Elizabeth Bowen on the Telephone

This chapter proposes that telephones are critical in the plotting of most of Bowen’s novels, as well as in some of her stories. Bowen’s plots are often organized around the telephone and around telephone calls in a way that would have been inconceivable at the start of the twentieth century. Making a telephone call in Bowen can be seen as an ideal version of speech and even as an ideal model for literature itself, precisely because the telephone generates a sense of immediacy and unmediated presence while at the same time marking absence. At the same time simple object and eerily human, the uncanny telephone in Bowen suggests that communication is what her writing, and what literature more generally offers while at the same time contesting, displacing, and resisting it. Bowen’s work thereby challenges our very understanding of how literature as a form of communication between author and reader can be said to work.

‘How Much of Nothing There Was’: Trying (Not) to Understand Elizabeth Bowen

This chapter notes that one of the strangest aspects of Bowen’s novels of the 1930s and 1940s is the prevalence of nothing in these texts. Examples range from sentences including double or triple negatives and words that cancel themselves out, to descriptions of parts of London destroyed by the Blitz, to scenes built around something missing. Her characters complain that they know nothing about each other or their own motives; her plots often resist final explanation, as if the novels are in some sense about nothing. On every page, in sentences, in her characters’ lives, in her sense of the world, Bowen’s novels pursue a paradoxical task: charting the presence of lack, absence and negativity. The chapter argues that Bowen’s obsessive dealing with nothingness is a clue to her sense of her place and time. Exploring Bowen’s ‘nothings’ is a way of understanding the fractured historical moment in which she wrote, and her response to it; it is also a way of placing her responses to late and high modernism, to world history and literary history.

‘One Is Somehow Suspended’: Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield and the Spaces in Between

This chapter compares Bowen to Katherine Mansfield. Neither English nor Irish, but a hybrid of both, Bowen, like Mansfield, does not belong to one country, existing instead in an unstable, liminal sphere between the two. Bowen’s admiration for Mansfield has been well-documented, and while she was undoubtedly influenced by Mansfield’s style, technique and talent, this chapter foregrounds a deeper connection between the two authors in their shared, fractured histories, and in the effect that this had on their writing. Charting the persistence of in-between spaces across the work of Bowen and Mansfield, the chapter considers the way in which the use of such spaces by the two writers not only signifies their shared histories of hybridity and dislocation, but also enables them to interrogate the shifting position of women in modernity. The chapter sketches out a taxonomy of such spaces in Bowen and Mansfield’s narratives, and in doing so reveals the dialogues operating across the writings of these authors through the spaces of the in between.

Obnoxiousness and Elizabeth Bowen’s Queer Adolescents

This chapter addresses Bowen’s obnoxious adolescents, arguing that she brings together the operations of language and the critical function of affect in questions of meaning and being, and connects what she sees as the figure of the queer adolescent in Bowen (for example, Theodora Thirdman in Friends and Relations) with the equally queer or innovative operations of her writing, with her novels as aesthetic events. It thus posits adolescence as a particular structure of feeling that, in the assemblage of (Bowen’s) novelistic writing, at once mobilizes the stylistic operations of her prose, and that determines the singularity of her writing and its aesthetic effects.

Elizabeth Bowen and the Pleasure of the Text

This chapter recognises that while several authors in the extant criticism have used various lenses of critical theory through which to analyse Bowen’s work, a case for Bowen as a theorist herself has not yet been made. Through an analysis of Bowen’s critical essays, reviews, and depictions of reading and writing in her fiction, this chapter proposes a logic of literary theory as it emerges in her work. Bowen’s theory of reading does anticipate, in some ways, poststructuralist theory as it appears in the work of Roland Barthes, particularly in terms of her syntactical evocations of trauma. Where her work differs (or defers) from theirs, however, is in her insistence upon a kind of mindless and spontaneous memory-work which describes the impact of the reader and the text upon each other and the production of pleasure engendered through this relationship. It is in the process of this mutual engagement, Bowen’s work suggests, that each comes into being. This essay will thus argue for the innovation present in Bowen’s understanding of reading and writing as an anticipation and an inflection of later poststructuralist theory.

‘Some Really Raging Peculiarity’: Female Fetishism in The Little Girls

This chapter shows that many of Bowen’s female characters have curious relationships with inanimate objects, endowing them with special powers or personal attributes. The pattern of these relations, in which certain objects obtain an unusual significance to their possessors, even, in some cases, to the extent of being preferred over relationships with other people, is obvious in Bowen’s works, yet it eludes the usual definitions of fetishism. Critics attempting to theorize female fetishism have tended to rely on paradigms articulated by Freud (ie erotic) or Marx (ie consumerist). Neither of these constructs, however, adequately describe the relationships with objects that possess overwhelming importance to many of Bowen’s characters and, through these attachments, lead often lead to perverse consequences. Recently, however, German theorist Hartmut Böhme has postulated that fetishism is an entirely European concept, one crucial to our understanding of Modernism. Using Böhme’s axioms of fetishism and Modernism as well as insights from anthropological and theological sources, this chapter explores female characters’ ‘object relations’ (not necessarily in the Freudian sense of the term) in Bowen’s works.

Elizabeth Bowen: Surrealist

This chapter approaches the emerging notion of Irish surrealism in a seemingly unlikely corner: Bowen’s fiction. Seldom considered in the context of a modernist avant-garde, Bowen's work has been read within the history of the novel of manners, and as a chronicler of Anglo-Irish anxiety and ambivalence. Underrepresented until recently, however, are the specifically modernist commitments of her art. Bowen's career-long attention to the effects of new technologies on consciousness; her willingness to revise older forms of fiction and to experiment with techniques influenced by painting, cinema, and radio; as well as her depictions of women struggling to resist inherited Victorian roles and fulfil their desires for autonomy, education, travel, and love align her with a modernist tradition. Yet rather than classifying her with such innovators, even those critics attending to her modernist style and technique figure such experiments as idiosyncrasies. Where her prose subverts expectations of realist fiction, Bowen is more often described as an eccentric writer than one participating in modernism. Uncovering Bowen's dialogue with surrealism allows us to see her ‘strangeness’ in a new light, as part of her intermodernist (drawing on Kristin Bluemel’s term) engagement with avant-garde, continental discourses.

How to Be Yourself – But Not Eccentric: Clothes, Style and Self in Bowen’s Short Fiction

If Bowen can be said to ‘indulge’ and ‘antagonize […] modernist theory and practice’ (Hunter 113), a key question is whether it was her extra-experimentalism that ensured her sidelining from the prototypical modernist canon. Critics such as Susan Osborn have described Bowen’s texts as being written in a ‘queer, opaque style’, one that ‘realizes itself not solely as a style to be looked through but as a style to be looked at as well’ (194). Following this line of thought, this chapter examines the stylised, patterned rendering of Bowen’s short fiction as a type of dress and consider its relationship with personal statement. It explores Bowen’s material style as ‘the dress of thought’ in opposition to what she saw as the common flaw of modern short fiction; ‘too much prose draped around an insufficiently vital feeling’, and consider the material detail of her stories not as frivolous frippery but as a key technical expression of her contingent view of the world (Hepburn 250).

Introduction: Thinking in/about Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen’s first short story, ‘Breakfast’ (1923), begins with a thought: ‘“Behold, I die daily,” thought Mr Rossiter, entering the breakfast-room.’1 It is a story primarily structured by thought: Mr Rossiter says very little, and the reader is privy to his reflections on the odious people with whom he must daily share his morning meal. The emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity is a typically modernist move, as is the story’s sense of a ‘life in death’, its allusion, perhaps, to the end of the second canto of ...

Bowen’s Recesses: From Realism to Inter-Objectivity

This chapter re-orients consideration of realist elements in Bowen’s short stories by framing readings according to a series of ‘recesses.’ The first is as a building feature designed to conceal and display, which frames a discussion of the status of ‘things’ in Bowen’s writing, that is, the objects that deck out her narratives and become a focus for critical interest in her realism. The second is as a cue for the notion of receding, which I use against claims about consistency in narrative voice in Bowen’s work to argue instead that Bowen’s ‘voice’ can be shown increasingly to recede, leaving the subject-position in such doubt as to compel the willing reader to complete the point of view. Finally, ‘recess’ is used in the sense of suspension or adjournment, against claims that the ‘psychological realism’ created by Bowen presents a ‘transtemporal subjectivity,’ to argue that agency in Bowen’s narratives becomes, by virtue of the points raised above, suspended, such that ‘subjectivity’ is itself untenable. The term I will use to describe the coming together of people and things in Bowen’s fictional universe—and indeed in her writings about the world of the Blitz—will be ‘inter-objectivity.’