Performing Hospitality in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love

Abstract

Performing Hospitality in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love Sarah Harsh (bio) For Elizabeth Bowen, the Big House was always a haunted house. Yet this haunting could be a source of comfort. For Bowen and like-minded Anglo-Irish writers, traces of the ancestral past legitimized the Ascendancy's presence in twentieth-century Ireland. In her 1940 essay "The Big House," Bowen welcomed "the indefinite ghosts of the past" who lent a house its history and imposed upon its living residents a sense of purpose.1 Within the walls of Bowen's Court, she argued, "the dead who lived here and pursued the same routine of life in these walls, add something, a sort of order, a reason for living, to every minute and hour." Bowen celebrated how "each house seems to live under its own spell," exuding a sense of mystery. She was so enchanted that she even wanted to share the magic of the Big House with her countrymen. She issued a call for the remaining owners to throw open the doors of their Big Houses. The Big Houses themselves, she claimed, beg to be a part of a modern, inclusive Ireland: "'Can we not,' the big, half-empty rooms seem to ask, 'be as never before, sociable? Cannot we scrap the past, with its bitterness and barriers and all meet, throwing in what we have?'" ("BH" 76). Bowen assumed that her colonial counterparts, the "Irish-Irish" as she called them, would be equally willing to overlook the traumas of history and take similar delight in Ascendancy pleasures. Bowen's open-doors enthusiasm would prove short-lived. In her essay for The Bell, Bowen claimed the Big House was "planned for spacious living—for hospitality above all" ("BH" 73). Yet Bowen was envisioning a very specific form of hospitality bound by Ascendancy conventions and limited to Ascendancy values. The Anglo-Irish, in other words, would entirely dictate the terms of this hospitality. Following her interest in living "life with the lid on," Bowen's version of Anglo-Irish hospitality was one where civility reigned.2 In this social setting, individual opinions are not welcome. "What is fine about the social idea," she wrote, "is that it means the subjugation of the personal to the impersonal" ("BH" 76). This meant that debates about contentious topics, like history and politics, were off the table. Rather, "in the interest [End Page 100] of good manners and good behavior," Bowen claimed, "people learned to subdue their own feelings" ("BH" 76). Bowen's insistence on decorum over emotion precluded the possibility of any meaningful dialogue. Ultimately, Bowen's Anglo-Irish hospitality is a hollow performance that upholds colonial power structures. Big House novels, like Bowen's The Last September and A World of Love, may resist or reaffirm this colonial authority. The latter novel, in particular, reveals an under-studied aspect of the Big House genre: the ways in which the performance of a culturally specific and exclusive type of hospitality reenacts colonial violence. The Big House has long been a prism through which to view the colonial past. Seán Ó Faoláin commissioned Bowen to write "The Big House" for the inaugural issue of The Bell, his magazine intended to offer "a survey of Irish life." In her contribution, Bowen explored her ancestral past while presenting a vision of an inclusive Ireland that fit with The Bell's mission. In newly independent Éire, the team behind The Bell was more interested in bridging the colonial divide than reaffirming tribal loyalties. Ó Faoláin articulated this mission in his introduction to the first volume with language that explicitly invokes Bowen's essay: "Whoever you are then, O Reader, Gentile or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House, The Bell is for you."3 In this editorial preface, Ó Faoláin signaled his own shift away from his republican activism and toward an aesthetic production of cultural harmony.4 Ó Faoláin's broad-minded inclusivity in The Bell anticipates by fifty years the revisionist turn in Irish studies scholarship. In the 1990s, as scholars scrutinized the ways in which the Irish canon had been shaped by nationalist narratives, Bowen proved...