Abstract
Mukherjee explores liminal figures in Elizabeth Bowen’s stories, focusing on female characters engaged in transition, suggesting that these liminal identities destabilize cultural assumptions about selfhood and challenge traditional notions of female subjectivity. In reading Bowen’s stories, Mukherjee focuses on experiences of the phantasm: ghostly, hallucinatory, and irrational experiences that challenge the borders of what is accepted as normal or real. Characters in these texts gain access to the other only through these ambiguous, ephemeral, and phantasmatic experiences. The experience of the uncanny, defined by Freud as paradoxically both familiar and strange, can have the effect of destabilizing identity; the boundaries between self and other can temporally dissolve, and the self––especially because of its imminent mortality—can be figured outside of itself and become other.
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- 1.
Diana Wallace , “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic”, Gothic Studies 6/1 (Manchester University Press: Manchester, UK, 2004): 57–58.
- 2.
Elizabeth Bowen, Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (London: Longmans Green, 1962): 79–80.
- 3.
Bowen, Collected Impressions (London: Longmans Green, 1950): 41, 43.
- 4.
Bowen, “The Shadowy Third”, Encounters (1923), “Foothold”, Ann Lee’s (1927), “The Apple Tree”, The Cat Jumps and Other Stories (1934) in Angus Wilson edited The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1981).
- 5.
Bowen, Preface to A Day in the Dark and Other Stories (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964): 9.
- 6.
Clare Hanson , Introduction, Re-reading the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1989): 26–27.
- 7.
Sigmund Freud , “The Uncanny”, Writings on Art and Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997): 193.
- 8.
Nicholas Royle , The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003): 109, 190.
- 9.
J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992): 32.
- 10.
Allan E. Austin , Elizabeth Bowen (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989): 72.
- 11.
The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1981): 76.
- 12.
Ibid., 77.
- 13.
Ibid., 77–79.
- 14.
Ibid., 82.
- 15.
Maud Ellmann , Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,2003): 84.
- 16.
Collected Stories, 80.
- 17.
Ibid., 82.
- 18.
Collected Stories, 299.
- 19.
Ibid., 302.
- 20.
Ibid., 301.
- 21.
Ibid., 304–5.
- 22.
Ibid., 302.
- 23.
Ibid., 305, 308.
- 24.
Phyllis Lassner , Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991):13.
- 25.
Collected Stories, 301.
- 26.
Ibid., 313.
- 27.
Ibid., 309.
- 28.
Clare Hanson , Hysterical Fictions: The ‘Woman’s Novel’ in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, LLC, 2000): 2.
- 29.
Collected Stories, 470.
- 30.
Ibid., 464–65.
- 31.
Ibid., 466.
- 32.
Ibid., 467.
- 33.
Ibid., 470.
- 34.
Ibid., 467.
- 35.
Ibid., 470.
- 36.
Ibid., 468.
- 37.
Ibid., 463.
- 38.
Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991): 52.
- 39.
Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977): 145.
- 40.
Ellman, 4.
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Mukherjee, P. (2017). Cultural Liminality: Gender, Identity, and Margin in the Uncanny Stories of Elizabeth Bowen. In: Elbert Decker, J., Winchock, D. (eds) Borderlands and Liminal Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67813-9_12
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