Elizabeth Bowen's war gothic

Abstract

Elizabeth Bowen's fiction from World War II is among the most celebrated of the era. As most readers know, her remarkable collection of wartime short fiction, The Demon Lover and Other Stories, joins war writing with the gothic. This odd conjuncture has produced two dominant modes of reading Bowen's stories: either the immediate historical context of World War II guides interpretation or Bowen's deployment of gothic tropes and imagery invokes a longer tradition of Anglo-Irish gothic fiction, thereby restoring a specifically Irish historical context to these stories. Rather than privilege one form of reading over the other, I suggest that the defining features of Bowen's war gothic – disorderly temporalities, alternating narratives, hauntings – formally mediate between these two historical moments. On my reading, Bowen's stories transfer the anxieties of Anglo-Irish gothic fiction – the erosion of property rights, wealth distribution, and inheritance – to the scene of the People's War. Bowen's gothic fictions, then, treat the war populism of the 1940s and the calls for a more equitable postwar democracy as augurs of the same economic and social disaster that befell the Anglo-Irish landowners. In Bowen's hands, a genre initially suited for a dying settler colonial class is uniquely, if counter-intuitively, appropriate for a bombed imperial metropolis. These gothic stories of unsettled pasts and ghostly returns function as anxious ruminations on the near future, distress signals from the world to come.