"Mirages of repose": Displacement and dissolution in Elizabeth Bowen's wartime fiction

Abstract

This research project looks at the World War Two fiction of Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen. This thesis draws on short stories contained in The Demon Lover and Other Stories (first published in 1945), and the 1948 novel, The Heat of the Day, as well as selected essays and other non-fiction writing of the time. Bowen’s fiction is concerned with moments of intense and often sublime or repressed feeling which could arise as an effect of living through war in Home Front Britain. Bowen’s fiction is widely renowned for its unusual treatment of physical spaces and material objects within space. Bowen’s work explores the tension between representation, perception and the thing itself, registering moments of strangeness on the Home Front through both form and content. Chapter One investigates the treatment of doubt and deceit in The Heat of the Day, looking at the ways that uncertainty and duplicity, bred by existing in the precarious context of the Home Front, permeate characters’ relationships with time, text and each other, becoming strategies for coping with an increasingly untrustworthy existence. Chapter Two explores the shifting landscapes of the Home Front in the short stories “In the Square” and “Ivy Gripped the Steps” to build a picture of how characters’ feelings of dissolution or displacement are writ large on the decaying, destroyed or repurposed buildings and landscapes which were so much a feature of the topography of the Home Front during World War Two. Chapter Three looks at the short stories “Sunday Afternoon” and “The Demon Lover,” as well as the novel The Heat of the Day to understand something of how Bowen’s own position as an Anglo-Irish writer influences the way that the past assumes a weighty presence in the present in the contexts of displacement and decline brought into being through the onset of the Second World War.