Domestic Gothic, the Global Primitive, and Gender Relations in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and The House in Paris

Abstract

The representation of domestic space and its gendered formulations has become an important perspective through which to further our understanding of women writers in the interwar period and their relation to modernism. As Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen persistently shows, it is necessary not only to contextualize domestic space historically, but to read it as a contested site in which men and women, young and old, redefine and conflict over definitions of national and cultural memory and identities. For Bowen, these definitions are complicated by recognitions and denials of the place of those who are deemed ethnically, racially, and culturally Other. In turn, the presence of the Other creates an unsettling sense of instability and uncertainty about individual and national identity. Thus, regardless of how insular or stable, domestic space in Bowen’s writing is never merely private, but rather always generative of and invaded by the history and politics constituting the public sphere. This chapter focuses on the domestic spaces, so important throughout Bowen’s work, that encapsulate and reflect Bowen’s most central artistic concerns during the interwar period. We begin with the Big House in The Last September (1929) and then move to the urban middle-class homes depicted in The House in Paris (1935).