Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction by Victoria Coulson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction by Victoria Coulson Jessica Gildersleeve Elizabeth Bowen's Psychoanalytic Fiction. By Victoria Coulson. (Midcentury Modern Writers) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2020. x+226 pp. £75. ISBN 978-1-4744-8049-9. Victoria Coulson's monograph is among the first in a new series from Edinburgh University Press. 'Midcentury Modern Writers', under the editorship of the prominent critic of modernism, Irish literature, and psychoanalysis, Maud Ellmann, is devoted to 'restoring undervalued writers, genres, and literary movements' (p. ix). A book, like the present study, devoted to the work of Elizabeth Bowen constitutes a welcome addition to such a project. A range of major publications on Bowen's work has emerged in recent years, including Ellmann's Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), Nicola Darwood's A World of Lost Innocence: Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), my own Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (New York: Brill, 2014), and Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things, edited by myself and Patricia Juliana Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Despite this, as well as the formation of the Elizabeth Bowen Society and its associated journal, the Elizabeth Bowen Review, Bowen still haunts the margins of canonical literature. Although psychoanalytic methods, often with a deconstructive, trauma-informed, or feminist slant, have informed a number of such recent studies, a sole focus on Bowen's work as 'psychoanalytic' may seem curious, given her interest in but apparent lack of explicit commentary on psychoanalysis. Indeed, the short story 'The Cat Jumps' (1934) may at first blush appear to be the only one of her works which directly uses the terms of psychoanalysis—and does so in a satirical manner, as its very modern characters engage in lively discussion about 'Kraffi-Ebing, Freud, Forel, Weiniger and the heterosexual volume of Havelock Ellis' (The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 366). In her private life, too, Bowen appeared to hold some disdain for modern psychology, such that although she visited a psychotherapist, her lover Charles Ritchie observed that the therapist exposed more of his own private feelings to her than she to him. Yet Coulson marks a critical intervention in this interpretation: [End Page 296] she points out that 'the satire of "The Cat Jumps" is directed not at the ideas represented by the volumes stocking the Wrights' library but at the spectacle of their complacent uptake by a social group motivated primarily by a tribal desire to instantiate its intellectual superiority' (p. 13). More importantly, however, she observes more subtle references in Bowen's fiction, non-fiction, and personal writing to psychoanalytic concepts such as narcissism, neurosis, and complexes (pp. 13–14). Given such infiltration of these ideas within her work, as well as the clear impact of personal and historical trauma in her life, including her father's debilitating psychological breakdown and her mother's early death, not to mention two world wars, a study dedicated to psychoanalysis in Bowen, or indeed of Bowen as a '"theorist" of psychic life' (p. 11), therefore represents an important contribution to the field. Following Bowen's favoured tripartite narrative structure, across three sections Coulson maps out Bowen's psychoanalytic representation of 'Development', 'Sexuality', and 'Reproduction; or Legacy', ultimately arguing for a consistent and original advancement of her theorization of these concepts, such that 'there is operative in Bowen's writing a sophisticated implicit account or understanding of psychological development, of sexuality, and of the structure and function of gender identities' (p. 10), as well as how this 'psychodrama of individual development' functions 'in relation to contemporary world-historical events' (p. 17). To do so, Coulson examines a range of Bowen's extensive œuvre of novels and short stories—the fiction—but also makes use of her life writing and critical essays. Yet her psychoanalytic method is peculiarly unmoored: this makes for a more readable text, to be sure, but does leave the study's psychoanalysis methodologically free. Nevertheless, this is a welcome inclusion in the field of Bowen studies, and does much to gather together and reframe some of the disparate themes...