The fragmentation endemic to modernism … involves multiple perspectives that can destroy one’s sense of one’s world and one’s sense of one’s self. But this isn’t always the case. Regeneration, of the kind that eventually comes to [some of Ford Madox Ford’s characters] … is also … its gift … [There is an] (often atavistic) possibility in Ford, a possibility that attunes the mind not to the commonly expressed modernist experience of fragmentation, but to its rich and life-giving mirror – multiplicity – instead.1
The possibility that Sara Haslam refers to here is suggested by Ford through his allusion to George Herbert’s poem ‘Virtue’ (1633) in A Man Could Stand Up—, the third volume of Parade’s End.2 On the Western Front, during World War I, Christopher Tietjens hears a bugle tune that brings to mind Henry Purcell, the Seventeenth Century, and the first two lines of Herbert’s poem.3 The context for Tietjens’s musing is his fragmentation, dislocation, and nostalgia for a time when he imagines he would feel more whole and more at home. But the first and last stanzas of ‘Virtue,’ remembered in full, reveal a more complex situation: one that holds the possibility that Haslam notes and to which Ford alludes:
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
For they must die …
Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like season’d timber never gives;
But thought the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
Herbert’s poem begins by foreseeing the end of the ‘sweet day’ for which Tietjens pines, but it ends by foreseeing also the prospect of ethical gain from temporal loss in the form of regenerated virtue(s) in those whose moral ‘timber’ is ‘seasoned’ by their world’s transformation to ‘coal.’ I want to argue here that such regeneration is an overarching theme of Parade’s End: one of the ways in which, as Haslam notes, Ford both ‘represent[s] the fragmented perception and experience of modern life’ and ‘counters them’ with ‘positive fictions’ like this.4 I will do so by offering an overview of Ford’s tetralogy in terms of virtue ethics, a branch of moral philosophy concerned, like Ford, with regenerating ‘atavistic’ modes of ethical thought that predate the rise of the modes with which Ford’s characters contend: the instrumental calculus of modern technocracy resulting in war and the abstract, inhumane moral codes of the atomized, anomic society to which such calculus gives rise.5
On Armistice Day, Valentine Wannop recalls the epigraph to Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898): ‘Something human is dearer than a wilderness of decalogues,’6 and whether the dictates be those of the utility-based or ‘consequentialist’ ethics of Jeremy Bentham7 or those of the rule-based or ‘deontological’ ethics of Immanuel Kant.8 What unites these modern ethics is their impersonality: their emphasis on calculus and code respectively at the expense of moral character, a human factor deemed to be irrelevant to ethical efficiency. This modern abstraction of ethics from personality is one key form of the fragmentation noted by Haslam, which Ford follows Conrad in critiquing.
It is likewise one that the founders of contemporary virtue ethics critique. Elizabeth Anscombe calls for the concept of ‘duty’ to be ‘jettisoned’ until such time as ethics recovers the sense of ‘psychology’ that it has been ‘lacking’ since Bentham and Kant.9 Alasdair MacIntyre follows Anscombe by making the ‘disquieting suggestion’ that, lacking a sense of moral character embodied in human personalities, we now possess only ‘simulacra of morality’ and not the real thing.10 Charles Taylor follows both Anscombe and MacIntyre in noting how we have now forgotten how ‘selfhood and the good’ are ‘intertwined,’ our ethics focused more on ‘what it is right to do’ than ‘what it is good to be,’ more on ‘the content of obligation’ than ‘the nature of the good life.’11 This lack of focus yields what MacIntyre calls ‘the emotivist self,’ a fragmented self without ethical substance since ‘the kind of telos in terms of which it once judged and acted’ is no longer thought to exist.12 And since a telos in virtue is, as Taylor notes, ‘constitutive of human agency,’ this negligence of moral character is ‘tantamount to stepping outside what we would recognize as integral, that is, undamaged human personhood.’13
The damage done is seen throughout Parade’s End, even – perhaps especially – in Tietjens himself, who sees it more clearly than most of his peers. The endemic fragmentation of moral character through its replacement by moral calculus and moral codes upheld hypocritically is clear in Tietjens’s famous claim to stand for ‘monogamy and chastity’ and ‘no talking about it,’ followed by his qualification that ‘of course if a man wants to have a woman, he has her,’ and ‘again, no talking about it.’14
What ethicists like Anscombe, MacIntyre, and Taylor do to address the damage Tietjens displays is precisely to discuss the kinds of things of which he would rather not speak. In this, they follow Ford. Max Saunders notes ‘the ethical intricacy and subtlety’ of Parade’s End, which he regards as ‘a massive exploration of the nature of virtue.’ ‘The theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity all make their appearance,’ he observes, to which I would add the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. ‘Virtue and goodness themselves are explicitly invoked,’ he adds. ‘But Parade’s End does not flinch from the confrontation with [its characters’] weaknesses.’15
Ford’s exploration of the possibilities for ethical endurance and regeneration is joined by an equal recognition of what Martha Nussbaum, calls ‘the fragility of goodness.’ Life is an ‘egg-and-spoon race,’ as Valentine notes, and virtue a thing to be ‘prized,’ in part because of how precarious and prone to fragmentation it is.16 As Nussbaum explains, this recognition began to be made by ancient Greek drama in tandem with the recognition of virtue itself by ancient Greek philosophy. And as befits its status as the most humanistic of the three main schools of contemporary moral philosophy, virtue ethics has also been the one most informed by dialogue with literature, with MacIntyre and Nussbaum both developing key ideas through reference to Ford’s and Conrad’s predecessor Henry James and Taylor referring as often to modernist literature as to modern moral philosophy.17
I want to extend that dialogue by placing Ford’s work in conversation with two important recent works of virtue ethics by Eric Silverman, each focused on terms crucial to Parade’s End: chastity, which Ford invokes from the start, and love, which comes to predominate. In The Prudence of Love: How Possessing the Virtue of Love Benefits the Lover (2010), Silverman enumerates how love counter-acts the fragmentation, dislocation, and nostalgia Ford’s characters face.18 Using terms derived from Silverman’s conception of love as ‘a disposition toward relationally appropriate acts of the will consisting of disinterested desires for the good of the beloved and unity with the beloved hailed as final ends,’ I will argue that Tietjens’ and Valentine’s love for one another helps them integrate their psyches and acquire the epistemic goods of self-awareness, irony, and empathy, which foster eudaimonia or well-being, even in the midst of catastrophe.19 In Sexual Ethics in a Secular Age: Is There Still a Virtue of Chastity? (2021), Silverman answers ‘yes,’ explaining how the virtue helps solve problems resulting from the ‘unwise, imprudent, unjust, intemperate, or otherwise vicious expressions of sexual desire’ which are just as endemic in Tietjens’s and Valentine’s world as moral fragmentation, dislocation, and nostalgia are.20
Using terms derived from Silverman’s conception of chastity as ‘an excellent personal disposition toward sex, sexual pleasure, and relationships that supports the flourishing of both the individual and those effected,’ I will argue that both before and after they have sexual intercourse, Tietjens and Valentine are chaste in the philosophical sense and that their virtue in contrast to the violence and negligence of war and sexual vice is one reason they are forgiven for their legal infidelity and their union blessed at the close of Parade’s End.21
A dialogue of hearts and minds that fosters well-being is the point of their affair. ‘You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her,’ Tietjens concludes. ‘[S]itting talking to her for whole afternoons … was what a young woman was for.’ That ‘in effect was love,’ he decides: a word ‘little in his vocabulary before.’22 The ability to talk about love or any other virtue (or vice) is based on the ability to recognize it and to think about it in critical ways. Tietjens and Valentine learn how to do this in Parade’s End, and it is also my project here, with help from contemporary virtue ethicists and fellow scholars of Ford.
Love’s Benefit of Psychic Integration
Among the ‘benefits’ of love that Silverman identifies are ‘final ends’ and ‘psychic integration.’ Loving someone, he explains, we want what is best for them and hope for their love in return. So, love provides us with meaningful goals and direction in life. Our pursuit of love’s ends requires a unity of feeling and thought, he notes. When our emotions are conflicted or at odds with our will, we can’t pursue love’s ends. To seek a loved one’s well-being and their love for us in turn calls for psychic integrity, with instincts and intentions aligned. Such harmony increases both our loved ones’ well-being and our own, he concludes. Love is better when each partner is wholehearted and of one mind.23
Prior to meeting Valentine, Tietjens is split between ‘emotion’ and ‘intellect,’ ‘reason’ and ‘passion.’ Reflecting on his case, Tietjens posits that ‘in every man there are two minds that work side by side, the one checking the other.’24 Barbara Farnworth discusses Tietjens insight here into his own internal fragmentation. Both Haslam and Saunders25 note the influence of Frederic W. H. Myers’s idea of ‘the subliminal self’ and Sigmund Freud’s idea of the unconscious mind on British thinking on psychology informing Parade’s End. Haslam, Saunders, and Karolyn Steffens each give us illuminating readings of the sequence informed by Freud. And Farnworth extends this genealogy of modern ideas on feeling and thought in Parade’s End back to William James’s Principles of Psychology, which she sees as informing Ford’s depiction of Tietjens’s self-awareness, including his sense of his own lack of psychic integrity.
We can extend it further still, to virtue ethics, to see how Silverman’s work on the role of love in psychic integration complements these Ford scholars’ points of view. Love can be seen as among those ‘ancient sanities’ that Haslam cites Ford’s friend C. F. G. Masterman as finding lacking in modern life.26 And in Ford’s specific case, it can be seen as one aspect of what Haslam (following Herbert N. Schneidau) calls the ‘atavism’ through which modernists like Ford seek to overcome the fragmentation from which their work grows.27 The psyche’s internal conflict between the virtues and the vices in general or between love and hate specifically is an alternate mapping that the similarly atavistic project of modern virtue ethics provides us, alongside Freud’s more well-known mapping of the conflict among superego, ego, and id or between Eros and Thanatos. And one form hateful vice can take is the codified moralism of deontological conventions that abstract the virtue of justice from peer-virtues like prudence, temperance, and love, as well as from the human beings in whom all virtues reside.
This split between internal character and external codes, internal virtue and external rules is the one which Tietjens suffers most and from which he starts to heal on meeting Valentine. That turn of events starts a narrative arc that shows Parade’s End itself to hold components of the ‘positive fiction’ Haslam notes in some of Ford’s prior works. The advent of Tietjens’ love for Valentine initiates a turn toward self-analysis. It leads him to greater recognition of how he is split and starts a process of self-integration through which his divisions are healed. He tries at first to follow external rules and play ‘stiff and cold’ with Valentine, while knowing that he is ‘at bottom’ a ‘sentimentalist.’ But eventually he yields to the counsel of love. ‘Let this be a holiday!’ he says, a break ‘from his convention with himself:’ a break from his dutiful adherence to codes of thought and feeling that divide his heart and mind. Valentine inspires Tietjens’s holiday, and he inspires her own in reciprocal turn. ‘I’m loving [this] all,’ she observes and he admits that he is ‘loving it too.’28
Love’s Epistemic Goods of Self-Awareness and Irony
Further benefits of love observed by Silverman are ‘self-improvement’ and knowledge as an ‘epistemic good.’ He notes how we curb our vices and cultivate our virtues for the sake of those we love. These virtues come in two broad types. The first, which Silverman follows MacIntyre in calling the ‘virtues of independent reasoning,’ were codified by Aristotle and include the cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, prudence, and fortitude. The second, referred to by MacIntyre and Silverman as the ‘virtues of acknowledged dependence,’ were codified by Jesus and later Christian thinkers and include the additional virtues of kindness and charity. Silverman agrees with MacIntyre that both types of virtue are essential for human well-being, forming the basis for mutually supportive relationships. He follows Aristotle in describing these as ‘friendships of virtue,’ where each friend fosters the other’s moral growth. Aristotle regards such friendships as the highest external goods, second only to the cardinal virtues as ends in themselves. But Silverman goes further and follows MacIntyre in noting the essential roles of kindness and charity in friendship. These virtues are especially crucial during times of vulnerability. But even during more secure times, friendships of virtue bring us knowledge as an epistemic good. As they deepen, so does insight, increasing our awareness not only of our friends but also ourselves. In friendships of virtue, we see ourselves through our friends’ eyes and with an ethical irony that helps us improve.29 This epistemic good of self-recognition is one aspect of the ‘ethics of singularity’ toward which Isabelle Brasme sees Tietjens growing through his love for Valentine. Brasme describes a moment when Tietjens sees himself in a mirror that has been cracked and recognizes someone there who is other than the person whom he took himself to be, because fragmented in the ways we have seen.
From the start, Tietjens’s attraction to Valentine is ethical as much as erotic. He recognizes her at once as a moral peer, a ‘virtuous friend,’ ‘the only human being he had met for years whom he could respect.’30 He does so based on fundamental ethical affinities that obviate their superficial differences in ideology. Valentine wants Tietjens to ‘get it out … once and for all’ that while he approves of her Suffragist aims, he disapproves of her means. But she has it the wrong way round. ‘I approve entirely of your methods,’ he explains. ‘But your aims are idiotic.’ What earns his admiration is the ethos expressed through and cultivated by her performance of the Suffragist role and not the role per se.31 For someone as ‘virtuous’ and ‘vigorous’ as she to be ‘suffragette of the suffragettes’ is only ‘as it should be,’ according to him, since ‘how else can a woman keep clean and wholesome’ in ‘the early decades of ‘the twentieth century?’32 Her example brings him greater knowledge of an ethos congruent with his own but one which manifests in an unexpected way. And Tietjens’s own example does the same kind of good for Valentine. ‘I’ve never met a [Tory] before,’ she explains. ‘I thought they were all in museums.’ But she comes to recognize Tietjens’s posture as the ‘mighty fine performance’ of ‘a capable workman’ only ‘doing his job’ and Tietjens himself as ‘a man like oneself with feet of clay.’33 There is an element of pantomimic irony in both Valentine’s and Tietjens’s performances of their respective roles. It is an element of which they are each already aware, but one which becomes more apparent when each of them sees it through the other’s eyes. This arc of mutual growth as their romance unfolds is the extent to which they each become progressively less role-players of their chosen archetypes, less theatrical emblems, and progressively more real-life epitomes of the ethos those emblems represent. Valentine becomes more prudent and Tietjens becomes more temperate as they fall in love. And each becomes even more just and courageous than they already were. But the virtues in which they grow the most are those of ‘acknowledged dependence:’ kindness and charity. Tietjens comes close during their first outing to kissing Valentine: ‘an all but irresistible impulse,’ foretelling things to come.34 But a gesture that says more about their romance as it unfolds is Valentine’s placement of her arm over Tietjens’s shoulder as he shakes with ‘clumsy sobs,’ while sharing with her his sadness at lacking, like her, an ethical home in their social scene.35
Love’s Epistemic Good of Empathy
Silverman emphasizes one particular type of growth fostered by relationships like Tietjens’s and Valentine’s: an increase in ‘empathy’ or knowledge of how others think and feel. As we and our loved ones grow closer, he explains, we become attuned to one another’s points of view, enabling a shared understanding, despite whatever differences remain. This is evident already from how love allows the Tory Tietjens and the Suffragist Valentine to empathize with one another’s views. But as Silverman notes, empathy fostered in the context of friendships of virtue extends beyond them to greater understanding of others in general and, with it, greater kindness and charity.36 This type of empathy is termed ‘fellow feeling’ by Meghan Marie Raymond, who situates it in early twentieth century thinking by Vernon Lee, Wilhelm Worringer, and T. E. Hulme and the Scottish Enlightenment ethics of David Hume and Adam Smith. We have seen Tietjens’ view of himself as ‘a sentimentalist’ and Raymond links this view, by way of Hulme and Smith, to his anachronistic self-perception as a man of the Eighteenth Century. Through that posture, Tietjens participates implicitly in the ‘atavistic’ modernist project of groping after ‘ancient sanities,’ though perhaps not reaching far enough back. MacIntyre describes Hulme and Smith as early, only partially successful ‘atavistic’ modernists, in their attempts to revive virtue ethics even as it first began to yield to consequentialism and deontology.37
The further forward Parade’s End moves, the further back Tietjens gropes in terms of his nostalgia for prior episodes in the history of ethics, feeling himself more and more a man of the seventeenth century moment when virtue ethics made its last stand in figures like George Herbert, and less and less a man of the eighteenth century, when the loss of virtue ethics began to be acknowledged by Hulme and Smith. In terms that rhyme with Herbert’s sense that it is when the whole world turns to coal that the soul of virtue chiefly lives, Eve Sorum reads Parade’s End as exploring ‘the [enduring] possibility of empathy in a war-traumatised world’ in which ‘all’ seems ‘lost.’38 One way of viewing the era of the two World Wars with the hindsight the revival of virtue ethics provides is to see that era as a moment when all seemed lost and the whole world turned to coal. But these, as Herbert and Sorum recognize, are ones when the soul of virtue gains a new lease on ethical life. This is the case with Tietjens, who sees the war not only through his own eyes but also Valentine’s, and eventually those of many others: men quite different from himself, whom he nonetheless regards empathetically as comrades-in-arms.
Alongside the faces of these comrades, Tietjens sees Valentine’s face. He sees it in the face of Lance Corporal Duckett, who – once his corpse is retrieved from a landslide caused by a German shell – resembles Valentine ‘reclining in an ashbin.’39 Seeing her face, Tietjens imagines how she, as a pacifist, would view the scene of war and in so doing, he sees that scene through her eyes as well as his own. He makes the ironic recognition that it is a ‘mix-up’ to be lovelorn for a pacifist, all the while preparing men like ‘bullocks’ for ‘the abattoirs.’40 Seeing himself through Valentine’s eyes and empathizing with her point of view, Tietjens feels himself more than ever ‘bound to do his best’ for his men:41 a ‘ragtime collection’ of eccentrics, with each of whom he learns to empathize.42
Two of his comrades are ‘music-hall performers’ and two are ‘scene shifters’ for the pantomime;43 so, Tietjens promises the ‘poor, bloody unit’ a post-war trip to the Boxing Day panto at Drury Lane.44 Elsewhere, I follow. Thomas C. Moser in using this allusion to pantomime to explore the relation between Parade’s End as a whole and that theatrical form.45 What I call the ‘pantomimic mode,’ by which Ford pivots back forth between satirical and romantic points of view, is derived not only from the back and forth pivot between abstraction and empathy in modernist writing observed by Saunders, Haslam, Hammond, and Sorum, but also from the way in which empathy itself contains its own pivot between identity and alterity as described by Brasme. Cockney music-hall comedian Runt affectionately teases Tory gentleman Tietjens by serenading him with a lyric that instinctively alludes to Tietjens’s longing for Valentine. Knowing that Runt had played ‘the ‘ind legs of the elephink’ at Drury Lane, Tietjens reciprocates this complex gesture of fellow feeling with one of his own. He invites Runt and the rest of his men to the Boxing Day panto: a democratic gesture of generalized empathy typical of Ford’s artistic project in Parade’s End and elsewhere after the war and indicative also of Tietjens’ moral growth.46
Love, Chastity, and Sexual Well-Being
Despite the ongoing revival of virtue ethics, with its exploration of the virtue of love, Silverman notes that little is being said lately in favor of chastity, with most recent discussions of erotic love advocating unrestrained desire as against what is deemed to be repression. But that chastity remains a virtue seems clear to him when the term is defined philosophically. Anscombe calls chastity ‘the virtue concerned with sex.’ Aquinas calls it ‘the proper ordering of sexual desire.’ And even common sense, not to mention common law and legal statute, makes a clear distinction between sexual behaviors that are wise and foolish, good and bad, or right and wrong, with almost everyone agreeing that some level of sexual restraint is required in some cases.47
Chastity for Silverman combines two cardinal virtues: temperance or internal self-control and justice or external responsibility. A lack of self-control in sexual relations can be harmful to oneself, he argues, while a lack of responsibility toward others can be harmful to them. So, chastity requires both temperance and justice. But these alone are not enough, he concedes. The cardinal virtue of prudence or practical wisdom is also required, since temperance and justice are being brought to bear on some of the most complex and volatile of human contingencies. Therefore, he concludes, chastity should not be mistaken for sexual convention or conservative adherence to rules regarding sex. It requires instead the thoughtful application of general virtues to specific situations; such that sexual decisions are informed by genuine wisdom rather than uncritical acceptance of traditional norms.48
Chastity for Silverman is not the repression of sex but only its restraint to prevent some harm or to promote a greater good. It has two key benefits: increased personal autonomy and the prospect of friendships of virtue including sexuality. Sexual fulfillment is just one part of human well-being, Silverman argues, so erotic desires should not determine our course in life at the expense of other aims. One choice such self-control enables is romances of virtue that provide both sexual fulfillment and long-term opportunities for moral growth.49
Tietjens’s and Valentine’s romance stands in marked contrast not only to his and Sylvia’s marriage, which was born of lust or intemperate desire unrestrained by chastity, but also two other unchaste sexual relationships: Syliva’s affair with Drake, prior to meeting Tietjens, during which she suffered from sexual assault, and the affair of McMaster and Mrs. Duchemin, who comes to Valentine for advice on ‘get[ting] rid of a baby’ as the war begins.50 What emerges from these instances of what Saunders calls ‘sex ferocity,’ in which sex and violence are mixed – and what emerges especially from their juxtaposition with war – is a way of imagining chastity in terms of pacifism and pacifism in terms of chastity which can renew our understanding of each term.51 What emerges is a view of chastity as the pacifism of sex and of pacifism as the chastity of violence.
Pacifism, Chastity, Violence, and Sex: Women and Men
Chastity, Silverman argues, helps us protect ourselves from harmful decisions resulting from immoderate sexual desires. Temperance in the context of chastity enables self-control, self-respect, and respect for others’ rights, helping us resist manipulation in sexual relationships and honor our responsibilities. Chastity for Silverman benefits both the chaste person and those they love. A chaste person considers the effects of their actions in sexual relationships and strives to act in just and responsible ways. Ethical sexual relations require full mutual consent, which goes beyond simply refraining from violent force to ensuring both partners can make informed decisions, without power differentials.52
Sylvia imagines World War I as a ‘universal conspiracy’ of men ‘to rape innumerable women:’ a ‘warlock’s carnival of appetites, lusts, ebrieties.’ For her, war and with it, rape are ‘at the bottom’ of all ‘male virtue.’53 She is thinking of Tietjens and supposing he is sleeping with Valentine. But a fundamental virtue of the gentleman’s role Tietjens seeks to play is a chastity intended expressly to temper men’s sexual behavior and provide just protection for women from a range of attendant harms. This sexual variety of temperance and justice is also a fundamental good for the Suffragist cause, which helps explain the ethical affinity of Valentine and Tietjens, despite their divergent ideologies.
Sylvia is charged with being one of the least just and temperate figures in modern literature. But her sex ferocity may be owing – as Saunders follows Janet Soskice in saying – to the ‘sadic lusts’ of someone less just and temperate still: the ‘ghost-like’ Drake, who haunts Ford’s sequence as its genuine warlock, its anti-Christopher.54 Saunders notes elements of either sadism, masochism, or both in the sexualities of most of Parade’s End’s major figures, including Mrs. Duchemin and MacMaster and even Valentine and Tietjens, in addition to Sylvia and Drake. But only in the last pair are sadistic and/or masochistic tendencies intemperate enough to seem essential, not merely potentials that go unrealized.
Sylvia was ‘taken advantage of’ sexually by Drake, whom she describes as ‘a brute.’ I view Drake’s brutality toward her as extending to rape, a conclusion I base on thoughts from Soskice (shared by Saunders) on the post-traumatic impulse by which she ‘drives her nails into her palms’ and feels ‘degraded’ when she thinks ‘involuntarily’ of him. Another mark of this trauma is not only her masochistic ‘longing’ for submission to men in re-enactment of the ‘dreadful feeling’ she had felt with Drake, but also her sadistic desire ‘to have men at her feet.’ As Saunders notes, Tietjens is charged with being sadistic himself in refusing sex with Sylvia. But Sylvia herself does something similar, albeit not to Tietjens. She adopts a state of ‘personal chastity’ upon returning to him from Perowne. But she does so ‘not because of any attachment to her husband or to virtue as such.’ She does so instead for sadistic pleasure, which she gets from leading ‘nice men’ on and then ‘turning [them] down,’ a ‘sport’ she describes by analogy to what she thinks men must feel when they box or hunt.55
Drake’s rape of her leaves Sylvia unable to form a romance of virtue with Tietjens or anyone else. Drake harms her by making her unable to enjoy relationships with good men, including her husband. She can enjoy masochistically being hurt by bad men like Drake and she can enjoy sadistically hurting good men like Tietjens. But she cannot find fulfillment in the marriage Tietjens gives her justly to accept responsibility for his own intemperate action in sleeping with her and maybe fathering her child. And Drake’s rape of Sylvia harms Tietjens too, albeit indirectly, by leaving her someone with whom he cannot form the romance of virtue into which their marriage might otherwise have grown. Sylvia and Tietjens would most likely not have married at all because they would most likely not have had sex, save for consequences owing to Drake’s own lack of chastity.
Pacifism, Chastity, Violence, and Sex: Children and Parents
Silverman observes that romances of virtue involve the same range of shared experience as friendships in general, plus the prospect of parenthood. By supplying potential parents with a context for mutual support, romances of virtue provide the best means by which to care for any children they conceive. Silverman argues that justice in the context of chastity extends to responsibility for reproduction as one potential consequence of sex. Ethical sexual behavior requires consideration of the rights of children and of parents’ responsibilities to those they conceive.56
When Mrs. Duchemin comes to Valentine wanting ‘to get rid of a baby,’ both the timing at the start of the war and the language she uses place her desire in the context of not only chastity and sex but also pacifism and violence. It matters here that Mrs. Duchemin does not describe what she wants as termination of a pregnancy but a way to do away with what her diction indicates she regards as an unborn child. Mrs. Duchemin’s question lands like a bomb and its ‘harshness’ and ‘vulgarity’ will mark it as ‘a dark patch – as it were of murder – at which [Valentine] should never look’ but always will.57
Valentine’s work as a ‘tweeny maid’ has given her ‘considerable knowledge’ of ‘the sexual excesses of humanity.’ Because she has been ‘a slavey,’ she is now ‘a suffragette.’ And because she is a ‘suffragette,’ she is ‘virtuous’ and ‘chaste.’58 The Suffragist call for ‘Votes for Women’ came with a call for ‘Chastity for Men.’ If asked, Valentine would concur with her day’s ‘advanced teachers’ and ‘tendentious novelists’ who call for ‘enlightened promiscuity’ in sexual affairs. But her own deeper feelings are of a less advanced, more atavistic, but perhaps more enlightened type. She finds ‘sexual incontinence’ (like every type of intemperance, including war) to be ‘extremely ugly’ and ‘chastity’ (like every type of temperance, including peace) a virtue to be prized in ‘the egg and spoon race that life is,’ goodness being fragile and precarious. So, she assumes incorrectly that whatever their fashionable support for enlightened promiscuity, friends like Mrs. Duchemin and MacMaster maintain the same ‘absolute continence’ as she herself does.59
The ‘idea’ that, ‘if a male and a female … were alone in a room’ and the male did not press forcefully for sex and the female yield, then it was ‘an insult’ is one that had not entered her mind ‘without someone to put it there.’ Its proximate cause is Mrs. Duchemin, but its ultimate source is Sylvia, for whom it is a ‘tenet,’ or rather Drake, whose rape of Sylvia produces her ferocious view of sex.60 It is a vicious, unvirtuous view and its violence stems from intemperate lust just as war stems from intemperate wrath. On the Western Front, Tietjens recognizes Sylvia’s course of sex ferocity as a ‘warpath.’61
The sadistic half of Sylvia’s ‘ferocity’ is manifest in threats toward Tietjens and her own child, whose paternity he claims. And it leads Valentine to feel threatened also during her pregnancy. ‘I hate my husband … and I hate … I hate my child,’ Sylvia insists to her confessor Father Consett, who is concerned about the ‘black masses’ at which she is ‘playing,’ which include the sacrifice of ‘kids’ or infant goats. She goes further and tells him that she plans to ‘pain’ Tietjens by ‘corrupting’ their child, something Tietjens fears throughout Parade’s End.62 His fear explains Valentine’s own when Sylvia appears toward its close, seemingly to threaten ‘Little Chrissie’ in her womb.63
‘God … Loves All Good Lovers’
What makes these ‘masses’ so ‘black’ is the importance of the love between parents and children throughout Parade’s End, including Tietjens’s love for his mother, the ‘Anglican saint,’ Valentine’s for her father, the Classics professor, and Sylvia’s for, Father Consett, her Irish Catholic priest.64 This type of love will help resolve the paradox of Ford’s novel sequence: that Tietjens and Valentine are emblems of virtue in general and chastity specifically, while also technically engaged in adultery.
Three of the parents whose approval they might seek are now gone, Mr. Tietjens too having passed away. But there is still Mrs. Wannop, a novelist, tasked now with weighing the claims of virtue and law in much the same way as Ford. She asks Valentine and Tietjens if there is ‘any legal way out’ [emphasis mine].65 That their romance is virtuous is not in dispute, nor is the fact that up till now it has been chaste, in the legalistic sense of not having been consummated sexually. But in terms of social convention, it remains illicit, and therefore, as Tietjens puts it, ‘reprehensible.’66 So, Mrs. Wannop hopes there is some ‘way out.’ But Valentine and Tietjens say ‘no.’
Earlier, as we have seen, Valentine remembers the epigraph to Conrad’s Youth: ‘Something human, someone had once said, is dearer than a wilderness of decalogues!’ This occurs to Mrs. Wannop too, when she ‘makes’ Valentine’s and Tietjens’s ‘union,’67 concluding that she ‘cannot persuade [them] to a course that might mean [their] eternal unhappiness.’68 It may seem surprising that Valentine’s thought occurs as well to Tietjens, who, as Sylvia notes, ‘desires to model himself on our Lord.’69 But it needs to be remembered how Tietjens views Christ, in the terms of a country estate, as ‘an almost too benevolent land-steward, son of the owner, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants.’70 Worth remembering too is how close this is to the Gospels, in which the Beatitudes afford a virtue ethical supplement and complement to the Decalogue. It counts that Tietjens and Valentine will soon be living in sin. But it counts too that they are ‘poor in spirit,’ ‘mourn[ful], ‘meek,’ ‘hungry and thirsty for righteousness,’ ‘merciful,’ ‘pure in heart,’ ‘peacemakers,’ and ‘persecuted for righteousness’ sake.’71 So, Mrs. Wannop’s blessing is not the only one they receive. As Ford explains in his poem ‘On Heaven:’ ‘God’s a good brother … God’s a good mother … God is our father and loves all good lovers.’72
While religiously more observant than Tietjens, Sylvia is spiritually less faithful to the ministry of Jesus than either he or Valentine are. She exempts herself from Christian ethics in her marriage to Tietjens, reasoning that ‘our Lord … never touched on topics of sex.’73 But this is plainly untrue. In The Sermon on The Mount, Jesus offers a virtue ethical expansion of the terms of adultery: from merely breaking the rule prohibiting sex with someone besides one’s legal spouse to in any way manifesting ‘lust’ as opposed to love. And he in turn recognizes ‘unchastity’ in one’s spouse as legal grounds for divorce.74 Jesus seeks ‘to fulfill’ and not ‘to abolish the law of the prophets.’75 But he consistently takes up the role of the ‘almost too benevolent land-steward,’ in contrast to the role of the officious sheriff collecting bills. He consistently opposes ‘scribes,’ ‘Pharisees,’ ‘lawyers,’ and ‘hypocrites’ who live by the letter not the spirit of ethical rules.76 He sides consistently with those (including women) caught or ‘taken’ in sin (including adultery): the sinful woman who washes his feet in the Pharisee’s house; the woman at the well, who has divorced five times; and the adulterous woman whom he dares the scribes and Pharisees to judge.77
Sylvia’s birth father is absent from Parade’s End, and her mother, Mrs. Satterthwaite, appears just once, when Sylvia is introduced. But Father Consett is always there, a holy ghost combatting Drake. Initially, he fails, but he finally succeeds in brokering a ‘come-to-Jesus’ moment, one when Sylvia feels moved, by her chance to be forgiven, to repent and make amends for all her wrongs toward Tietjens and Valentine. The priest judges Tietjens be ‘perfectly sound.’ He waves Sylvia away, advising her to ‘say a Hail Mary or two’ and speak no more of corrupting their child to punish Tietjens for his perceived wrongs. He predicts that she will ‘tear the house down’ if Tietjens ever finds someone he loves: something Father Consett foresees well ahead of Tietjens’s meeting with Valentine, a prospect with which he sympathizes and of which he does not disapprove.78
Sylvia comes eventually to make a decision regarding her marriage: the moment Father Consett had hoped to arrange. When she does, she remembers how the priest had predicted that if Tietjens ever found another woman, ‘she, Sylvia, would perpetrate acts of vulgarity.’ And she ‘undoubtedly’ has, through multiple social and legal machinations to keep the two of them apart. But it has been clear for some time that ‘God would one day step in and intervene for the protection of Christopher,’ which He seems to have done, in allowing him to make a home and conceive a child with Valentine. ‘God is probably – and very rightly – on the side of the stuffy domesticities,’ Sylvia concludes, with Father Consett’s prediction in mind. Sylvia cannot deny that Tietjens is ‘sickeningly good.’ She would not have sought to pain him otherwise.79 But something threatened then which she is now unable to do is harm his unborn child. ‘[As] God hears me,’ she swears to Valentine, ‘I have never thought to harm your child.’ Instead, for the sake of that child, she is ‘playing pimp to Tietjens,’ leaving him to Valentine and blessing their union unexpectedly.80
Not only Tietjens’ and Valentine’s but also Sylvia’s world has turned to coal, and like them, her timber has been seasoned in consequence. We have already glimpsed her more virtuous self in Tietjens’ memory of the care she gave their son when he suffered from a fever.81 And as Sylvia approaches the pregnant Valentine, she is haunted once last time by the ghost of Drake, who had ‘half-killed’ her on the night before her marriage to Tietjens, when she had ‘feared for the child within her’ in the same way Valentine does.82 This memory brings together all the vicious ways that violence and sex have been combined in Parade’s End and gives Sylvia a chance to exorcise them just as Tietjens and Valentine have. Tempering her anger at Tietjens and chastening her passion for him, Sylvia puts love in the form of care before letter, law, or ethical efficiency just as surely as Tietjens and Valentine do, which is something that Father Consett – and virtue ethicists – would both find perfectly sound.
Notes
[1] Sara Haslam. Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the novel, and the Great War. Manchester UP, 2002, p. 118.
[2] George Herbert, “Virtue,” The Poetry Foundation, URL = <https://poetryfoundation.org/poems/44375/virtue>.
[3] Ford Madox Ford. Parade’s End Volume III: A Man Could Stand Up —, edited by Sara Haslam, Carcanet, 2011 – henceforth MCSU; p. 87.
[5] See Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/ethics-virtue/>.
[6] Joseph Conrad, Youth; Heart of Darkness; The End of the Tether, edited by Owen Knowles, Cambridge UP, 2010, p. 11.
[7] See Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Consequentialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/consequentialism/>.
[8] See Larry Alexander and Michael Moore, “Deontological Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/ethics-deontological/>.
[9] G. E. M. Anscombe. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 124, January 1958, p. 1.
[10] Alasdair C. MacIntyre. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. U of Notre Dame P, 1981, p. 2.
[11] Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard UP, 1989, p. 3.
[14] Ford Madox Ford. Parade’s End Volume I: Some Do Not …, edited by Max Saunders, Carcanet, 2010 – henceforth SDN; p. 24.
[15] Max Saunders. Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life: Volume II: The After-War World. Reprint Edition, Oxford UP, 2012, p. 223.
[17] See MacIntyre, After Virtue, Chapters 3 and 16; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford UP, 1990, Chapters 1 and 4–6; Taylor, Sources of the Self, Chapters 23–25.
[18] Silverman, Eric J. The Prudence of Love: How Possessing the Virtue of Love Benefits the Lover. Lexington, 2009.
[20] Eric J. Silverman. ‘Contemporary Chastity Still Consists in Principles of Temperance, Justice, and Prudence.’ Sexual Ethics in a Secular Age: Is There Still a Virtue of Chastity?, edited by Eric J. Silverman, Routledge, 2021.
[25] Max Saunders. “‘Sex Ferocity’ and ‘the sadic lusts of certain novelists’: Sexuality, Sadomasochism, and Suppression in Parade’s End.” War and the Mind: Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Modernism, and Psychology, edited by Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, Edinburgh University Press, 2015, pp. 17–34.
[37] See MacIntyre, After Virtue, Chapters 4–6 and Whose Justice? Which Rationality, U of Notre Dame P, 1988, Chapters 12–16.
[38] Eve Sorum. “Empathy, Trauma, and the Space of War in Parade’s End.” Chantler and Hawkes, pp. 50–51.
[40] Ford Madox Ford. Parade’s End Volume II: No More Parades, edited by Joseph Wiesenfarth, Carcanet, 2011 – henceforth NMP, p. 94.
[45] Murphy, John B. “‘The ‘ind Legs of the Elephink:” Pantomime, Prophecy, and Tosh in Parade’s End,” Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: the First World War, Culture, and Modernity, edited by Ashley Chantler and Rob Hawkes, Rodopi, 2014, pp. 81–93.
[63] Ford Madox Ford. Parade’s End Volume IV: Last Post, edited by Paul Skinner, Carcanet, 2011 – henceforth LP; p. 173.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.