A “Pre-Natal Hold”: Elizabeth Bowen, Mothers and Daughters

Abstract

This article argues that, faced with the disintegration of their patriarchal Ascendancy culture, Elizabeth Bowen’s young Anglo-Irish female protagonists in The Last September (1929) and A World of Love (1954) revert to the primordial mother-daughter relationship as an attempt to foster some sense of identity and stability. In The Last September, the flux and tumult of the War for Independence prompts Lois’s pursuit of maternal unity with her absent mother, Laura. This endeavour is ultimately frustrated, leaving Lois with an unstable sense of self facing an even less stable future as the Ascendancy and her projected lifestyle crumbles. For Jane in A World of Love, the posthumous affair with her mother’s dead lover, Guy, is a misdirected attempt to gain closeness with her mother. Before, the mother-daughter relationship had been tethered to an unproductive past by Guy’s memory, and only with the destruction of his memory can the future be secured.