The Blitz Gothic: War and Language in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover"

Abstract

The paper intends to explore Elizabeth Bowen’s stylistic choices in her wartime short story, The Demon Lover (1945), wherein the experience of war is rendered in gothic form as a supernatural occurrence. Bowen’s predilection for framing aspects of war in an inverted manner is well-documented in such novels as The Heat of the Day (1949), and her appeal to the fantastic is part of an Irish tradition, ranging from Bram Stoker to John Banville. The paper attempts to analyze the way in which the gothic mode, particularly at the level of language, contributes to a deconstruction of the war experience and a re-examination of the psychological horror of the Other. To this end, the paper employs theoretical concepts pertaining to the sphere of the “war gothic”, while also placing emphasis on modernist theories of style, specifically as they relate to Bowen’s “willfully tortuous syntax” (Teekell 61) which has an almost physical, claustrophobic effect on the reader.