The Death of the Heart

Abstract

The Death of the Heart, published four years after The House in Paris, is considered by many to be Bowen’s crowning achievement.¹ Acclaimed for its contemporary treatment of the theme of innocence and disenchantment, Bowen’s sixth novel traces the egocentric needs of child and adult as they are transformed into a recognition of mutual interdependence. The Death of the Heart is different from the earlier novels. Dispensing with gothic, mythic, and romance motifs, with mysterious, unexplained events, Bowen creates a realistic domestic novel of manners, using conventions of verisimilitude, multi-dimensional character, and forays into the characters’ pasts through their own fully conscious recollections. An ensemble of characters forms the intertwined quests of a young girl for love, a family home and a sense of herself and of a married woman who resists such goals. Bowen portrays everyone in this work as capable of giving verbal expression to an understanding of those forces which paralyse characters in earlier works. This novel is composed of a process by which one woman on the brink of self-discovery and another who has lost her sense of herself free themselves from a haunting past by becoming interdependent.