Ford Madox Ford's Good Soldier in a Modern World

Ford often wrote about virtuous gentlemen ruined by the modern society he saw developing around him. While Ford Madox Ford was writing The Good Soldier, ther was a sense of displacement in England and the class system was starting to crumble. Edward Ashburnham, one of the two male protagonists in Th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Hinds, Constance
Format: Others
Published: Digital Archive @ GSU 2010
Subjects:
Online Access:http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_theses/80
http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1080&context=english_theses
Description
Summary:Ford often wrote about virtuous gentlemen ruined by the modern society he saw developing around him. While Ford Madox Ford was writing The Good Soldier, ther was a sense of displacement in England and the class system was starting to crumble. Edward Ashburnham, one of the two male protagonists in The Good Soldier, is described as a Chevalier Bayard and there are definitely some similarities between Ashburnham and Bayard. For instance, both men lived during periods of great societal change and both faithfully served their countries. However, the feudal lifestyle that was appropriate for Bayard in the fifteenth-century is unavailable to Ashburnham in the twentieth-century. In The Good Soldier, Ford used the old ideals of chivalry and courtly love codes to produce a character, Edward Ashburnham, who represents the loss of traditional values in a modern society.