“We observe small rites, but we defend ourselves against that terrible memory that is stronger than will. We defend ourselves from the rooms, the scenes, the objects that make for hallucination, that make the senses start up and fasten upon a ghost. We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.”
Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart |
Twentieth-century novelist Elizabeth Bowen has historically been too often cited as merely a writer of realist text and ghost stories and, though Bowen does occasionally write to these narrow boundaries, a large area of her work anticipates the sophisticated theories that I will discuss within and throughout this thesis. Even posthumously, Bowen’s work sits more comfortably in the present that it did in the vast period with which her work was published. A reading of Bowen’s novels, at once, informs the reader of the relevance of the home-space in her novels and it is these fictional home-spaces that are most often problematized by unresolved trauma and uncanny references to the residents, the furniture and the architecture – all of which indicate that something other is happening. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard articulates that; “The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” (2014, p. 85) and it is from this assumption that I will investigate the home-spaces in two of Elizabeth Bowen’s inter-war novels, The Last September and The Death of the Heart. In both of these novels, the home-space is a focal point that subjectively haunts and suffocates Bowen’s young protagonists, Lois and Portia. I believe the problematic home-spaces in both of these novels work as metaphorical ‘hosts’ of experienced and transgenerational traumatic events that manifest within their residents and thus, there exists a significant correlative relationship between the home-space and fractured and unformed identities. As a consequence of this, Bowen’s novels read as liminal, uncanny texts and my immediate aim is to identify and rationalise these instances of the uncanny using the framework of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’. Freud’s famous study has long been used as the principle work for investigations of the uncanny in literature but I believe that it is advantageous to first identify the limits of his study. To further develop my investigation, I will use contemporary theories to augment Freud’s initial inquiry and propose that contemporary theories of the post-colonial, hauntology and the phantom can be used to illustrate Bowen’s innovative methods. Though there is a vast body of biographical texts on the life of the Anglo-Irish novelist, there has been little theory with regards to Bowen’s work. However, a most profitable text is Andrew Bennett and Nicolas Royle’s 1995 study, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives which I have used as a starting point to gain a rich insight into the liminal theories which make Elizabeth Bowen one of the most compelling, yet underappreciated novelists of our time.
The Uncanny Home-Space
“We Live Inside a Dream” –
Twin Peaks: A Fire Walk With Me. |
This thesis relies heavily upon the axis of identifying the presence of an ‘uncanny’ semblance within two of Elizabeth Bowen’s inter-war novels, The Last September and The Death of the Heart. Both novels withdraw from any obvious genre classification and I propose that they offer a level of unease that advances beyond the palpable terror of the Gothic genre and simultaneously circumvents the chiefly psychological concerns of the conventional Modernist text. Thus, this investigation proposes that an application of the term ‘uncanny’ is pertinent to elucidating the spectres which hover between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the past and the present and within haunted identities. However, due to the ambiguity of this term, uncanny, it is first imperative to arrive at a working rationale by which instances of the uncanny effect can be identified as both a working theory and a characteristic (but not a genre) of literature. I propose that the current understanding of the uncanny, or uncanniness, relies heavily upon Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’ but to gain a more practical comprehension of the concept, it is necessary to recognise the key accomplishments of Freud’s research as well as acknowledging his deficiency in reaching a conclusive outcome. Although his was not the first investigation into the theory of this intangible concept, the term ‘uncanny’ is one that is predominantly associated with Freud, despite his study offering merely an array of semi-developed analyses’ and personal anecdotes which neither conclude his argument nor offer the reader any precise rationalisation. This section of my thesis will introduce the key ideas which have shaped my own understanding of the uncanny as neither a genre nor a literary technique but as an impalpable effect which is dependent solely on the experience of the reader. Amongst a discussion of Freud’s pivotal, but ultimately disadvantageous essay, this investigation will be supported with reference to several key texts but I will chiefly utilize Nicolas Royle’s comprehensive discussion of the topic in his aptly-named text, The Uncanny (2003).
Defining the Uncanny
Many previous critical works discussing the discourse surrounding the uncanny concept have worked on the primary tenet of Freud’s much-quoted statement; “The uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar”(Freud, 2003, p. 124). However, I find this particular proclamation far too reductive in order for one to gain a full understanding of the uncanny concept and I would counter this proposal with a similarly reductive, yet ultimately more adequate, promulgation proposed by Nicholas Royle that the uncanny, “has to do with a sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves” (Royle, 2003, p. 6); an indication that the uncanny resides within the individual and does not exist as an outside experience – I will return again to this supporting concept of duality in my later analyses of both hauntological and postcolonial theories. Despite my prevailing dismissal of Freud’s study, I entirely respect his thorough etymological research in the ‘The Uncanny’ in which he addresses the ambiguity of the German word heimlich. Freud’s fundamental proposal is in line with Nicholas Royle’s own theoretical reasoning that the uncanny, at its base level, lies in its duality of signification. Freud offers an initial definition of heimlich as “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, comfortable, homely, etc.” (Freud, 2003, p.126) but a second definition suggests that it is, “Concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know about it, withheld from others” (2003, p.129). However, strangely, this second definition bears much more commonality with its supposed antonym unheimlich, which is described as “arousing uneasy, fearful horror”. Thus, we can conclude that there is no precise or absolute opposition of concepts and as Freud himself observes, “…that what is called heimlich becomes unheimlich” (2003, p.132) and it is at this point of linguistic instability that the uncanny effect, ironically, begins to take place and disturb the boundaries of transliterated language. This is further complicated in that the word unhemlich is neither an exact translation nor a stable equivalent of the English word uncanny, rendering both the concept and the terms (both German and English) as unsubstantiated shadows of both language and psychoanalysis that appear only as impalpable reference points which can never quite be validated. In a very recent investigation into the derivation of the etymological mutations, Adam Kotsko, in his text Creepiness, proposes that the many translations, past and present, amount to the same thing; “[definitions] collected from various dictionaries…include “uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny, ghastly; (of a house) haunted; (of a man) a repulsive fellow… we do have a single word that encompasses all of those meanings: ‘creepy’” (Kotsko, 2015, p. 14). Whilst Kotsko’s inquiry seems to diminish many other complicated investigations into the uncanny, he touches upon a point which upholds both his work and my own; that melding the uncanny concept as creepiness does so because both fundamentally rely on the transgression of boundaries: “…this is because Freud is above all concerned with understanding how human beings deal with what we could call the inherent creepiness of sexuality.” (2015, p. 15): This is attested in my later analyses of Bowen’s novels where the violation of boundaries (both sexual and otherwise) will endorse Kostko’s conclusion. Freud’s literary review of ‘The Sandman’ by E.T.A Hoffman within his essay is another aspect that is often viewed as abetting his definition of the uncanny; the critique is a belligerent continuation of the one undertaken by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay, ‘Zur Psychologie des Umheimlichen’ (‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’). Without inquiring too much into this awkward section of Freud’s essay, I will assert that Freud’s insistence on extracting some palpable version of the uncanny to ascribe to the short story within the boundaries of his own exacting and psychologically-driven standards, is the point at which his investigation begins to collapse and it is a venture that I neither credit as important and nor will I apply this frustrating approach to my own later analysis of Elizabeth Bowen and the problematic home-spaces that occupy her novels. My unsatisfied pursuit of Freud’s point is articulately summarised by Hélène Cixous in her essay, ‘The Fiction and its Phantoms’ when she declares;
“Nothing turns out less reassuring for the reader than this niggling, cautious, yet wildly and indeterminable pursuit (of “something” –be it a domain, an emotional movement, a concept, impossible to determine yet variable in its form, intensity, quality and content).” (Cixous, 1975, p. 525).
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The absence of any explicit, conclusive theory in Freud’s essay seems to suggest that an acceptance of the concept’s impalpability would prove to be an auspicious course and, as such, this thesis relies on outlining and understanding the queerness of the uncanny as a concept which one cannot conveniently apply to a literary text; the uncanny is neither a standard set of techniques nor a stylistic approach but an arbitrary phenomenon which exists, as proposed by Royle, often explicitly played out within dualities. Thus, the affected subject is unintentionally responsible for the occurrence of an uncanny experience, the uncanny will not simply sit between the pages of a novel waiting to be read but occurs when the psychological state of the reader is disturbed in some way through no predetermined intention of the text (or corresponding author) itself. Furthermore, what one may find disturbing or uncanny may simply be a humorous or even inconsequential non-experience for another whom has engaged in the exact same circumstance as the affected subject. As such, Nicholas Royle’s considerable investigation of the uncanny acknowledges the many ways that it can manifest itself:
The uncanny can be a matter of something gruesome or terrible, above all death and corpses, cannibalism, live burial, the return of the dead... It can involve a feeling of something beautiful but at the same time frightening, as in the figure of the double or telepathy. It comes above all, perhaps, in the uncertainties of silence, solitude and darkness. The uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light (Royle, 2003, p. 2).
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Whilst this essay does not claim to offer new interpretations of the uncanny, it does offer an investigation of key contemporary theoretical approaches; the post-colonial, hauntology and phantoms, which I believe can be used to read the presence of uncanniness within the novels of Elizabeth Bowen. I aim to display a working theory which demonstrates that the problematic home-spaces in Bowen’s novels are not merely the result of deliberately-placed gothic literary motifs but, instead, intentional and unintentional violations of physical and psychological spaces, unstable dual identities and intrusive spectres of past lives which consequently provoke symptomatic instances of the uncanny which are particularly effective when filtered through the lens of Bowen’s vulnerable young characters.
Uncanny At Work in the Home
In his 1992 seminal text, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Anthony Vidler begins his chapter, ‘Unhomely Houses’, by noting that “the house [has] provided an especially favoured site for ‘uncanny’ disturbances: its apparent domesticity its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by the terror of invasion” (Vidler, 1992, p. 17). This key observation by Vidler is parallel to my own investigation of uncanny occurrences that manifest within what I will refer to as the ‘problematic home-space’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s two interwar novels, The Last September (1929) and The Death of the Heart (1938). Specifically, my thesis supposes that the disturbed home-space and subsequently, the uncanny occurrences, are directly associated with problematic identities in the novels.
The Last September is set during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and centres on the fictional estate, Danielstown in Cork, Ireland. The home-space physically exists as a space within the national conflict but is also subjectively isolated from it and, as such, the behaviour of the residents and guests at Danielstown is largely ignorant to the ongoing crisis despite the rampant manifestations of decay and death of former colonial grandeur seeping from the structure of the house; “Exhausted by sunshine, the backs of the crimson chairs were a thin, light orange; a smell of camphor and animals drawn from skins on the floor in the glare of morning still hung like dust on the evening chill.” (Bowen, 1990, p. 10). The novel explicitly depicts the “…terror of invasion” (Vidler, 1992, p. 17) proposed by Vidler and the reader is subtly reminded of the tumultuous military conflict that laterally shadows the main plot and finally emerges as the cataclysmic consequence at the novel’s conclusion.
The Death of the Heart deals with another home-space in conflict, although not against the backdrop of military conflict, but rather one which focuses on the experience of Portia, a young girl sent to live in bourgeois London with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife. Due to the resentful attitude of her sister-in-law, Anna, and the wishes of her deceased mother, Portia becomes an intruder in their home, destabilising her personal sense of belonging and ultimately her identity. Accordingly, within both novels, we can see that the domestic space is invaded, both on a provincial and public level. In Bowen’s own non-fictional writing she often refers to the home space as being an entity of its own accordance. In her 1955 essay, ‘Home for Christmas’ she writes, “Humanity is a complex thing. Home during our absence, we must remember, has settled into a rhythm of its own” (Bowen, 2008, p. 136) and it is her integral assumption of the home as being both “a thing of windows” and “a living, organic part of the world” (Bowen, 2008, p. 130) that is analogous of the living-dead as the archetypal image of uncanniness and thus, haunts her novels. It is clear from both her essays and fictitious work that Bowen regards and writes the home as alive but also, as merely a reference point to the experience that is inherently connected to its inhabitant’s identity. However, it is not only fear of invasion that haunts Bowens writing but the past which besieges both the identities of her characters and their problematic home-spaces.
In The Last September the young protagonist, Lois, exists within a crisis which is explicitly connected to the problematic home-space that she wishes to flee; “She and the home surroundings still further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack” (Bowen, 1990, p. 166). As with the protagonist in the later The Death of the Heart, Lois hovers anxiously on the boundaries of contrasting identities – she feels isolated from her vulnerable Anglo-Irish privileged background which is threatened by the ongoing military action of The Irish War of Independence that is taking place on the literal boundaries of the home-space. Lois’ anxiety concerning her nationality leads her to finally leave the ‘Big House’ which is subsequently burnt to the ground by the Irish Republican Army. Thus, the problematic home-space is haunted throughout the novel by its own inevitable demise and Lois’ inherent knowledge of the fate of both Danielstown and Ireland shakes and unbalances her identity. Throughout her time in Danielstown, Lois is haunted by spectral and physical manifestations that indicate the presence of her dead Mother, Laura, and is even expressly compared to her, “she’s the image of Laura” (Bowen, 1990, p. 8). However, Laura is not the only “ghost” that haunts the novel, the reader is also witness to the unseen entities (presumed to be soldiers, but oft-obscured) which disturb the demarcations of the home-space; “First, she [Lois] did not hear footsteps coming, and as she began to notice the displaced darkness thought what she dreaded was coming, was there within her – she was indeed clairvoyant, exposed to horror and going to see a ghost” (Bowen, 1990, p. 33).
In The Death of the Heart, Portia is sixteen years old (in between adolescence and adulthood), recently orphaned and now re-homed at the insistence that she experiences “normal, cheerful family life” (Bowen, 2012, p. 41) for a year after having only ever having lived a nomadic lifestyle with her mother and father. Portia, like Lois, is an identity is crisis. She arrives at Windsor Terrace still mourning her mother’s recent death and dressed, “as black as a little crow” (2012, p. 41). Despite its opulence, Portia is unused to the stability and permanence of a family home, instead used to the temporality of hotels and frequent international travel. As Portia enters No. 2 Windsor Terrace, the omniscient narrator describes the atmosphere; “Everywhere, she heard an unliving echo: she entered one of those pauses in the life of a house that before tea time seem to go on and on” (2012, p. 19) which not only encapsulates the loneliness felt by Portia in the house of strangers, but she is also experiencing a painful pause in her own life, she is only a temporary resident at Windsor Terrace and still in mourning for the parents she has lost. This seemingly inconsequential description is a distinct example of Bowen’s uncanny, the “unliving echo” is anthropomorphised and the stillness of the home-space becomes a suffocating phenomenon that invades the atmosphere which, importantly, pervades from the home-space. Bowen’s descriptions of the home-space and its parameters not only become uncanny in their refusal to adhere to any pragmatic portrayal, but Bowens syntactical construction of these descriptions is slightly unusual. One especially striking example from The Last September is particularly reminiscent of the uncanny; “Split light, like hands, was dragged past to the mill-race, clawed at the brink and went down in destruction.” (Bowen, 1990, p. 125) – this image of the home-space is simultaneously animated and terrifying; again, that which seems stable can easily be animated, something which Kotsko refers to as “certain “primitive” beliefs about the power of the dead” (2015, p.14). Furthermore, within Bowen’s problematic homes, the furniture which adorns these spaces are described as moving parts, acting as a man-made musculoskeletal system of the home-space. In The Death of the Heart, the housekeeper, Matchett, tells Portia that; “Unnatural living runs in a family, and the furniture knows it…Good furniture knows what’s what.” (1990, p. 81). Without side-stepping into the realm of the supernatural in her descriptions of the home-space, Bowen subtly, through similes and evocative imagery, brings alive the imposing atmosphere of the home-space and makes the usually safe environment, problematic. With this in mind, it is worth noting another proposition of Anthony Vidler, “If there is a single premise to be derived from the study of the uncanny in modern culture, it is that there is no such thing as uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities.” (Vidler, 1992, pp. 11-12).
The Last September is set during the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and centres on the fictional estate, Danielstown in Cork, Ireland. The home-space physically exists as a space within the national conflict but is also subjectively isolated from it and, as such, the behaviour of the residents and guests at Danielstown is largely ignorant to the ongoing crisis despite the rampant manifestations of decay and death of former colonial grandeur seeping from the structure of the house; “Exhausted by sunshine, the backs of the crimson chairs were a thin, light orange; a smell of camphor and animals drawn from skins on the floor in the glare of morning still hung like dust on the evening chill.” (Bowen, 1990, p. 10). The novel explicitly depicts the “…terror of invasion” (Vidler, 1992, p. 17) proposed by Vidler and the reader is subtly reminded of the tumultuous military conflict that laterally shadows the main plot and finally emerges as the cataclysmic consequence at the novel’s conclusion.
The Death of the Heart deals with another home-space in conflict, although not against the backdrop of military conflict, but rather one which focuses on the experience of Portia, a young girl sent to live in bourgeois London with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife. Due to the resentful attitude of her sister-in-law, Anna, and the wishes of her deceased mother, Portia becomes an intruder in their home, destabilising her personal sense of belonging and ultimately her identity. Accordingly, within both novels, we can see that the domestic space is invaded, both on a provincial and public level. In Bowen’s own non-fictional writing she often refers to the home space as being an entity of its own accordance. In her 1955 essay, ‘Home for Christmas’ she writes, “Humanity is a complex thing. Home during our absence, we must remember, has settled into a rhythm of its own” (Bowen, 2008, p. 136) and it is her integral assumption of the home as being both “a thing of windows” and “a living, organic part of the world” (Bowen, 2008, p. 130) that is analogous of the living-dead as the archetypal image of uncanniness and thus, haunts her novels. It is clear from both her essays and fictitious work that Bowen regards and writes the home as alive but also, as merely a reference point to the experience that is inherently connected to its inhabitant’s identity. However, it is not only fear of invasion that haunts Bowens writing but the past which besieges both the identities of her characters and their problematic home-spaces.
In The Last September the young protagonist, Lois, exists within a crisis which is explicitly connected to the problematic home-space that she wishes to flee; “She and the home surroundings still further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack” (Bowen, 1990, p. 166). As with the protagonist in the later The Death of the Heart, Lois hovers anxiously on the boundaries of contrasting identities – she feels isolated from her vulnerable Anglo-Irish privileged background which is threatened by the ongoing military action of The Irish War of Independence that is taking place on the literal boundaries of the home-space. Lois’ anxiety concerning her nationality leads her to finally leave the ‘Big House’ which is subsequently burnt to the ground by the Irish Republican Army. Thus, the problematic home-space is haunted throughout the novel by its own inevitable demise and Lois’ inherent knowledge of the fate of both Danielstown and Ireland shakes and unbalances her identity. Throughout her time in Danielstown, Lois is haunted by spectral and physical manifestations that indicate the presence of her dead Mother, Laura, and is even expressly compared to her, “she’s the image of Laura” (Bowen, 1990, p. 8). However, Laura is not the only “ghost” that haunts the novel, the reader is also witness to the unseen entities (presumed to be soldiers, but oft-obscured) which disturb the demarcations of the home-space; “First, she [Lois] did not hear footsteps coming, and as she began to notice the displaced darkness thought what she dreaded was coming, was there within her – she was indeed clairvoyant, exposed to horror and going to see a ghost” (Bowen, 1990, p. 33).
In The Death of the Heart, Portia is sixteen years old (in between adolescence and adulthood), recently orphaned and now re-homed at the insistence that she experiences “normal, cheerful family life” (Bowen, 2012, p. 41) for a year after having only ever having lived a nomadic lifestyle with her mother and father. Portia, like Lois, is an identity is crisis. She arrives at Windsor Terrace still mourning her mother’s recent death and dressed, “as black as a little crow” (2012, p. 41). Despite its opulence, Portia is unused to the stability and permanence of a family home, instead used to the temporality of hotels and frequent international travel. As Portia enters No. 2 Windsor Terrace, the omniscient narrator describes the atmosphere; “Everywhere, she heard an unliving echo: she entered one of those pauses in the life of a house that before tea time seem to go on and on” (2012, p. 19) which not only encapsulates the loneliness felt by Portia in the house of strangers, but she is also experiencing a painful pause in her own life, she is only a temporary resident at Windsor Terrace and still in mourning for the parents she has lost. This seemingly inconsequential description is a distinct example of Bowen’s uncanny, the “unliving echo” is anthropomorphised and the stillness of the home-space becomes a suffocating phenomenon that invades the atmosphere which, importantly, pervades from the home-space. Bowen’s descriptions of the home-space and its parameters not only become uncanny in their refusal to adhere to any pragmatic portrayal, but Bowens syntactical construction of these descriptions is slightly unusual. One especially striking example from The Last September is particularly reminiscent of the uncanny; “Split light, like hands, was dragged past to the mill-race, clawed at the brink and went down in destruction.” (Bowen, 1990, p. 125) – this image of the home-space is simultaneously animated and terrifying; again, that which seems stable can easily be animated, something which Kotsko refers to as “certain “primitive” beliefs about the power of the dead” (2015, p.14). Furthermore, within Bowen’s problematic homes, the furniture which adorns these spaces are described as moving parts, acting as a man-made musculoskeletal system of the home-space. In The Death of the Heart, the housekeeper, Matchett, tells Portia that; “Unnatural living runs in a family, and the furniture knows it…Good furniture knows what’s what.” (1990, p. 81). Without side-stepping into the realm of the supernatural in her descriptions of the home-space, Bowen subtly, through similes and evocative imagery, brings alive the imposing atmosphere of the home-space and makes the usually safe environment, problematic. With this in mind, it is worth noting another proposition of Anthony Vidler, “If there is a single premise to be derived from the study of the uncanny in modern culture, it is that there is no such thing as uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities.” (Vidler, 1992, pp. 11-12).
The Uncanny Colonial Figure
“Tis within ourselves that we are thus or thus”
– William Shakespeare, Othello.
– William Shakespeare, Othello.
This thesis, although primarily an investigation into the construction of uncanniness, profits heavily from considering colonial identities and their input in creating uncanny dualities. The rationale for including this discussion is owed largely to Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish identity and the significance of this when considering the fractured and ‘othered’ identities of her protagonists in The Last September and The Death of the Heart. The fundamental crux of any uncanny study, but especially Freud’s, is the concept of ‘home’, and similarly, the fundamental crux of postcolonial studies is ‘home’. When the familiar ‘home’ is made ‘unhomely’ though colonisation it violates the sense of identity in the colonised subjects and it is this precise process of colonisation which I refer to by way of Portia and Lois internal ‘otherness’ as they reside in ‘unhomely’ houses. The cultural rhetoric of colonialism as an area of theoretical study only gained substantial eminence with the publication of Edward Said’s 1978 work Orientalism, the seminal text on postcolonial perceptions and it was from this point that the academic application of postcolonial theories to literature provided an ideological insight into the effects of colonisation, contrasted by previous postcolonial thought which had been concerned with more pragmatic aspects of colonised territories. The majority of the discourse surrounding colonialism focuses, understandably, on the detrimental effects of colonialism in countries such as India and Africa, however, the impact of colonialism on Irish identities still bears substantial cultural scars that were especially complicated during the Modernist period which saw both The Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and eventual decolonization of Ireland - the presence of which is almost palpable within the pages of Bowen’s two novels.
Ireland
Before focusing on the colonised spaces and identities in The Death of the Heart and The Last September, it is appropriate and advantageous to consider Bowens own self-imposed colonised status as Anglo-Irish in both English and Irish landscapes. Ireland has a complicated history of cultural colonisation, particularly in the beginning of the 20th century and thus, directly forged some of Ireland’s darkest literature. Writers such as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are amongst the most synonymous with which one associates Irish Modernism (at various points throughout the period) and interestingly, despite contemporary romantic retrospective ideals of Ireland, none of them resided in their native Ireland at the time of their death. Likewise, Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin but came to the end of her life as a resident of London and yet, her Protestant Anglo-Irish status never quite lent itself to either an Irish or English national identity. Bowens fractured identity extended to the prominent religious divisions within Ireland, and, in Bowens Court, she recalls how little integration she had with the Roman Catholics as a child, “They were, simply “the others” whose world lay alongside ours but never touched” (Bowen, 1999, p. 508). Aside from being her birthplace and the site of her family’s ancestral home, Elizabeth Bowen’s written depictions of Ireland are curious - she writes remarkably beautiful, certainly privileged, vignettes of Irish landscapes in her fiction that rarely grant her reader any insight into everyday Irish culture. However, Bowen’s essays are full of politically charged commentaries on both Ireland and the Irish, exposing her affiliation with her birthplace and horror at Ireland’s postcolonial status as “…a residential playground for the non-indigenous rich” (Bowen, 2008, p. 163) and, importantly, Bowen writes with political conscious when considering the economic effects of war on Ireland, “Eire doesn’t want her rates of living sent up by people who can afford to pay any prices, and her morals sent down by sophisticates who imagine that in Ireland anything goes.” (2008, p. 163). Despite her concise writings on Ireland, Bowen’s national identity is transient and it is precisely this uneasy, dual identity which extends to both Lois in The Last September and Portia in The Death of the Heart – the principle commonality between Bowen and her heroines is the concept of not belonging, the dislocation experienced by Bowen plays out on both national and minute local levels in her novels.
Colonial Power in The Death of the Heart and The Last September
Postcolonial literature is described in The Empire Writes Back as “the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (Ashcroft et al. 2002, p. 2) and though not set amongst military conflict like The Last September or amongst explicit states of colonial power, The Death of the Heart remains a novel that is influenced by and addresses the effects of colonisation on one’s identity. By utilizing themes associated with postcolonial writing and applying them to this seemingly quaint novel, my intention is to expressly demonstrate that Elizabeth Bowen addresses much bigger contemporaneous political themes of colonisation, fractured identities and ‘otherness’- the enveloping concerns for society in the period. Imperial colonisers in the 18th and 19th centuries regularly used the image of the racial ‘other’ to further support the discourse which sought to increase existing anxiety surrounding racial difference. This racist agenda, supported by biased accounts of undeveloped countries and primitive indigenous subjects only sought to strengthen the political and economic power of the white, European colonisers. Moreover, the image of the racial ‘other’ found a place in Gothic literature as the often animalistic and treacherous villain, such as the monster in Frankenstein (1818) or Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (1846). I propose that not only do these themes exist in The Last September, but Bowen subtly uses the novel as a criticism of the British Empire, once stating implicitly that “Yes, people matter, perhaps they matter too much. We risk disillusionment, tragedy, when we pursue them wrongly.” (Bowen, 2008, p. 397).
The Death of the Heart opens tentatively on a footbridge upon a fractured frozen lake and the reader is placed into the middle of a conversation between Anna (Portia’s sister-in-law with whom she lives) and Anna’s good friend and confidante, St. Quentin. The reader is, at once, estranged at the first utterance in the novel from St. Quentin, “You were mad ever to touch the thing” (Bowen, 2012, p. 3), and it is “the thing”, Portia’s diary, which is to become the fundamental crux of the novel – the diary’s content is of utmost annoyance to Anna, its content evidence of Portia’s exasperation, a colonial documentation. Due to her unfortunate circumstances - the death of both parents - Portia is forced to become native to a high-class bourgeois society which directly contradicts the nomadic existence on the continent from which she is accustomed. If her life on the continent represented transience and freedom then Windsor Terrace is a cruel enclosure, and indeed the quiet suffocating home-space represents a death of her indentity, “Portia lay in a sort of coffin of silence” (Bowen, 2012, p. 89). In that opening chapter Anna conveys her disregard for Portia to St. Quentin, describing the girl in animalistic and dehumanising terms, “like an animal” (2012, p. 4), and “deeply hysterical” (2012, p. 7) which prompts St. Quentin to call her a “little monster” (2012, p. 8). This is particularly damning if we consider Homi. K. Bhabha’s statement that, “the objective of colonisation is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types” (Bhabi, 1994, p. 70). Anna, not only treats Portia as the ‘other’ but also acts as ‘coloniser’, adopting the rhetoric of the history’s most desolate atrocities. Like the marginalised figure described in contemporary Postcolonial thought, Portia belongs outside of the minute hegemonic structure of Windsor Terrace and even ‘non-resident’ characters ‘out-rank’ the orphaned teenager and she is often found in the line of their gaze; “The pointed attention of St. Quentin and Anna reached her like a quick tide, or an attack: the ordeal of getting out of the drawing room tightened her mouth up and made her fingers curl” (Bowen, 2012, p. 26) and as Michael Ann Holly states in Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image, “The person who does the looking is the person with the power. No doubt about it; looking is power” (Holly, 1996, p. 90). Colonial and postcolonial themes are much easier to detect in The Last September due to the military threat which lingers, physically, on the periphery of the Danielstown. Though the novel chiefly deals with love and the trauma of the the absent mother, it also deals with the insecurity of the home-space in the ongoing fight for Irish independence and the inherent knowledge of imminent trauma and ruination of Anglo-Irish identities that had been in place for centuries. Danielstown, the Irish Big House, remains, throughout the novel, symbolic of the Anglo-Irish dominance within an Ireland that sought independence and its inevitable exorcism at the end of the novel provides a purification for the Irish Nationals; “It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning;” (Bowen, 1990, p. 206) – this act of purification is the most violent way to deal with the problematic home-space. Just before the concluding fire, Lois leaves the house for France and abandons her familiar home-space and the ghosts of her mother which occupy it and thus, Lois’ eventual withdrawal from the home-space in which she is colonised offers no conclusion or evidence of her freedom, as with The Death of the Heart, the ending is left open to speculation, the flames of the Anglo-Irish house still raging. Elizabeth Bowen’s interest in using the young, female protagonist to symbolise the colonised subject is not merely a coincidence but Bowen had an inherent belief that ;“Teenagers are not merely a group, they are a race… the absolute, the meridian of teenager-ship is at about sixteen” (Bowen, 2008, p. 342) – this figure of the fractured teenage identity is a trope that often appears in her fiction and, as with Lois and Portia, the teenage identity is marginalised and the novels often conclude with an unknowing threshold, much the same as the teenager who is left to enter adulthood. The orphaned girls in her novels, like colonised subjects, no longer exist in the parental home, or motherland, and find themselves under the guardianship (at best) of those who seek to mould their appearance, behaviour and values to mimic their own. Thus, what emerges is the uncanny double, the colonised eventually taking on the “knowledge, emotions and experience” (Freud, 2003, pp. 141-142) of the oppressor. One particular revealing, and sombre, revelation comes from Lois when asked why she doesn’t leave Danielstown; “I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to be is so intransitive, so lonely” (Bowen, 1990, p. 98) and of course, what she is, is a double character, she is constantly compared to the image of her dead Mother and furthermore, although she belongs to the Anglo-Irish house, she regularly stalks the perimeters of it like the Irish soldiers that threaten the residents. The overt symbol of ‘otherness’ as abject horror in the novel is the dilapidated Old Mill that sits on the Danielstown estate, described as “The mill startled them all, staring light-eyed, ghoulishly, round a bend of the valley…never quite stripped and whitened…like corpses at their most horrible” (1990, p. 123) – a concept Dylan Trigg proposes, “[testify] to a failed past but also reminds us that the future may end in ruin. Their use outmoded, the negative associations of the ruins are enforced.” (Trigg, 2012, p. 6).
The Death of the Heart opens tentatively on a footbridge upon a fractured frozen lake and the reader is placed into the middle of a conversation between Anna (Portia’s sister-in-law with whom she lives) and Anna’s good friend and confidante, St. Quentin. The reader is, at once, estranged at the first utterance in the novel from St. Quentin, “You were mad ever to touch the thing” (Bowen, 2012, p. 3), and it is “the thing”, Portia’s diary, which is to become the fundamental crux of the novel – the diary’s content is of utmost annoyance to Anna, its content evidence of Portia’s exasperation, a colonial documentation. Due to her unfortunate circumstances - the death of both parents - Portia is forced to become native to a high-class bourgeois society which directly contradicts the nomadic existence on the continent from which she is accustomed. If her life on the continent represented transience and freedom then Windsor Terrace is a cruel enclosure, and indeed the quiet suffocating home-space represents a death of her indentity, “Portia lay in a sort of coffin of silence” (Bowen, 2012, p. 89). In that opening chapter Anna conveys her disregard for Portia to St. Quentin, describing the girl in animalistic and dehumanising terms, “like an animal” (2012, p. 4), and “deeply hysterical” (2012, p. 7) which prompts St. Quentin to call her a “little monster” (2012, p. 8). This is particularly damning if we consider Homi. K. Bhabha’s statement that, “the objective of colonisation is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types” (Bhabi, 1994, p. 70). Anna, not only treats Portia as the ‘other’ but also acts as ‘coloniser’, adopting the rhetoric of the history’s most desolate atrocities. Like the marginalised figure described in contemporary Postcolonial thought, Portia belongs outside of the minute hegemonic structure of Windsor Terrace and even ‘non-resident’ characters ‘out-rank’ the orphaned teenager and she is often found in the line of their gaze; “The pointed attention of St. Quentin and Anna reached her like a quick tide, or an attack: the ordeal of getting out of the drawing room tightened her mouth up and made her fingers curl” (Bowen, 2012, p. 26) and as Michael Ann Holly states in Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image, “The person who does the looking is the person with the power. No doubt about it; looking is power” (Holly, 1996, p. 90). Colonial and postcolonial themes are much easier to detect in The Last September due to the military threat which lingers, physically, on the periphery of the Danielstown. Though the novel chiefly deals with love and the trauma of the the absent mother, it also deals with the insecurity of the home-space in the ongoing fight for Irish independence and the inherent knowledge of imminent trauma and ruination of Anglo-Irish identities that had been in place for centuries. Danielstown, the Irish Big House, remains, throughout the novel, symbolic of the Anglo-Irish dominance within an Ireland that sought independence and its inevitable exorcism at the end of the novel provides a purification for the Irish Nationals; “It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning;” (Bowen, 1990, p. 206) – this act of purification is the most violent way to deal with the problematic home-space. Just before the concluding fire, Lois leaves the house for France and abandons her familiar home-space and the ghosts of her mother which occupy it and thus, Lois’ eventual withdrawal from the home-space in which she is colonised offers no conclusion or evidence of her freedom, as with The Death of the Heart, the ending is left open to speculation, the flames of the Anglo-Irish house still raging. Elizabeth Bowen’s interest in using the young, female protagonist to symbolise the colonised subject is not merely a coincidence but Bowen had an inherent belief that ;“Teenagers are not merely a group, they are a race… the absolute, the meridian of teenager-ship is at about sixteen” (Bowen, 2008, p. 342) – this figure of the fractured teenage identity is a trope that often appears in her fiction and, as with Lois and Portia, the teenage identity is marginalised and the novels often conclude with an unknowing threshold, much the same as the teenager who is left to enter adulthood. The orphaned girls in her novels, like colonised subjects, no longer exist in the parental home, or motherland, and find themselves under the guardianship (at best) of those who seek to mould their appearance, behaviour and values to mimic their own. Thus, what emerges is the uncanny double, the colonised eventually taking on the “knowledge, emotions and experience” (Freud, 2003, pp. 141-142) of the oppressor. One particular revealing, and sombre, revelation comes from Lois when asked why she doesn’t leave Danielstown; “I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to be is so intransitive, so lonely” (Bowen, 1990, p. 98) and of course, what she is, is a double character, she is constantly compared to the image of her dead Mother and furthermore, although she belongs to the Anglo-Irish house, she regularly stalks the perimeters of it like the Irish soldiers that threaten the residents. The overt symbol of ‘otherness’ as abject horror in the novel is the dilapidated Old Mill that sits on the Danielstown estate, described as “The mill startled them all, staring light-eyed, ghoulishly, round a bend of the valley…never quite stripped and whitened…like corpses at their most horrible” (1990, p. 123) – a concept Dylan Trigg proposes, “[testify] to a failed past but also reminds us that the future may end in ruin. Their use outmoded, the negative associations of the ruins are enforced.” (Trigg, 2012, p. 6).
Haunting the Novel
“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom”
- Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
- Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real
An exploration of my chosen novels through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s conceptualisation of hauntology – first introduced in his Specters of Marx - must first allow for an understanding of this culturally-chic term. Despite the popularity of the phrase and its application to everything from politics to music, hauntology is a zeitgeist that is far from diminished by its over-use. Mark Fisher’s advantageous 2014 text, Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, explains: “think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the spectre understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing.” (Fisher, 2014, p. 46). Hauntology, in spite of its connotative signifier, does not engage with the phenomenon of haunting in the sense that it is associated with banshees and bogeymen but rather, hauntology negotiates the ‘in-between’ space that is disregarded from reductive and totalitarian thought. Haunting and the figure of the ‘spectre’ provides Derrida with a figurative trope by which to demonstrate the impalpable aspects of existential certainty and investigate that which is beyond, or just in between, logical thought. Accordingly, this area of deconstructive thought underpins Freud’s concept of the uncanny which, unequivocally, exists between what is substantiated in binary thought and what we are positive that we don’t know. Furthermore, the shifting confines and unstable definitions of the uncanny, are, as Nicholas Royle suggests, “what cannot be pinned down or controlled” (Royle, 2003, p. 15-16) and thus, that which cannot be fixed or contained exists outside of what we deem real or palpable and, much like Derrida’s figure of the spectre, occurs both out of space and out of time; “It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony.” (Derrida, 2006, p. 6).
Derrida initially used the idea of the spectre to question the concept of Marxism and its relevance in an assiduously Capitalist society, but it has become clear that this seemingly narrow approach to a specific area of political research can be applied to a much wider spectrum of disciplines. If we consider how explicitly Elizabeth Bowen’s novels embody the themes associated with hauntology then, in some ways, her novels seem to be a product of Freud’s theory of the uncanny and adumbrate Derrida’s theory of spectres. Furthermore, Bowen specifically uses the home-spaces to contain and demonstrate these uncanny occurrences that are haunted by spectres of both the past and the future where traumatic memory is repressed and futures are uncertain. Bowen’s home-spaces are especially interesting sites for spectres that manifest from repression or traumatic memory and, indeed, in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, he supposes a direct correlation between the home-space and memory “… a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated” (Bachelard, 2014, p. 8). Thus, within this section of this essay, I propose that within Bowens fictional houses lie frequent instances of that ‘in-between’ spectre which manifests, for the reader and the characters contained within the novels, as uncanny moments.
Derrida initially used the idea of the spectre to question the concept of Marxism and its relevance in an assiduously Capitalist society, but it has become clear that this seemingly narrow approach to a specific area of political research can be applied to a much wider spectrum of disciplines. If we consider how explicitly Elizabeth Bowen’s novels embody the themes associated with hauntology then, in some ways, her novels seem to be a product of Freud’s theory of the uncanny and adumbrate Derrida’s theory of spectres. Furthermore, Bowen specifically uses the home-spaces to contain and demonstrate these uncanny occurrences that are haunted by spectres of both the past and the future where traumatic memory is repressed and futures are uncertain. Bowen’s home-spaces are especially interesting sites for spectres that manifest from repression or traumatic memory and, indeed, in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, he supposes a direct correlation between the home-space and memory “… a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated” (Bachelard, 2014, p. 8). Thus, within this section of this essay, I propose that within Bowens fictional houses lie frequent instances of that ‘in-between’ spectre which manifests, for the reader and the characters contained within the novels, as uncanny moments.
Haunting in The Last September and The Death of the Heart
The home-space in The Last September contains many of Derrida’s spectres, it is unashamedly haunted by memories, not physical apparitions, of the deceased and repression of the ongoing military conflict in Ireland. In the novel and in Danielstown, these uncanny experiences and spectres invade the home space and the domestic comfort. My own understanding of Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology begins with that oft-quoted statement that, “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology” (Derrida, 2006, p. 202). Unlike the theories of the ‘phantom’ which will be explored later in this paper, hauntology does not attempt to deal with the repressed ‘secret’, in fact Derrida’s spectre is available in the present, even if it is not physically present. In this way, I find that Laura, the deceased Mother of the main protagonist in The Last September to epitomize this essence of hauntology. Maud Ellman proposes, in The Shadow Across the Page, that; “fiction interprets its interpreters, shaking our assumptions, undermining our defences, and penetrating deep into the haunted chambers of the mind” (Ellmann, 2006, pp. 4-5) and, through the subtle techniques employed by Bowen, the novel, in its way, haunts the reader without overt representations of ghosts. On a literal level, for the reader, Laura is equally as present (on the pages) as Lois and any of the other characters, Laura appears frequently in conversations and memories throughout the novel and thus, textually at least, she lives on. Bennett and Royle propose that ghosts “are always inscribed in a context: they at once belong to and haunt the idea of a place.” (2004, p. 133) and Laura explicitly fills this role, the figure of Lois has no real presence that isn’t related to the absence of Laura. The ‘ghost’ of Laura even manages to haunt the big house that is filled with so many other living presences; “He dragged at his hair and stared at the trees through a flawed pane, across which Laura Naylor had scratched her name with a diamond.” (Bowen, 1990, p. 160). As we have explored, the home-space is certainly disturbed by uncanny instances and I think that the unprocessed trauma of Laura’s absence adds to, if not largely comprises of, the uncanny disquiet in Danielstown and one almost ghostly encounter symbolises the very presence of Laura by using this near-homonym: “Laurels breathed coldly and close: on her bare arms the tips of the leaves were timid and dank, like tongues of dead animals. Her fear of the shrubberies tugged at its chain, fear behind reason, fear before her birth; fear like the earliest germ of her life that had stirred in Laura.” (1990, p. 33), this sentence wholly belongs in the realm of Gothic literature but placed in the midst of this realist text, it demands to be read in the context by which Derrida later contrived. The symbol of the laurel appears numerous times and its sinister presence assaults the senses each time they appear; “The strong and dreadful smell of laurels made them all irritable.” (1990, p. 43). Laura’s spectral presence in Danielstown is one of suffocating claustrophobia. This apparition of Laura, even as a ‘laurel’, fails to appear supernaturally as an apparition but refuses to stay ‘dead’. Julian Wolfreys offers an explanation of this phenomenon; “The identification of spectrality appears in a gap between the limits of two ontological categories.” (2013, p. 70), thus if we take the most dominant “ontological categories” – life and death – then certainly Laura appears to exists within, in-between. So if we take Laura as the physical manifestation of the spectral figure, then what of Lois? I believe that Lois is also a figure of spectrality. Lois presents as a young girl poised to enter womanhood, “Lois stood at the top of the steps looking cool and fresh; she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back tried hard to conceal her embarrassment.” (Bowen, 1990, p. 7). Rather than identify as a “young girl”, Lois is uncomfortable being gazed upon by the arriving guests, and is then described by her Mothers former lover, Hugo Montmorency, as “the image of Laura” (1990, p. 8) and throughout the novel the guests and residents reference her existence as how much she is like her dead mother, the spectre which she cannot shake. Additionally, Lois exists, literally, because of Laura, but also she is merely the ghost of Laura’s absence made physical. Mr Montmorency later further dismisses the existence of Laura and thus, if Lois is the image of Laura, when he remarks; “What I think I felt about…was, she was never real in the way I wanted” (1990, p.19) then Hugo diminishes both the existence of Laura and, in turn, Lois.
However, it is his wife Mrs Montmorency whom brazenly questions her physical existence; “Black is so striking. No, you are not like Laura – I don’t know who you are like” (1990, p. 21). Derrida’s term, hauntology, encompasses the erratic and amaranthine ontology by which we exist which consequently allows a discussion of that which infiltrates our present being physical and is, at least partially, defined by the intangible fluidity such as memory, history and effect of traumatic events. Like Lois, Portia is orphaned and sent to live with relatives. However, Portia is not haunted by semi-ghostly manifestations of her mother but it is her father’s shame which pervades and causes the unspoken friction with her brother and his wife, Anna. At times of anxiety (which are frequent) Portia will always reference the shame of her parents which cannot be repressed but instead manifests in the present “They did not think my father and mother wicked; they simply despised them and used to laugh…I see now that my father wanted me to belong somewhere, because he did not” (Bowen, 2012, p. 324). Of course, Portia shares the burden of her father’s shame with Thomas, her brother, though this shared inheritance seems to exists outside of conversations and Portia suspects that her brother sees her as the living manifest of her father’s shame; “He’s ashamed with me, too: he’s ashamed because of our father” (2012, p. 327). Another of the inherited causes of anxiety is the idea of premature death and this impending, but unrealised, trauma haunts The Death of the Heart.
Though Portia is alive, albeit in mourning, a traumatic future is constantly alluded to despite no traumatic event taking place. To Portia, the traumatic event is happening constantly, and when Major Brut asks her what event has happened to upset her, Portia replies; “[the event] always has the whole time” (2012, p. 324). Bowen uses symbolic allusion as a thread throughout the whole novel to keep returning to this idea of Portia’s impending trauma. From the beginning of the novel, Portia is likened to a variety of animals, but none more often than the kitten. In the opening conversation in the novel, Anna recalls Mr Quaynes death and his wishes for Portia “he didn’t mean us to take the kitten from the cat” (Bowen, 2012, p. 11), meaning take Portia from her Mother, Irene. Maud Ellman suggests that “In Bowen’s view, it is Portia’s duty to lose her innocence in order to renounce the wilderness and to come to terms with ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’ – the titles of the three parts of The Death of the Heart” (Ellmann, 2006, p. 136) and though I would agree with this statement, I would go further to suggest that the kitten is representative of the impeding danger which haunts Portia. Thomas’ memories of his half-sister also portray Portia as a kitten, but his is rather more ominous; “Portia, with her suggestion—during those visits—of scared lurking, had stared at him like a kitten that expects to be drowned.” (Bowen, 2012, p. 39). Despite this most docile of symbols, there is talk later of a kitten belonging to Anna which died. Instinctively, Portia knows that she is not entirely welcome in the Quayne house and thus, spends most of the novel travelling from one problematic home-space to the next and even at the novels conclusion when Matchett is sent to fetch her back to Windsor Terrace, the reader never finds out whether she returns to Windsor Terrace – to the reader, she is still in a state of transient trauma. Additionally, when Portia internalises her memories of her parents, it is the home-space that she describes, “They had all three worked at their parts of the same necessary pattern. They had passed on the same stairs, grasped the same door handles, listened to the strokes of the same clocks” (2012, p. 164) and this directly opposes how she describes all the other spaces she tries to occupy after her parents death. In Windsor Terrace, she amplifies the feeling of suffocation that she alludes to throughout; “She had breathed smoke from their lungs in every room she went into…To the outside world, she smelled of Thomas and Anna” (2012, p. 164).
Moreover, another way in which Bowen’s fiction forebodes Derrida’s work on hauntology is how, many times, her works contain the concept of time being “out of joint” (Derrida, 2006, p. 2) and one particularly brutal example is when Bowen writes of Portia’s rather humorous friend, Lilian, “She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her…” (2012, p. 51); the anticipation of trauma is haunts the reader throughout. Consequently, Portia travels from home-space to home-space in order to gain a stable frame for her identity formation but she is unable to escape the trauma-made-animate which haunts each physical space.
However, it is his wife Mrs Montmorency whom brazenly questions her physical existence; “Black is so striking. No, you are not like Laura – I don’t know who you are like” (1990, p. 21). Derrida’s term, hauntology, encompasses the erratic and amaranthine ontology by which we exist which consequently allows a discussion of that which infiltrates our present being physical and is, at least partially, defined by the intangible fluidity such as memory, history and effect of traumatic events. Like Lois, Portia is orphaned and sent to live with relatives. However, Portia is not haunted by semi-ghostly manifestations of her mother but it is her father’s shame which pervades and causes the unspoken friction with her brother and his wife, Anna. At times of anxiety (which are frequent) Portia will always reference the shame of her parents which cannot be repressed but instead manifests in the present “They did not think my father and mother wicked; they simply despised them and used to laugh…I see now that my father wanted me to belong somewhere, because he did not” (Bowen, 2012, p. 324). Of course, Portia shares the burden of her father’s shame with Thomas, her brother, though this shared inheritance seems to exists outside of conversations and Portia suspects that her brother sees her as the living manifest of her father’s shame; “He’s ashamed with me, too: he’s ashamed because of our father” (2012, p. 327). Another of the inherited causes of anxiety is the idea of premature death and this impending, but unrealised, trauma haunts The Death of the Heart.
Though Portia is alive, albeit in mourning, a traumatic future is constantly alluded to despite no traumatic event taking place. To Portia, the traumatic event is happening constantly, and when Major Brut asks her what event has happened to upset her, Portia replies; “[the event] always has the whole time” (2012, p. 324). Bowen uses symbolic allusion as a thread throughout the whole novel to keep returning to this idea of Portia’s impending trauma. From the beginning of the novel, Portia is likened to a variety of animals, but none more often than the kitten. In the opening conversation in the novel, Anna recalls Mr Quaynes death and his wishes for Portia “he didn’t mean us to take the kitten from the cat” (Bowen, 2012, p. 11), meaning take Portia from her Mother, Irene. Maud Ellman suggests that “In Bowen’s view, it is Portia’s duty to lose her innocence in order to renounce the wilderness and to come to terms with ‘the world, the flesh and the devil’ – the titles of the three parts of The Death of the Heart” (Ellmann, 2006, p. 136) and though I would agree with this statement, I would go further to suggest that the kitten is representative of the impeding danger which haunts Portia. Thomas’ memories of his half-sister also portray Portia as a kitten, but his is rather more ominous; “Portia, with her suggestion—during those visits—of scared lurking, had stared at him like a kitten that expects to be drowned.” (Bowen, 2012, p. 39). Despite this most docile of symbols, there is talk later of a kitten belonging to Anna which died. Instinctively, Portia knows that she is not entirely welcome in the Quayne house and thus, spends most of the novel travelling from one problematic home-space to the next and even at the novels conclusion when Matchett is sent to fetch her back to Windsor Terrace, the reader never finds out whether she returns to Windsor Terrace – to the reader, she is still in a state of transient trauma. Additionally, when Portia internalises her memories of her parents, it is the home-space that she describes, “They had all three worked at their parts of the same necessary pattern. They had passed on the same stairs, grasped the same door handles, listened to the strokes of the same clocks” (2012, p. 164) and this directly opposes how she describes all the other spaces she tries to occupy after her parents death. In Windsor Terrace, she amplifies the feeling of suffocation that she alludes to throughout; “She had breathed smoke from their lungs in every room she went into…To the outside world, she smelled of Thomas and Anna” (2012, p. 164).
Moreover, another way in which Bowen’s fiction forebodes Derrida’s work on hauntology is how, many times, her works contain the concept of time being “out of joint” (Derrida, 2006, p. 2) and one particularly brutal example is when Bowen writes of Portia’s rather humorous friend, Lilian, “She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her…” (2012, p. 51); the anticipation of trauma is haunts the reader throughout. Consequently, Portia travels from home-space to home-space in order to gain a stable frame for her identity formation but she is unable to escape the trauma-made-animate which haunts each physical space.
Phantoms
During the research for this dissertation thesis, it became apparent that the key to each concept I explored was their liminality, each carry an ambiguity at their core and this provided an ideal approach with which to read The Last September and The Death of the Heart. The prevailing theme which runs through this research, and indeed the novels, are the ‘hauntings’ as a means by which to demonstrate the returning nature of repression, trauma and fractured identities. However, I propose that this framework with which I have conducted my own research, can be centralised by exploring the important work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in their text, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals in Psychoanalysis. Within Abraham and Torok’s dense text, they introduce the concept of the ‘Phantom’ and it is this concept by which I will analyse the figures of Lois and Portia within the familiar rhetoric of themes of the ‘other’ which I have already discussed. This text proposes a ‘phantom’ which, according to the text, is cultivated when “the dynamic unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression but on account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental object” (Abraham & Torok, 1994, p. 181). However, what is particularly interesting and relevant to my own research is the concept of the ‘transgenerational trauma’, a phantom which belongs not to its ‘host’ but is rather, an inherited family secret or trauma which is passed down from generation to generation. Maria Yassa explained this concept of the repressed “family secret”, or, “psychic phantom” (Yassa, 2002, p. 2), in her article, ‘Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok – The Inner Crypt’: “…in the first generation, the secret is something that must never be revealed, unspeakable because of the pain and shame it would evoke. In the next generation it becomes unmentionable, since the bearer intuits its existence but is ignorant as to its content.” (2002, p. 3). More recently Colin Davis rather simplified this concept of the ‘phantom’ when he stated; “What they call a phantom is the presence of a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light.” (Davis, 2013, p. 10). I propose that Abraham and Torok’s concepts, these metaphorical hauntings, perfectly illustrate the presence of the uncanny in Bowen’s novels. In both novels, Bowen utilizes the figure of the orphaned teenage girl as protagonist and both girls are frequently likened to their deceased Mother figures and thus, the image of the mother (and family secrets or traumas) live on through the girls lives, a point which Jessica Gildersleeve coherently summarises in her text, Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma; “Her [Lois] going away repeats Laura’s earlier departure from the Big House or, perhaps, Laura’s departure anticipates her daughters. Laura’s never-told narrative forms a traumatic absence which Lois’ plot supplements; Lois is the supplement for Laura. Laura is survived by Lois, but Lois is shadowed by the lost mother” (Gildersleeve, 2014, pp. 35-36). In Bowen’s novels this cyclic existence is shown through dialogue, memories, dreams and perpetual characters and Laura is often reanimated; “She gave hospitality to the ever-living Laura” (Bowen, 1990, p. 80) pre-empting Jacques Derrida’s appropriation of Abraham and Torok’s theory of the crypt; “The inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead, a dead entity we are perfectly willing to keep alive, but as dead, one we are willing to keep, as long as we keep it, within us, intact in any way save as living” (Derrida, 1986, p. xxi). This symbol, the crypt, adopted by both theories, is central in understanding what exists, unknowingly, in the ‘hidden psyche’ that manifest outside of the psyche causing a diminishing of the self, or, as has been proposed throughout my thesis, a fractured self. Lois, though unable to directly access any of the secrets or traumas experienced by her mother, is physically able to access the old mill, which I accept as symbolic of this unavailable crypt. Lois is initially reluctant to enter the mill, despite feeling euphoric at the prospect but is forced into the mill (or crypt) by Marda, a family friend; “Marda put an arm round her waist, and in an ecstasy at this compulsion Lois entered the mill” (Bowen, 1990, p. 123-124). Upon entering the mill, the girls find a sleeping Irish rebel who eventually shoots at Marda, (a representative of changing face of femininity like Laura). When the girls flee from the mill, two things happen which I believe are symbolic of discovering the unknown crypt. The first is that Lois declares that she will marry Gerald (an English subaltern) rejecting the concept of an independent life (which, actually, she later takes up) that her mother, Laura, lived. The second is that the girls make a pact to never to tell, creating another secret which is destined to never be told (incidentally, Marda tells Hugo immediately after the event). Of course, Bowen wrote The Last September several decades before the emergence of these theories but within her novels emerge narratives that are tantamount to the developments on psychoanalytical theory. The family secret in The Death of the Heart is not as obscured, Mr. Quayne (Portia and Thomas’ father) was married to Thomas Mother, had an affair and Portia was the result forcing Mr Quayne, Portia’s Mother and Portia to live their life travelling the continent and staying in hotels in an exile state, “[They] always had the back rooms in hotels, or dark flats in villas with no view” (Bowen, 2012, p. 18). Portia is a physical and literal manifestation of the shame of her father and her diary contains her own hidden secrets – a crypt which is raided by her sister-in-law, Anna. The significance of Portia’s diary then, as explained by Jodey Castricano; “Haunting, then, implies interiority: the necessary construction of an ‘inside’ whether of a house, a text, a thesis, a system of representation, or a subject” (Castricano, 2001, p. 22-23). Anna’s violation of this ‘place of secrets’ is the hinge on which the anxiety in the novel permeates. However, the diary is offered openly to Portia’s love interest, Eddie, whom first asks to see it and then repeatedly rejects it despite it being offered up “Her diary, fetched from Windsor Terrace, lay still untouched between their elbows, with a strong indiarubber [sic] band round it.” (Bowen, 2012, p. 104). Thus, this diary is a crypt which houses Portia’s own ‘phantom traumas’, and Windsor Terrace is the problematic home-space which houses Portia. Therefore, Bowen’s framework of the novel can be read as a sort of Matryoshka doll effect – the diary as a crypt, Portia as physical manifestation of transgenerational trauma, and the home-space as a ‘haunted house’. Thus, both theories of Abraham & Torok and Derrida add further weight to my investigation of the home-space as problematic; if Bowen didn’t directly conceive the later theories, she approaches the then-uncharted themes through metaphorical representations.
Conclusion
“Life, seen whole for a moment, was one act of apprehension, the apprehension of death.”
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
Both The Last September and The Death of the Heart end upon an inconclusive axis that neither concludes nor eradicates the haunting spectres which besmirch the lives of their young protagonists. Instead, in The Last September, the Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’ is torched by the IRA and Lois is sent to France; “For her French” (Bowen, 1990, p. 204). The destruction of the home-space represents a cleansing of the traditional Anglo-Irish presence in Ireland, a purge of the ‘ghosts’ that haunt it. The Death of the Heart concludes with housekeeper Matchett sent to bring Portia home from another temporary space she has inhabited; “Reflections of evening made unlit windows ghostly; lit lights showed drawing-rooms pallid and bare. In the Karachi Hotel drawing-room, someone played the piano uncertainly” (Bowen, 2012, p. 354). Bowen uses the home-spaces within her novels to house universal themes of identity, nationalism, mourning, death and sterility which, though never explicit, mirror the concerns of the period in which she was writing and furthermore, read today, her novels have become spectres that still resonate and the anxiety contained within is still present for the reader. Thus, the theories discussed with this thesis have largely focused on a spectral rhetoric that upon application can be used to understand the Gothic tropes used as a vessel by Bowen to explore the subjective hauntings rather than the physical hauntings found in traditional Gothic novels – whilst the Gothic novel anticipates an apparition, Bowens novels anticipates a rationale for the anxious undercurrent, one which is never given. Throughout this thesis, I have sought to identify and rationalise the uncanny that resides in the fictional home-spaces of Bowen’s inter-war novels, I believe that appropriating the contemporary theories to augment Freud’s semi-theory has provided a way that not only exposes the subtle techniques used by Bowen, but how this impacts on the identity construction and subsequent destruction of her characters, the texts and the reader. As Bowen uses the home-space and it’s furnishings to shape identity, the theories discussed throughout this thesis use the symbolic language to name and discuss that which is absent from our vocabulary. Freud, ultimately, fails to name that which he seeks to identify and leaves an absence within his theory that cannot be ignored and, as mentioned in earlier, his shortcomings facilitate the need for supporting theories. However, fundamentality, the uncanny lies in ambiguity – what is threatening, what is absent, what is present and what is live and what is dead? It is this absence of any overwhelming conclusion which place the novels amongst the truly uncanny.
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Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. (2002) The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Bachelard, G. (2014). The Poetics of Space. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Bennett, A. & Royle, N. (1995). Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bennett, A. & Royle, N. (2004). An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory 3rd Edition. London: Pearson Education Limited
Bhabhia, H.K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Bowen, E. (1999). Bowens Court & Seven Winters. London: Vintage.
Bowen, E. (2012). The Death of the Heart. London: Vintage Publishing.
Bowen, E. (1990). The Last September. London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Bowen, E. (2008). People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen A. Hepburn, ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Castricano, J. (2001). Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida's Ghost Writing. Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press.
Cixous, H. (1976). ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’)’. New Literary History, Vol. 7. No.. 3. (Spring 1976). Available at: < http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/german/uncanny/cixous_uncanny.pdf > [Accessed 2nd April 2015].
Cottrell, P. (2006). The Anglo-Irish War: The Troubles of 1913-1922. Oxford: Osprey Publishing.
Davis, C. (2007). Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Davis, C. (2013). ‘État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’. In: Del Pilar Blanco, M. & Peeren, E. eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury.
Derrida, Jacques (1986) ‘Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson, B. In: Abraham, N and Torok, M. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy trans. Rand, N. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. & Kamuf, P., 2006. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge.
Ellmann, M. (2006). Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Fisher, M. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.
Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny (Penguin Modern Classics). London: Penguin Classics.
Gildersleeve, J., 2014. Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V.
Holly, M.A. (1996). Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image. New York: Cornell University Press
Kotsko, A. (2015). Creepiness. Winchester: Zero Books.
Royle, N. (2003). The Uncanny: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Trigg, D. (2006). ‘The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason’. In New Studies in Aesthetics. Vol 36. P.6.
Trigg, D., 2014. The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. Winchester: Zero Books.
Vidler, A. (1992). The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. London: The MIT Press.
Wolfreys, J. (2013) ‘Preface: On Textual Haunting’. In: Del Pilar Blanco, M. & Peeren , E. eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury.
Yassa, M (2002) 'Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok - The inner crypt', in The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 25.