Maddeningly Military: Ford's Depiction of Edward's Traits and Profession Andrew James Aulner College

Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier depicts professional soldiers, represented in the character of Captain Edward Ashburnham, as deeply troubled individuals who hide their real struggles beneath a veneer of professionalism and convention. The novel argues that such individuals are treated as a separate, higher class of beings due to their military status, yet this same elevation also impedes their ability to function normally in society outside of the battlefield.

Edward Ashburnham is praised several times throughout the novel for the strength of his outward appearance, particularly as it relates to his military career. John Dowell’s first full description of him states that “Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap:--an excellent magistrate, a first-rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire England” (Ford 18). He is physically every inch the perfect soldier, from his stoic expression--“His face hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction” (Ford 28)—to his “yellow moustache [that] was as stiff as a toothbrush” (Ford 8) to his “perfectly honest,...