natures of Edward, Leonora, and Florence, yet they fail to consider Dowell in the same light. The other three present masks to the world, but critics do not assume that Dowell is also presenting a mask to the reader. However, his actions reveal him to be more than a disinterested observer. If Dowell is a murderer, he would need to be conscious of it and behave so as to divert suspicion. He presents himself to those who are supposed to know him best as an innocent dupe. He presents himself to the reader as an emotional eunuch. Neither of those characters would have a motivation for murder, and indeed no one suspects Dowell of such an action. His pose is very effective.

But Dowell is not a eunuch according to his name. The dictionary definition of a “dowel” is “a pin, usually round, fitting into holes in two adjacent pieces to prevent their slipping or to align them.”⁴¹ As such, it is a phallic object both in shape and in use. This hints at both power and stability, but also at the possibility of violence. The name “Dowell” also suggests the idea “do well,” and Ford cannot have planted those two meanings accidentally. He intends to create doubt in the mind of the reader as to Dowell’s capabilities and intentions.

Ford used the common knowledge of his time period to cast suspicion on Dowell. The contemporary audience would have known the effects of prussic acid poisoning and wondered if Florence was arranged on her bed or died another way. Only the ignorant would have believed that she accidentally drank prussic acid and then arranged herself on the bed. Ford leaves the true method of Florence’s death up to the reader, but if she died of prussic acid poisoning or a true heart attack, she was cleaned up and “arranged.”

If one looks at the mere facts of the novel without analyzing Dowell’s impressionism, it becomes fairly obvious that Dowell could have killed his wife. Dowell is a man given to fits of violence and vindictiveness and who covers up his true feelings. Dowell was alone with Florence before her apparent suicide and in fact found the body. He had reason to hate her for cuckolding him with Jimmy, a “low-down Bowery tough,”⁴² because of the public ridicule she might expose him to. With her constant drive for excitement, she stood in the way of the one thing that Dowell really wanted—peace. At the end of the novel, Dowell has both Bramshaw Teleragh and Nancy, neither of which he could have had were Florence alive, and he has peace. Leonora and Dowell are in much the same place. They each have a diminished version of their previous spouse, and they each have a safe English estate. Neither of them needs to fear public exposure or anything else to disturb their peace. Of course, the story also ends with the beginning of a world war. After fighting for peace and safety, Leonora and Dowell can look forward to four years of utter horror. As Dowell said, it is a very sad story.