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"Am I no better than a eunuch?" Narrating Masculinity and Empire in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier

“Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man — the man with the right to existence — a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbourʼs womenkind?” With these words John Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Fordʼs The Good Soldier (1915), articulates the anxieties that prompt his incessant revisions of his identity. The disjunction between his own self-conception and his new understanding of masculinity creates his central crisis. Throughout the novel, Ford presents the operative defi nition 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 defi nition of masculinity grants a certain degree of power to those male characters that enact it, the defi nition not only limits the female characters but disables the male characters as well. Ford depicts late Victorian/Edwardian culture offering no alternatives to this defi nition of masculinity: the male characters either follow the defi nition 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 novelʼs treatment of imperialism, its refl ection upon the mutually reinforcing relationship between imperialism and patriarchy, and its exploration of narrative in relation to these topics remain virtually