Comic Elements and Their Effect on Meaning in George Meredith, Ford Madox Ford, and D
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1998 Comic Elements and Their Effect on Meaning in George Meredith, Ford Madox Ford, and D. H. Lawrence Helen Vincenza Garvey Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Garvey, Helen Vincenza, "Comic Elements and Their Effect on Meaning in George Meredith, Ford Madox Ford, and D. H. Lawrence" (1998). Dissertations. 3736. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3736 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1998 Helen Vincenza Garvey LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO COMIC ELEMENTS AND THEIR EFFECT ON MEANING IN GEORGE MEREDITH, FORD MADOX FORD, AND D. H. LAWRENCE VOLUME I A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY HELEN VINCENZA GARVEY CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JANUARY 1998 Copyright by Helen Vincenza Garvey, 1998 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to give thanks first and foremost to God, who through his Blessed Mother, answered my prayers for enlightenment, tenacity, and the help necessary to complete this dissertation. On a less ethereal plane, I wish to give special thanks to my husband, David S. Garvey, who through God's grace endured much to provide the help and support needed for me to finish my work; he is also solely responsible for formatting this dissertation to the required specifications. Great thanks are due, as well, to my mother, Esther A. Ferrante, whose presence was also a blessing; my mother spent many a day for many a month watching my son, Matthew, to expedite the completion of this work. I would also like to thank Caroline Young, Reader and Information Services Reference Librarian at Boston Public Library, and also a friend, for taking the time to check some references for which I had taken incomplete information. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Marialice Wade, the Reference Librarian who handles Interlibrary Loan at Waltham Public Library. Over the past few years I have repeatedly turned to Marialice, whose willingness to help me, and whose competence and diligence in locating and obtaining specific editions of various books, most of which were not with Waltham Public Library's network, have in effect given me access to an academic library. iii I am indebted, as well to Kate Tranquada, Head Reference Librarian at Waltham Public Library; Kate has periodically helped me over the past few years, and she has been particularly helpful in the final stages of my dissertation, as she located a large numbers of books I needed to complete my bibliography. Thanks are certainly due to my dissertation committee. Micael M. Clarke, Ph.D., my director, has consistently encouraged me at those fairly frequent intervals when I questioned whether or not I could ever finish,, and she has always been kind in directing me, even at such times when I was less than amenable to taking direction. I would like to than Verna A. Foster, Ph.D., a reader on my committee; in retrospection I have truly come to appreciate Dr. Foster's vigilant efforts to improve my writing by making me demonstrate, at least to some degree, a working knowledge of the terms "precise" and "concise." I would also like to Douglas H. White, Ph.D., another reader on my committee. Dr. White's clear-thinking and thoughtful approach to literature have been of great value in influencing my own approach to literary interpretation; Dr. White has reminded me that novels are written by authors. iv To David CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................... lll ABSTRACT ........................ viii VOLUME I CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ....... 1 Part I. Comedy, Tragedy, & Tragicomedy in the Novel . 17 Part II. Comedy. 27 Part III. Tragedy. 52 Part IV. Tragicomedy. 76 Notes 99 2. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MEREDITH'S NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN HIS COMIC VISION, THE EGOIST, AND IN HIS TRAGICOMIC VISIONS, THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL AND THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS . 105 Notes 254 vi VOLUME II CHAPTER 3. FORD MADOX FORD'S THE GOOD SOLDIER Part I. Overview. 265 Part II. Analysis. 306 Notes 348 4. COMIC EFFECTS IN SONS AND LOVERS AND WOMEN IN LOVE .. 352 Notes 418 WORKS CITED . 429 VITA . 439 vii Helen V. Garvey Loyola University Chicago COMIC ELEMENTS AND THEIR EFFECT ON MEANING IN GEORGE MEREDITH, FORD MADOX FORD, AND D. H. LAWRENCE This dissertation re-examines George Meredith's The Egoist, The Ordeal Of Richard Feverel, and The Tragic Comedians, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, and D. H. Lawrence's Sons And Lovers and Women In Love. Meredith, Ford, and Lawrence all use various elements of comedy and Meredith and Ford also use elements of tragedy and tragicomedy to create specific effects. Up until now these authors have been to some degree misunderstood or misinterpreted as a result of an apparent inability on the part of critics to recognize the role comic elements should play in the interpretation of their works. I consider Meredith's intrusive narrators in light of their comic effects, and also explain Meredith's combining comic and tragic elements to depict life as a continuous struggle between an individual's intellect and his emotions. Interpreting The Egoist as essentially comedy with some mixed moments and Richard Feverel and The Tragic Comedians as tragicomedies reveals that Meredith mixes comic and tragic effects chiefly to investigate the link between motivation and provocation and to reveal the degree if any to which individuals know themselves. Ford also fuses the comic with the tragic to represent the human condition as a precarious balance between potential and limitation; Ford dramatizes that balance in his central character's struggle to face the truth that shatters his illusions. Ford uses a mixed genre to make his points because the viii complexity of tragicomedy blurs the distinctions between right and wrong by creating an ambiguous context in which the reader must make judgments about moral action. My approach to Lawrence's novels provides new interpretations that counter his apparent anti-feminism: Lawrence utilizes his narrators sometimes to cast doubt upon the utterances of some of his principal male characters, such as Paul Morel and Birkin, and sometimes to make their utterances ironic or to ridicule them. The broader implications of my reading of Lawrence's novels in relation to the comic effects he creates focus on his treatment of relationships between men and women and allow for an accurate perspective on what he is saying about the ways men and women relate to each other. ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The purpose of this dissertation, which is interpretative, is to re-examine The Egoist, The Ordeal Of Richard Feverel, and The Tragic Comedians by George Meredith, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, and Sons And Lovers and Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. The reason for studying these novels is that Lawrence, Meredith, and Ford all use various elements of comedy and Meredith and Ford also use elements of tragedy and tragicomedy to create specific effects. Up until now these authors have been to some degree misunderstood or misinterpreted as a result of an apparent inability on the part of critics to recognize the role comic elements should play in the interpretation of their works. The negative critical assessments of Lawrence's portrayal of women in Sons And Lovers and Women in Love do not recognize that Lawrence uses comic elements to undermine apparent anti-feminism. Although critics have mostly interpreted The Egoist as comedy, they have not seen that Meredith combines comic effects with serious non-comic effects to complicate the reader's response; neither have critics seen that Meredith's intrusive narrators in The Egoist, as in The Tragic Comedians and The Ordeal Of Richard Feverel, create comic effects. In these latter two novels critics have not seen that in the interaction of comic and tragic effects Meredith creates a special effect, a mixed response. And critics have been mostly divided about whether Ford's The Good Soldier is comedy or 1 2 tragedy; for the most part they have not seen that Ford usually contrasts his method of narration with the material being narrated, so that, like Meredith, he creates a special effect, a mixed response to the novel. Another reason for misunderstanding or misinterpretation of Lawrence, of Meredith, and of Ford is that the focus has been on particular aspects of the novels and in some cases primarily on the authors themselves, rather than on the works in their entirety. Studying only specific parts of these novels and/or focusing primarily on the authors rather than on their fiction, has led many critics to conclude that Lawrence is anti-feminist, that Meredith is in certain respects an artistic "failure," and that Ford is writing either comedy or tragedy, but not a mixed work that combines comedy and tragedy. Ironically, a great part of the difficulty in interpreting these novels arises from the elusive terms themselves, comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy, that are used to describe them, and which, presumably are meant to facilitate a greater understanding of the works. These terms are problematic in that they have been variously defined throughout history according to particular dicta and standards of the age, and they are still being redefined today. Another matter for consideration in labeling these novels as comedy, tragedy, or tragicomedy is that dramatic theory is being applied to a non-dramatic medium.