?Am I no better than a eunuch??: Narrating Masculinity and Empire in Ford Madox Ford'sThe Good Soldier

Abstract

A '. no better than a eunuch or is the proper man ? the man with the right to existence ? a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's womenkind?1 With these words John Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), articulates the anxieties that prompt his incessant revisions of his identity.2 The disjunction between his own self-conception and his new understanding of masculinity creates his central crisis. Throughout the novel, Ford presents the operative definition of patriarchal masculinity in late Victorian/Edwardian England as inextricably linked to the assumptions and practices of imperialism, likening the expectation that men transgress boundaries in order to possess ever more women to the scramble for colonies among colonial powers. While this imperialistic definition of masculinity grants a certain degree of power to those male characters that enact it, the definition not only limits the female characters but disables the male characters as well. Ford depicts late Victorian/Edwardian culture offering no alternatives to this definition of masculinity: the male characters either follow the definition compulsively, even at times against their explicitly stated wishes, or they do not compete and consequently are emasculated or destroyed. For decades critics have discussed The Good Soldier in terms of its narrative technique, but the novel's treatment of imperialism, its reflection upon the mutually reinforcing relationship between imperialism and patriarchy, and its exploration of narrative in relation to these topics remain virtually