Date of Award

Spring 5-12-2017

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

First Advisor

Randy Malamud, PhD

Second Advisor

Leeanne Richardson, PhD

Third Advisor

Marilynn Richtarik, PhD

Abstract

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and Parade's End revolve around men and women about whom Ford challenges readers to draw inferences about national and personal identities. Employing Ford's 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's 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's male and female characters.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/9575903

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