Elizabeth Bowen: ‘Becoming-Woman’

Abstract

Elizabeth Bowen’s exploration of female embodiment differs significantly from that of Lehmann. While Lehmann moves towards a reworking of the relationship between mind and body and towards a valorization of the body and the ‘feminine’, Bowen takes a different path, away from gender specificity. I want to follow this move ‘beyond’ gender by making reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, which may illuminate aspects of Bowen’s work which have been particularly resistant to analysis. It should be made clear at the outset that Bowen’s fiction is always written from the point of view of the woman. Often, her novels contrast an older woman (middle-class, educated, perhaps with a professional job) with a girl who may be as young as sixteen, unformed and not yet defined by the codes of patriarchy. This recurrent pattern, this hesitation between the viewpoint of the girl and that of the woman, recalls the suggestive analysis of femininity in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.¹ In the central section of this book, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between dispersed libidinal energies (‘molecular’ energies) and those which strive to aggregate into totalities (‘molar’ energies). Femininity (in the conventional sense) is linked with molar energies, with the attempt to form and stabilize identities through divisions of classes, races and sexes. ‘Becoming-woman’, on the other hand, is linked with molecular energies, which, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, ‘traverse, create a path, destabilize, enable energy seepage within and through these molar unities’.²