The Poetics of House and Home in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

Abstract

This essay offers a comprehensive analysis of the images of house and home in the short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. First, the essay analyses the construction of these images in terms of style, arguing that Bowen’s idiosyncratic combination of a variety of figural tropes and narrative strategies results in a strong but highly ambivalent bond between house and character, whereby houses at once illuminate and efface their inhabitants. Second, while most critics have interpreted Bowen’s houses in the context of her Anglo‐Irish background as emblems of a lost tradition and identity, this essay argues that Bowen’s houses also evoke other contexts, in particular the celebration of the domestic in interwar Britain. Through a detailed reading of several short stories, it shows how Bowen both satirises this idealisation of the home and uncovers its far more awful reality, especially for the ‘daughters’ and ‘ladies’ of the house. A final part considers the isolation that marks nearly all of Bowen’s houses and opposes it to her characterisation of the ideal house as a place of hospitality and recognition.

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