Identity, Knowledge, and Power: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Parade’s End

Ford Madox Ford\u27s The Good Soldier and Parade\u27s End revolve around men and women about whom Ford challenges readers to draw inferences about national and personal identities. Employing Ford\u27s texts, I explore the anxiety associated with changing gender roles in England from the end of the Victorian Era through World War I. In both works, Ford\u27s male characters cling to the gender roles with which they are familiar, but the women seek to define new gender roles or, sadly, choose not to exist in a world where this seems to be an impossibility. I argue that what Judith Butler calls an undoing of stable, normative gender roles and what Michel Foucault calls the emergence of sexuality collided in this period to make the search for intelligibility not only an elusive quest but also a quest that differs for Ford\u27s male and female characters