Ford Madox Ford’s Modernist Trio: A Psychosocial Study of Suicidal Doppelgängers in The Rash Act

Abstract

As one of the most prolific writers of modernist fiction, Ford Madox Ford shared the period’s fascination with suicide. Despite the complementary relationship between the theme of suicide and the double-motif, a concentrated analysis of its significance in Ford’s portrayal of the modern world in The Rash Act (1933), his work which most directly focuses on the theme of suicide, has not, to date, been conducted. Accordingly, this article presents a systematic examination of the aforementioned relationship in The Rash Act by applying Anthony Giddens’ psychosocial exploration of suicide in “A Typology of Suicide” (1966), which apart from offering an etiological analysis, serves to aptly contextualize the structuring device of suicidal doppelgängers in the modernist milieu of the novel. It will be argued that, through suicide, the protagonist strives to realize his ego-ideal, which is embodied by his double, oblivious to the fact, however, that it ironically entails the annihilation of the identity of the double (ego-ideal) himself, along with the symbolic destruction of the protagonist’s own identity. By expunging the embodiment of the ego-ideal rather than the protagonist’s undesirable ego, suicide thwarts the actualization of the protagonist’s illusory rebirth. The upshot is a trio, in whose liminal space, suicide, the double-motif and the narrative of identity loss correspond to each other’s contradictions and indeterminacy, which mirror Ford’s literary conception of his age.