Demon Lover Research Articles

The Archetypal Images in “Coraline” Novel By Neil Gaiman (2002)

The dark fantasy children's book Coraline by Neil Gaiman described Coraline's adventured as she tried to uncover strange and frightening secrets in her new home. The goal of this study was to describe the archetypal images that emerged in the Coraline novel based on Carl Jung's theory of the archetypal image. The issue identified in this study is that many readers are still not aware of what an archetypal description in a novel implies. This research was a qualitative descriptive research proposed by Creswell (2018). In collecting data, researchers used observation (reading) and note-taking techniques. Then, for data analysis methods, the researchers used content analysis and interpretation techniques. The result of this research was the discovery of 15 data of archetypal images in the novel Coraline. The 15 data consisted of four data of terrible mother, two data of demon lover, two data of black color, two data of tree, one data of red color, one data of rising sun, one data of desert, one data of serpent, and one data of circle. Considering the findings of the study, it could be concluded that the novel Coraline used a number of image archetypes to convey hidden meanings through the use of symbols.

A Study on the Traumatic Theme in Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”

British novelist Elizabeth Bowen tactfully sets the fate of individuals in the spectacular background of war in her short novel “The Demon Lover” to depict the physical and psychical trauma of human beings. The protagonists Kathleen Drover and the “demon” soldier who returns for revenge are two typical sufferers of trauma. The writing of the trauma in this novel not only recreates daily life of British women during the war but also draws readers’ attention on the cruelty of war, which endow the short story abundant significance of enlightenment to individuals and society.

The Non-human, Haunting and the question of ‘Excess’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”

The Non-human, Haunting and the question of ‘Excess’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”

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

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.

A Greener Gothic: Environment and Extinction in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover (1945)

A Greener Gothic: Environment and Extinction in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover (1945)

The State of Exception and Exceptional States in Elizabeth Bowen’s Wartime Ghost Stories

In this article, I consider Elizabeth Bowen’s depiction of the impact on citizens of their changing political and legal relationship to the British state during World War II, using Agamben and Freud’s writing about wartime behaviour of the state to illuminate Bowen’s short fiction, in particular ‘The Demon Lover’ and ‘Green Holly.’ Although from different points on the political spectrum, Agamben, like Bowen, is opposed to the expansion of the state into the lives of citizens. As a legal philosopher, he has written extensively on the early to mid-twentieth century, and the article takes his theory, expressed in The State of Exception, as its starting point. The article goes on to compare the evocation of the state’s presence and treatment of its citizens in ‘The Demon Lover’ and ‘Green Holly,’ incorporating Freud’s essay ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.’ I then focus on Bowen’s portrayal of the socio-legal predicament that women were placed in through consideration of the literary antecedents to ‘The Demon Lover,’ the history of state surveillance of war widows, and Bowen’s short radio play, ‘A Year I Remember – 1918.’ The article culminates with the most exceptional state in the stories, and in Freud: the ghosts. I discuss the extent to which they represent the unmourned wartime dead or the existential anxiety experienced not only because of the threat of death during war, but also, the threat to individuality, rights and legal status created by the state of exception.

The Ghost of Col. Bowen: 1655, 1691, 1941/42

ABSTRACT In 1655 the ghost of her husband appeared to Catherine Bowen. In 1691 Richard Baxter, in The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, collated witness statements about this extraordinary event. This article investigates this account as both typical and atypical of seventeenth-century ghost stories, and how in this period narratives were constructed around allegedly true stories of the supernatural. It also follows the story into the twentieth century, when the colonel's descendant Elizabeth Bowen retold it. It suggests that, in both her family history Bowen's Court (1941) and her short fiction, especially “The Demon Lover” (1942), Bowen is not only influenced by but also comments, directly or indirectly, on the seventeenth-century case.

Demon Lovers versus Damsels in Distress: An Archetypal Reading of Robert Browning’s <i>My Last Duchess </i>and<i> Porphyria’s Lover</i>

Each literary work has a world of its own and discovering this world may seem undemanding and straightforward. By contrast, the realm of a literary work might be loaded with hints for a reader who has established a harmonious relationship with that world. The world depicted by the work may well encourage this reader to pass from the surface meaning toward the heart of the idea. This paper tries to reveal the secondary layer of meaning in two poems by Robert Browning, My Last Duchess and Porphyria’s Lover, by focusing on the archetypal elements implemented in them. The recent study explores the archetypal characters playing their roles in the poem by focusing on old archetypes such as the Soul Mate, Damsel in Distress, Innocent youth and Demon Lover. Then it elaborates on the archetypal motifs or patterns such as immortality and scapegoat. Furthermore, the last part of discussion elaborates on Jung’s principal archetypes (shadow, persona, and anima) and his theory of individuation.

Raymond B. Waddington Looking into Providences: Designs and Trials in Paradise LostLooking into Providences: Designs and Trials in Paradise Lost. Raymond B. Waddington. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+310.

<i>Raymond B. Waddington</i> Looking into Providences: Designs and Trials in <i>Paradise Lost</i><i>Looking into Providences: Designs and Trials in <i>Paradise Lost</i></i>. Raymond B. Waddington. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. xiv+310.

‘Only one antagonist’: The Demon Lover and the Feminine Experience in the Work of Shirley Jackson

‘Only one antagonist’: The Demon Lover and the Feminine Experience in the Work of Shirley Jackson

Woman Protection Cell in India: A Threat

In India marriage was considered as sacred institution and now it is a mean to extort money from innocent husbands and his family members. If she does not like her husband she approaches to these cells, irrespective of the jurisdiction of the area, wherever she feels convenient to do so. Even she files false application against all family members of the groom. He does not find a companion even after marriage, as naturally being a social animal, he cannot live alone but he has to do so, loses social reputation, loses chance of marriage again, loses hard earned money of family, becomes psychologically ill. Court dates become barrier to his dreams. A crook wife misuses laws according to her mind. She satisfies her lust with her demon lovers and her husband has to live signally. In Muslims a man marries at the same time with four girls and in Hindus he has to keep crying with one wife, with estranged relationship, she keeps on killing him mentally and physically with Police and pro woman system.Power of social pressure has been lost and special woman cells have taken their places. These cells have been established for keeping the marriage alive but when a case comes to these cells, means it turns in the end of the relationship resultantly. Panchayats and Social pressure was good means to solve their petty issues, as in lok adalats, Para-legal services (No person wins or fails/loses). But women cells for an ordinary man these are like courts. These cells receive their functioning power from the police and act accordingly after receiving an application, whether it is true or false, a man is summoned. This is the first occasion for him considering as his marriage cannot be retrieved. It proves that these cells have been totally failed to keep the marriages alive. As the name indicates that these are pro woman and a man is reprimanded by the cell in-charge even she finds/knows that the man is totally innocent, she leaves it for the court to decide, and only favors a wife who has left her husband to live alone. Thus tolerance, adjustment and respecting one another have been lost in the marriage institution up to some extent. It is to be there in every marriage to a certain bearable extent. Petty quibbles and trifling differences should not be exaggerated and magnified to destroy the sacred institutions by these cells. Woman Protection cells in India have been established in India for the protection of children and women. These Women cells have been established to give relief to the poor and destitute ladies but at present time these cells are used by most of the cunning ladies as a threat to the innocent person. By filing cases in these cells for getting rid off from her husband and for extorting money. This was not very purpose of opening these cells and have been derailed from its main purpose.

Elizabeth Bowen's war gothic

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.

Seduction, date rape, and aborted surrender

This paper clarifies the dual-layered nature of the “demon lover complex,” with its background of both pre-Oedipal trauma and Oedipal-level desire. It draws on an object relations understanding of the unconscious and dissociated addiction to an internal demon object that has derivations in the personalities of the actual parents, and in the internalization of these parents. The dramatic case of early trauma compounded by adult date rape trauma serves to illustrate how a “developmental mourning process” in treatment can resolve such trauma. It also illustrates how reparation with the mother that partially heals pre-Oedipal trauma cannot immunize anyone against Oedipal-level attractions to a “demon lover” father, as represented in a displacement, resulting in victimized behavior, and in an aborted surrender to heterosexual desire. However, this victimization can be resolved, as seen in the clinical illustration, when the psychoanalyst has an understanding of the mourning process in developmental terms, working with a natural interaction between mourning and transference evolutions in treatment. The case also demonstrates the transitional object role of the psychoanalyst who is involved with the healing of pre-Oedipal trauma through mourning.

Object Relations Perspectives on “Phantom of the Opera” and Its Demon Lover Theme: The Modern Film

This study of the modern film version of "Phantom of the Opera" employs a mythic theme to illustrate how women can involve themselves with charismatic and eroticized narcissistic men, who are unavailable for true relationship within the conscious world of societal connection. How can the healthy-heroic woman extricate herself from the seductive web of such men, men who seek to own the women--not through sexual relations--but through ownership and control of the women's creative talents? What are the developmental, internal world, dynamics that spell out the muse turned demon/lover theme in British and American Object Relations terms? Similar to the mythic vampire who entrances women to suck their blood, the male muse haunts the female artist to possess her talents. The "demon lover" creates himself to woo the unsuspecting female with potential but yet unrealized creative talents. He woos through entrancement, like so many psychologically wounded narcissistic characters who require mirroring to have any sense of existence!

The Music of Daredevils and Madmen

The Music of Daredevils and Madmen Brendan Galvin Outlaw Style: Poems by R. T. Smith (University of Arkansas Press, 2007. 110 pages. $16 pb) One way around the ubiquitous Me, Myself, and I obsession of contemporary poetry is to write about characters, historical and otherwise, and provide (even invent!) the material that will fill in lacunae. Letting characters speak for themselves can also be a fruitful strategy. This is what R. T. Smith has done in Outlaw Style. [End Page lvi] Not that his earlier poems were full of self-involved navel-gazing: he has always worked deeply in the natural vein, whether examining his native southern places and people or those of Ireland, where he has spent time. Music, too, as made by the folk who are outside officially sanctioned circles, has been one of his affections. Hence outlaw style. The major difference here is that more of his poems have crossed the unfenced border between lyric and narrative, all the while retaining the lyric’s music. He seems to have discovered that inhabiting the voices of others, a precinct left largely to fiction these days, has opened up broad new possibilities. Listen to the snake-handler Brother Fain Carouthers: The wicked I have walked among and fought with and abandoned will call us daredevils and madmen, but I can read the cursive letters of a serpent’s spine and look him where the wet eye shines beneath its hood to seek my sweating face. The narratives and lyrics of Outlaw Style are set in three sections. In the first a marvelous array of voices relate their stories. Besides the snake-handler there’s a preacher who launches into a hilarious defense of cockfighting, a dead woman whose ashes have been left to the winds by an absconding undertaker, and various personae whom I take to be earlier versions of the poet, particularly in “Dar He,” a boyhood memory centering on the murder of Emmett Till. The middle section of Outlaw Style, the longest at forty-four pages, almost constitutes a biography of John Wilkes Booth, ranging back and forth over his life, as told by Booth and a collection of relatives, friends, and lovers, spies, losers, and actors, even Boston Corbett, the man who shot him. What comes powerfully through is the variety of ruin he cast on these people, not to mention the country, by his murder of Lincoln. Strangely or not Booth seems to have been the Elvis of his time. For years after his death travelers claimed they had encountered him—even drunk with him—in places as far apart as Tunis and Hong Kong. These poems are rich with the history of their time, the details that bring a narrative alive: As dawn embered over the Rappahannock, the blazing Garrett barn collapsed. Everyone remembers the words he cried that Good Friday night: Sic Semper Tyrannis. From Brutus, and Virginia’s state seal. During the autopsy by Doctor Barnes, his head came detached. The body was thrown into a musket case, nailed shut and shoveled under the Old Penitentiary’s cellar floor. The third section of Outlaw Style is a foray into the origins of various musics. The sad cornettist Buddy Bolden, the Carter Family, Billie Holiday, and Robert Johnson are but a few who put in appearances in these poems, as do such instruments as the mandolin, gypsy fiddle, and [End Page lvii] harmonica. Smith has the remarkable ability to translate the sounds of music into language. Thus in “Hohner,” I’d cup my palm for a mute or give all my breath to “Fair and Tender Ladies,” “Shenandoah,” “Wayfaring Stranger,” but it was hard love blues I’ll always remember as the natural weather for the raspy fervor of a mouth harp’s razor edge, that stridor and chromatic keen under the embouchure uttered only as kiss and spitfire by woman wailing for her demon lover, all caterwaul, moan, and broken-soul-shiver. Smith’s robust prosody is exemplary, with patterns of near-rhyme, alliteration, and loose iambics often in evidence, together with a rich word hoard. Most collections are snacks, but Outlaw Style is a verbal feast, as the very title with...

Gothic memory and forgetfulness in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love and ‘The Demon Lover’

Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love (1954) and ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) share an uncustomary usage of Gothic conventions: the Anglo-Irish writer invests the Gothic genre with new meaning for the war-torn Irish and the post-World Wars generation by skewing Gothic conventions, reflecting a new Gothic for a new age – one that has seen the effects of two catastrophic wars and not only dead soldiers, but dead-in-life survivors. In A World of Love, Bowen uses not a ghost that haunts the attic, but a nearly forgotten dead World War I soldier; not a male power of place and a fleeing female, but a female power of place and a displaced male; and not a lonely, menacing castle, but a dilapidated farm. In both the novel and the short story, the dead-in-life survivors must remember in order to successfully exorcise the war and the dead soldiers of war, thereby revitalizing themselves. Those who cannot remember are doomed to the past. This article examines the twist on the Gothic novel and its statement about the possibly disastrous effects of forgetting and of remembering incorrectly – anxieties shared by other twentieth-century Irish writers in terms of their eroding cultural identity and past.

From Andersen On: Fairy Tales Tell Our Lives

Human beings are storytelling animals. It is what distinguishes us from the other beasts. We are dreamers, too, always looking for that bit of luck, that bit of magic, that bit of courage that guarantees us the prize. We are wizards of the mouth. Our stories reflect the human condition, and none more so than the folk tales that have been an inheritance from our great-great-ever-so-many-greatgrandparents back to the beginning of time. We polish those stories and send them on. Stories about transformations and transportations, about miracles and mayhem, about fairy wives and demon lovers, about the gods walking about as humans and humans walking on the streets of heaven. Now children, those great eavesdroppers, have overheard these stories for years. Ehey remembered the ones they wanted to remember, forgot the rest. Somewhere in the nineteenth century, many of the tales began being set down specifically in books for children. Oh, there had been chapbooks before and schoolbooks and religious books and courtesy books before. But the great movement of children's publishing did not get its kick start until the mid-1800s. Still, children had been coveting and keeping some of the great folk romances and legends like King Arthur and Robin Hood and St. George, resurrecting for their own use the sly fabliaux of Aesop and the stories of Reynard the Fox. Children had been hearing bits of the Arabian Nights and the Ocean Stream oj Stories and the jokes and jests out of the mouth and from the page of the medieval storehouse of such tales. We could call this - as John Rowe Eownsend does in Written jor Children - the prehistory of children's interest in folklore (18). And then, in 1805, two hundred years ago, a baby was born on a bed that was made from a coffin platform. Ehe bed still had the black borders of cloth at the bottom. Life and death both sleeping together. Ehat baby would grow up to be the great fairy-tale writer, Hans Christian Andersen. Or at least such was the story he told. It was as much a fairy tale as any he ever made up. reinvented his life perfectly. And whether you like his stories as I do - or find them frequently sentimental and horrific as Maurice Sendak does (though I must note he has illustrated a number of them!) - you have to admit one thing. made his life into a perfect tale. lived for twelve years with his parents in a tiny one-room house in Odense, a city in Denmark. A lanky child with white-gold hair, Hans was very homely, even by his own account. His parents were terribly poor. His father was a shoemaker and his mother a washerwoman who did other people's laundry. He had an older half-sister who was probably a prostitute. He hardly knew her. His father's father was quite mad. He would wander into the woods return singing loudly, beech leaves and garlands of flowers plaited in his hair. His father's mother incessantly told lies. Hans told lies, too. About his past life. About his present life. He called them fairy tales. My life is a beautiful fairy tale, he began his autobiography, wonderous happy. Now used his life - and the world of story and superstition into which he'd been born - to make fairy tales. As Danish critic Hans Brix put it, Andersen wrote more self-portraits than Rembrandt ever painted. But was not alone in this. AU fiction writers lie, or at least we cannibalize our lives, reinventing them in tales. Some tales we call realistic, but they are hardly that. Ehey are fiction, a lie that is - at its core - true. Let's take a look at the three kinds of fairy stories: the actual folk tale from the mouths of storytellers within a culture, the retold story sometimes told within the culture but often from outside of it, and the art or original fairy tale. Ehe actual folk tale is polished by years of telling. …

Domesticity and the Female Demon in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

This essay explores the transformations of the female demon in Dacre’s Zofloya and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in relation to issues of femininity and domestic space. The mutability of the Gothic genre allows for the emergence of a new female demon introduced by Dacre and rewritten by Brontë. Tracing the domestication of Victoria and Catherine reveals the significance of the role of performance in the female demon’s acceptance into this feminized space. Masculinity and sensibility are also examined since the female demon is guided into the domestic sphere by effeminate male characters and then fall prey to their more masculine demon lovers. This essay argues that although the female demon’s newly acquired skill of performance and transformation allows her to explore the realm of the domestic, Dacre and Brontë suggest, by ultimately reverting to traditional Gothic perceptions of femininity, that her domestication is her demise.

The Rose &amp; the briar: death, love and liberty in the American ballad

Praised by Robbie Robertson of Band as classic & a ticket to ride, Rose & the Briar assembles an astonishing group of writers and artists: Paul Muldoon, Stanley Crouch, R. Crumb, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Sharyn McCrumb, Luc Sante, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Marsh, and more than a dozen other novelists, essayists, performers, and critics; to explore the ineffable power of the American ballad. From Barbara Allen through The Wreck of the Old 97 to contemporary ballads by Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Rose & the Briar is, as Geoffrey O'Brien hailed in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, book full of internal echoes and provocative coincidences, featuring historical investigation, shamanistic trance-journey, memoir, novella and cartoon, where names and costumes change, soldiers become cowboys, demon lovers become backwoods murderer; the voices are unmistakably distinct but they share a common ground.

Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief by Walter Stephens (review)

REVIEWS 281 toriography of Protestantism in England. PETER CARLSON, School of Religion, Claremont Graduate University Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2003) xvi + 468 pp. In early modern Europe, those accusing a woman of being a witch would claim that she had committed a myriad of sins, often including copulation with a demon . Modern scholars have been fascinated with the representation of women’s bodies and sexuality in witchcraft literature (broadly defined), without paying attention to the related topic of their demonic sexual partners. In an exciting new book, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief, Walter Stevens, professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins, argues that in the fifteenth century, a new theory emerged to prove the existence of demons that resulted in a uniquely Western European construction of the witch. Stephens uses a particular genre of literature as his source base: witchcraft treatises written by individuals whom he refers to as “witchcraft theorists.” He views the corpus of witchcraft treatises as a unified whole—documents that resemble one another and share a systemic logic (29). Steven’s work is smart because although he works with well-known and often-studied sources, he provides a creative approach to these well-worn texts that sheds fresh new insights . Unlike many other scholars, he does not begin by placing a theoretical— such as Lacanian or Freudian—framework on this corpus. Instead, he reads the sources as texts, arguing that before one proceeds further, he must first fully understand the genre (32). Therefore, his primary goal is to understand how these witchcraft theorists developed their ideas, and then how these ideas became part of orthodox thought. Throughout the book, he convincingly demonstrates that the genre was rather uniform and that the theorists espoused a coherent , homogeneous theory. In examining sex between witches and demons, Stephens shifts the focus from witches to demons. In doing so, he sheds new light on our preconceived notions of Early Modern constructions of women. He argues that the principal issue for witchcraft theorists was not misogyny, but rather proving that demons were real and not imaginary. The only way to do this was to show that they could physically interact with humans. The main argument is laid out in chapter 2. He begins with a close reading of the Malleus maleficarum (1487). In a complicated, yet ultimately convincing argument centered around the rewriting and editing of this seminal work on witchcraft, Stephens argues that Heinrich Kramer was not a misogynist interested in the gratuitous emphasis of women’s evil. Rather, the sections of the Malleus devoted to women’s predisposition to seeking sex—which some scholars have viewed as tirades against women— were instead necessary precursors to set up his more critical exposition of demonic copulation. Kramer did not waste his time woman-bashing, rather he had more important theological concerns—he needed to prove that demons were not imaginary, but very real. Stephens argues that Kramer was using Aristotelian logic—namely that sensory data and bodily experience serve as certain proof. Demons must be real because they have sex with witches. Kremer’s theories were then ratified by Innocent III’s bull Summis desiderantes, which established the reality of witchcraft through legislation and “implicitly identi- REVIEWS 282 fies demonic copulation as the origin of witchcraft” (55). Why this obsession with the corporality of demons then? Why was it so important to prove that they were real? This is where the “Crisis of Belief” found in the title becomes so critical. Stephens lays out his argument in chapter 4. From the twelfth century, theologians were interested in reconciling Aristotelian disbelief in the supernatural with church teaching. There was an increasing need to find worldly proof of the supernatural, and in each generation writers grew more and more skeptical. Even though these writers wrote extensively about demonic copulations to convince others, if one reads between the lines, it becomes apparent that the authors were first and foremost trying to convince themselves. Although witches were needed to prove the corporality of demons, this led eventually, in a rather circular logic to the construction of the Western European...