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“Man, for her, was a sort of brute who must have his divagations, his moments of excess, his nights out.” — Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier

Early in Part III of Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Dowell describes his ideas about passion for a woman, likening it to the spurts of interest that a traveler has for different parts of the world. He’s quick to point out that passion has little to do with sexual interest, which “can be left out of the calculation,” but rather “the craving for identity with the woman that he loves” (107). But from that point, his depiction of passion carries situational overtones of sexuality. Even though Dowell has dismissed the “sex-instinct,” as he calls it, we readers have been awakened to it by his fastidious denial!

Subsequent phrases—such as “passion […] is the craving for identity with the woman he loves”—remind us that sex is considered in our culture a union of identities (107). Reading that one in love “desires to touch with the same sense of touch, […] to be enveloped, to be supported” (108) brings to mind the physical reality of sexual relationship, the act of making love. And, when Dowell tells us that the saddest story is the passing of time, we may think not of a woman who has become “too familiar” to us, but rather one who has had far too many “explorers” of her treasures (108).

Dowell’s view of passion and love is more interesting combined with his description of Leonora’s ideas. He says that “she had a vague sort of idea that, to a man, all women are the same after three weeks” and “she was always imagining him ogling at every woman that he came across” (168). So, Leonora believes that a man is always looking for more “territory” to explore, conquer, and tire of—at least according to Dowell.

Perhaps she believes the way Dowell writes it, or perhaps he projects his ideas onto her. According to him, “[Leonora] had the vague, passionate idea that when Edward has exhausted a number of other types of women, he must turn to her” (170). Perhaps Dowell is sympathetically aligning his and Leonora’s view of men so that when Edward fails to return to her (as we know he will fail), the two of them are left somehow together.

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