Making up madness in the novels of Ford Madox Ford

Gustar, Gillian ORCID: 0009-0002-6247-9128 (2025). Making up madness in the novels of Ford Madox Ford. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) was an important writer in a period of exciting changes in the way that madness was conceptualised. He lived through the development of psychology and psychiatry as new medical disciplines and the emergence of psychoanalysis and participated in the literary shift towards representing individual consciousness, putting the mind on the page. The First World War challenged both medical professionals and writers to find new responses to madness. Ford was at the intersection of these changes, with a personal history of mental breakdown, a preoccupation with insanity and direct experience of serving at the Somme in 1916.

Ford wrote about people who were mentally or emotionally disturbed throughout his writing career, in letters, essays, autobiographies and fiction. The novels he published between 1892 and 1939 leave a rich repository of depictions of madness which acknowledge but are not constrained by its increasing medicalisation. This valuable collection of literary representations of madness has been under-explored. The most comprehensive and influential accounts are biographical and interpret the novels largely as an expression of Ford’s own psychological needs and problems.

This thesis addresses the question of what Ford’s novels have to say about madness, rather than about Ford himself. It considers how he represents madness, charting continuities and changes over his oeuvre, and to what effect. Methodologically the thesis takes a hybrid approach. It uses quantitative analysis to explore Ford’s language of madness; archival and empirical research to shed new light on how his treatment for a nervous breakdown in 1904 impacted on his fiction; and close readings of thirteen novels from across the oeuvre which exemplify different aspects of his depictions of madness. It offers sustained readings of some of Ford’s less studied novels, such as The Benefactor (1905) and When the Wicked Man (1931), alongside re-examinations of those already extensively discussed: The Good Soldier (1915) and the Parade’s End tetralogy (1924-28).

The thesis demonstrates that the theme of madness in Ford’s novels traces a trajectory of explanations for it from the personal, to the interpersonal, and to the societal and systemic. Ford’s novels produce progressively nuanced and complex explanations for who is labelled as mad and why, with the power of language and the literary central to this. They unsettle distinctions between the rational and irrational, the imagination and delusion, and ultimately the sane and the mad. Increasingly his novels implicate readers in ways which destabilise any sense of their own immunity from madness, showing it to be more ordinary than exceptional. Ford’s insights into how madness is created and experienced remain relevant today.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):