"Even a Shelter's Not Safe": The Blitz on Homes in Elizabeth Bowen's Wartime Writing

Abstract

In wartime memoir Bowen's Court, Elizabeth Bowen remembers her ancestral Irish home as a private sanctuary: Like Flaubert's nothing, it sustains itself on itself by inner of its style (21). Bowen employs same image in The Heat of Day to describe Stella Rodney and Robert Kelway, whose relationship, like nothing, stayed itself on itself by its inner force (90). Flaubert's ideal book is about nothing because it tells no story other than that of its own form; it merges form and content in a closed fictional system that becomes a world unto itself. As an upper-middle-class woman living and working in London during Second World War, Bowen both clung to and questioned notion of such a safe, hermetic world, whether architectural or emotional. London was bombed every night from September 7 to November 2, 1940, and city suffered 13 major attacks by V-1 and V-2 rockets between January and March of 1944. In total, blitz damaged or destroyed over 3 1/2 million homes (Taylor 502). Recognizing devastation that blitz wreaked upon British homes, Bowen employed domestic metaphors to explore war's parallel assault on gendered categories of public politics and private emotion. She experimented with Flaubert's idea, linking metaphor to two images of home: habitat that Robert and Stella create in their relationship (90) and her family estate in Ireland. These two images represent two kinds of security - sexual security generated by a traditional romantic relationship and social security created by upper-middle-class land ownership. Although Bowen perceived blitz as an opportunity to interrogate sexual security by challenging traditional gender ideology, she accepted and even valorized social security grounded in class ideology. An analysis of Bowen's wartime writing must therefore account for an ideological conflict within her use of domestic imagery: on one hand, blitzed home represents a radical, feminist challenge to gendered categories of public and private space; on other hand, home represents a conservative, elitist retreat from problems of war. Despite interdependence of gender and class ideologies in Bowen's work, critical discussion has focused primarily on issues of gender. Phyllis Lassner has argued that war offered Bowen and other women writers opportunity to revise stereotypical gender roles by questioning the political of war and its relation to domestic ideology (89). Reacting against Lassner, Gill Plain contends that historical record may reveal war's offer of increased mobility to women, but history of postwar period records its repeal.... This is pessimistic scenario that emerges from contradictions of Bowen's narrative in The Heat of Day (179). These arguments Bowen's war writing reflect a broader historical debate impact of Second World War on women: on one hand, historian Arthur Marwick has argued that social upheaval of war created opportunities for women; on other, feminist historians such as Dorothy Sheridan, Penny Summerfield, and Shelley Saywell agree that ultimately challenges to women's subordination were contained within an overarching nationalist rhetoric which positioned woman at heart of family in her idealised role as wife and mother (Sheridan 3). Although their focus is not on Second World War, Cora Kaplan and Angela Woollacott both offer models for complicating these polarized notions of gender with a concurrent analysis of class ideology. Kaplan has argued that nineteenth-century bourgeois women defined themselves through a manipulation of working-class feminine identity, while Woollacott has insisted on recognizing class differences that shaped women's writing of First World War. Extending Kaplan's analysis of nineteenth century and Woollacott's explication of First World War, I contend that it is essential to recognize intersection of class and gender ideologies in Bowen's writing during Second World War. …