Elizabeth Bowen< representations of identity >

Main Themes“Innocence inevitably must be confronted and be vanquished by experience, and physical objects, things, provide stability and continuity amid the uncertainties and disruptions of life.”

“The past, […], discharges its load of feeling into the anaesthetized and bewildered present. It is the “I” that is sought – and retrieved at the cost of no little pain. And the ghosts – […] what part do they play? They are the certainties.”

Images of War

London was bombed every night from September 7 to November 2, 1940, and the city suffered 13 major attacks by V-1 and V-2 rockets between January and March of 1944. In total, the blitz damaged or destroyed over 3,5 million homes.

Bowen’s use of Domestic Imagery

“On the one hand, the blitzed home represents a radical, feminist challenge to gendered categories of public and private space; on the other hand, the home represents a conservative, elitist retreat from the problems of war.”

Open Endings…“Short stories resist an easy moral interpretation.” Elizabeth Bowen expressed this by saying: “my stories end with an “over to you”.

Q1: Does this show in the stories we read?

Q2: And, why leaving the reader with this uncertainty?

The Back Drawing Room (1926)

“They all looked up expectantly at Mrs Henneker, but Mrs Henneker was silent. And the silence lasted, because Mennister was gone.”

The Cat Jumps (1929)

“Muriel, on her silent way through the house to Theodora’s bedroom, had turned all the keys on the outside, impartially. She did not know which door might be Edward Cartaret’s Muriel was a woman who took no chances.”

Her Table Spread (1930)

“Perhaps it was best for them all that early, when next day first lightened the rain, the destroyer steamed out – below the extinguished Castle where Valeria lay with her arms wide, past the boat-house where Mr Rossiter lay insensible and the bat hunh masked in its wings – down the estuary into the open sea.”

Summer Nights (1941)

“The rusted gates of the castle were at the end of the square. Queenie, in her bed facing the window, lay with her face turned sideways, smiling, one hand lightly against her cheek.”

Mysterious Kôr (1944)

“He was the password, but not the answer; it was to Kôr’s finality that she turned.”

The Happy Autumn Fields (1944)

“Fitzgeorge wonders, and says he will always wonder, what made the horse shy in those empty fields.”

The Demon Lover (1945)

“After that she continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on the glass all around as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets.”

Ivy Gripped the Steps (1945)

“‘Anyway,’ she said sharply, ‘I’ve got a date. Anyway, what made you pick on this dead place? Why not pick on some place where you know someone?’”

Conclusion

“A fundamental uncertainty is ascribed to the “I” by Bowen, and this uncertainty is filled by the ghosts of the past, thus dissolving the line between the living and the dead, and between the past and the present.”

Sources http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/ransomedition/2008/spring/bowen.html Identity at Risk: An Analysis of Female Identity in Four of Elizabeth

Bowen’s Wartime Texts / Ingfrid Thowsen, 2007 "Even a Shelter's Not Safe": The Blitz on Homes in Elizabeth Bowen's

Wartime Writing / Kristine A. Miller, Twentieth Century Literature, 1999 Nostalgic narcissism in comic and tragic perspectives: Elizabeth Bowen's

two fictional reworkings of a Tennyson lyric / Martin Bidney, Studies in Short Fiction, 1996.

Postscript U.S. edition The Demon Lover / Elizabeth Bowen Lecture 6-11-2008 on D.H. Lawrence / Michael Newton Collected Stories / Elizabeth Bowen, Vintage, 1999