Abstract
This chapter reads the work of Elisabeth Bowen in light of contemporary accounts of loneliness and the experiences of colonial English expat communities. For Elizabeth Bowen’s Anglo-Irish community, the feeling of being a resident expatriate was enduring and it produced a unique kind of “ascendancy” loneliness that for critics such as Frank O’Connor was unspeakable or unrepresentable. Bowen’s collection of essays People, Places, Things offers new insights into her motivations as a writer. The later essays possess a warmth and philosophical empathy her critics rarely assign to her characters and fictional worldviews. Bowen can be regarded as transposing the emotion of this unspeakable loneliness onto the aesthetics of space that is so central to her fiction and that transforms furniture and “imperturbable things” into objects that have an inordinate influence on the events of the narratives.
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Notes
- 1.
Elizabeth Bowen. People, Places, Things: Essays By Elizabeth Bowen. Allan Hepburn, ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
- 2.
See “The Impersonal Personal: Value, Voice, and Agency in Elizabeth Bowen’s Literary and Social Criticism”. Modern Fiction Studies. 53.2 (Summer), 2007, pp. 351–69.
- 3.
Ellmann refers the reader, at this point, to Karen Schneider’s Loving Arms: British Women Writing in the Second World War, pp. 78–9.
- 4.
For details of this exchange, see Charles Ritchie, The Siren Years, p. 120 (entry of 22 October 1941).
- 5.
Jeffory A. Clymer’s “Property and Selfhood in Herman Melville’s ‘Pierre’” (Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 61, No. 2 (Sept., 2006), pp. 171–199) also returns to Locke in describing “Melville’s ultimate unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to imagine identity outside some form of property relations” (199). This essay examines how Bowen may possess a similar “inability”.
- 6.
John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (1690), in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Locke argues that one’s labour can transform communal property into private property: “The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property” pp. 287–88.
- 7.
John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, p. 287.
- 8.
Margaret Jane Radin, “Property and Personhood”, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 5 (May, 1982), pp. 957–1015.
- 9.
Glendinning’s blurb to the new Vintage edition of The Last September reads: “She is a major writer; her name should appear on any responsible list of the ten most important fiction writers in English on this side of the Atlantic in this century. She is what happened after Bloomsbury…the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark”.
- 10.
Ellmann argues that “Bowen is a greater novelist than Woolf, though Woolf is arguably a finer prose-poet” (7).
- 11.
The practice of judging a writer on the strength of his or her characters is, arguably, most convincing in criticism that imitates Harold Bloom’s manner of reading. Bloom writes in The Western Canon: “In response to the hoary question of which book to take to a desert island if you could take only one, Joyce told Frank Budgen: ‘I should hesitate between Dante and Shakespeare, but not for long. The Englishman is richer and would get my vote.’ ‘Richer’ is a fine word there; alone on a desert island one would want more people, and Shakespeare is wealthier in characters than his nearest competitors, Dante and the Hebrew Bible. Joyce, despite the Dickensian vigor of the minor characters in Ulysses, has only a rather inadequate Hamlet in Shakespeare, and a rival for the Wife of bath in Molly. Poldy can challenge Shakespeare, or attempt to, the act being impossible to perform because the larger entity, in all literary agons, swallows up the smaller” (414). While such criticism might be accused of reducing the canon to a kind of league table, it does evidence how at least one influential kind of criticism has associated literary greatness with strong characters.
- 12.
See Hubert Butler, Escape from the Anthill, Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1987, p. 147.
- 13.
Hermione Lee regards The Last September as describing the life of Anglo-Irish families, their “class”, in terms of “their absurdity, their isolation, their lack of an active position, their helplessly conflicting loyalties” (20).
- 14.
The furniture is personified ominously for Lois when Mrs. Fogarty makes her feel guilty for how she has treated Gerald: “The ante-room chairs, now looking at Lois askance, knew also. What she had done stretched everywhere, like a net. If she had taken a life, the simplest objects cold not more have been tinged with consequence” (162). It is also interesting to note that Lois is experiencing here the “guilt” that Bowen, as her earlier comment to Charles Ritchie suggests, associates with the “middle-class”. Lois, in being of a different class, and presumably not possessing the connection between “actions” and “notions” this class embodies for the narrative voice of The Death of the Heart, is once again seen to fix her mind on “imperturbable things” in order to deal with this “inward upheaval”.
- 15.
The omniscient voice of The Heat of the Day tells us that Robert’s and Stella’s relationship is subject to the workings of time: “They were the creatures of history, whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day – the day was inherent in the nature. Which must have been always true of lovers, if it had taken till now to be seen. The relation of people to one another is subject to the relation of each to time, to what is happening. If this has not always been felt – and as to that who is to know? – it has begun to be felt, irrevocably” (195).
- 16.
In “The Back Drawing-Room”, “the little man”, who is described in terms of “an umbrella that an absent-minded caller has brought into the drawing-room”, (Collected Stories 200) struggles to have his story told, a story in which he believes “one cannot fail to be interested if one has experienced…” (202). When he speaks, Mrs. Henneker’s guests look at him as if he is an object: “[e]verybody turned to look at him; it was though the umbrella had spoken” (202). When Mrs. Henneker gives the impression that she is listening to him, by repeating the word “Ireland”, the moment is described in terms of a “contact” that was “so intimate as to be almost intolerable” (203).
- 17.
Elizabeth Bowen. “So Much Depends”. The Bazaar And Other Stories. Allan Hepburn, ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 152–170.
Works Cited
Works Cited
O’Sullivan, Michael. “Loneliness and the Submerged Population: Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice and Joyce’s “The Dead”. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2015. VIII, 322 pp. 105–19.
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O’Sullivan, M. (2018). Bowen: The Unspeakable Loneliness of the Anglo-Irish Expat. In: Irish Expatriatism, Language and Literature. New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95900-9_7
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