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Ideal Homes? Emptiness, Dereliction and the Ruins of Domesticity in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

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The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories

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Abstract

This chapter focusses on the clash between old and new in haunted houses of the 1920s and 1940s, comparing Elizabeth Bowen’s representations of Irish Big Houses, “unearthly” suburban villas and bomb-damaged London terraces. It argues that her stories spectralise newness and suburban values. Debates about the ideal home and the servantless house are used in readings of “The New House” and “The Shadowy Third,” in which spectral predecessors mock new homeowners from the shadows. The chapter draws on the theoretical frameworks of War Gothic and ruin studies in its explorations of emptiness and loss in Bowen’s Court, “In the Square,”  “Oh Madam …” and “The Happy Autumn Fields.” The disappearance of servants from the household hierarchy in the war-damaged urban dwelling heralds new conceptualisations of haunted space.

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  1. Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK

    Emma Liggins

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  1. Emma Liggins
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Correspondence to Emma Liggins .

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Liggins, E. (2020). Ideal Homes? Emptiness, Dereliction and the Ruins of Domesticity in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. In: The Haunted House in Women’s Ghost Stories. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40752-0_7

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