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- Title
'DON'T YOU SEE?': SURVEILLANCE AND UTOPIAN TRANQUILLITY IN THE GOOD SOLDIER.
- Authors
Marks, Peter
- Abstract
This chapter considers The Good Soldier through the intersection of recent surveillance theory - with its concentration on the ability of institutions and individuals to monitor each other - and utopia, something that John Dowell craves desperately. Taking at its starting point Ford Madox Ford's appreciative if nuanced response to H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia, the chapter reads John Dowell's first meeting with Edward Ashburnham, when he is able to name the putative 'good soldier' even before being introduced, as revealing underlying surveillance processes at work at Bad Nauheim working to identify and reduce risk. Ironically, these very processes inaugurate the calamitous relationship between the two couples that Dowell belatedly tries to comprehend. This institutional surveillance is looked at in contrast to the various and variously successful ways in which the main characters see or (consciously or unconsciously) fail to see what is happening over nearly a decade of deceit. Dowell's apparent blindness to the obvious is read in terms of his search for a 'shock-proof world', a world of utopian tranquillity that he achieves and is forced to endure.
- Subjects
GOOD Soldier, The (Book : Ford); UTOPIAS; MARITAL relations in literature
- Publication
International Ford Madox Ford Studies, 2015, Vol 14, p283
- ISSN
1569-4070
- Publication type
Article