The First World War, Madness, and Reading between the Lines of <i>The Marsden Case</i>

Abstract

The Marsden Case, Ford’s first published novel after the First World War, has received relatively little critical attention. This paper aims to redress the balance by offering a sustained reading which illustrates how the context of the First World War interacts with a major theme in Ford’s oeuvre, madness. It follows Ford’s maxim that the novel was a place for inquiry and illustrates how Ford’s narrator explores the questions of who succumbs to madness and why. It highlights a debate at work in the novel on the role of talk in creating or curing nervous breakdowns. The novel’s opacity is part of a challenge to the wisdom of directly confronting or revisiting painful experiences, which speaks not only to the effects of the war but to the value of emerging Freudian psychotherapy.

Keywords

• First World War
• war fiction
• madness
• shell shock
• Freud