Freudian Psychoanalysis on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover

Seyyed Shahabeddin Sadati

Introduction:

The theories of Sigmund Freud and their practice on literary texts provide the foundation for psychoanalytic criticism. While working with his patients diagnosed as hysterics, Freud theorized that the root of their problems was psychological, not physical. These patients, he believed, had suppressed incestuous desires with which they had unconsciously refused to deal.

Freud was the first to suggest that the storehouse for these desires was the unconscious, his name for that part of the psyche or mind that receives and stores our hidden desires, ambitions, fears, passions, and irrational thoughts. Unaware of the presence of the unconscious, we operate consciously, Freud asserted, believing that our reasoning and analytical skills are solely responsible for our behavior. But it is the unconscious, Freud believed, that evidences itself through slips of tongue, dreams, art, and irrational behavior that motivates most of our actions.

Freud later revised this theory, believing that no thought was either totally conscious or totally unconscious, and he spoke rather of modes of consciousness or unconsciousness. The irrational, unknown, and unconscious part of the psyche Freud calls the id, and the rational, logical, waking part the ego. A third part, the superego, acts like an internal censor, causing us to make moral judgments in the light of social pressures. The ego’s job is to mediate between the instinctual (especially sexual) desires of the id and the demands of social pressure issued by the superego. What the ego (consciousness) finds unacceptable it suppresses and deposits in the unconscious. And what it has most frequently repressed in all of us is the sexual desires of our early childhood (Guerin 124 – 127).

According to Freud, in our early childhood all of us go through three overlapping phases: the oral, anal, and phallic stages. As infants, we experience the oral phase: by sucking our mother’s breast to be fed, our sexuality (or libido) is activated. Our mouths become an erotogenic zone that will later cause us to enjoy sucking our tongues, and still later kissing. In the second phase, or anal stage, the anus becomes the object of pleasure when the child learns the delights of defecation. During this stage the anus becomes an erotogenic zone, for the child becomes sadistic, expelling and destroying through defecation. By withholding feces, the child also learns that he or she can control or manipulate others. In the last phase, the phallic stage, the child’s sexual desires or libido is directed toward the genitals (Guerin 129).

At this point in our development, Freud posited, the pleasure principle basically controls the child. Being self-centered, sadistic, and assertive, the child cares for nothing but his or her own pleasure and recognizes neither male nor female. If the child, however, is to grow up as a ‘normal’ adult, he or she must develop a sense of sexuality, a sense of his maleness of her femaleness. This awareness, Freud asserted, is expressed through the Oedipus complex (Hall 157). “During the late infantile stage (somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6), both the male and female child wish to possess their mother. Unconsciously, the male child desires to engage in sexual union with his mother, while the female child, Freud asserts, develops homosexual desires toward her mother. But each child now recognizes a rival for his or her mother’s affection: the father” (Bressler 90).

If the child’s sexual development is to proceed normally, Freud maintained, each must pass through the castration complex. From observing themselves, their mothers, and perhaps their sisters, little boys know they have a penis like their fathers while their mothers and sisters do not. What the male child from continuing to have incestuous desires for his mother is fear of castration by his father. On the other hand, the little girl unconsciously realizes that she is already castrated as is her mother. Since she knows her father possesses that which she desires, a penis, she turns her desires to him and away from her mother. After the seduction of her father fails, she turns back toward the mother and identifies with her. Her transition into womanhood complete, the girl realizes that one day she, too, like her mother, will possess a man. Through her relationship with a man, her unfulfilled desire for a penis (penis envy) will be reduced and her sense of lacking can be somewhat appeased (Bressler 90 – 91).

Since the consciousness and the unconsciousness are part of the same psyche, the unconscious with its hidden desires and repressed wishes continues to affect the conscious in the form of inferiority feelings, guilt, irrational thoughts and feelings, and dreams and nightmares. In dreams, Freud asserted, the unconscious expresses its suppressed wishes and desires. Since wishes may be too hard for the unconscious psyche to handle without producing feelings of self-hatred or range, the unconscious will present our concealed wishes through symbols, softening our desires. “The unconscious can for instance hide repressed desire behind an image that would seem to be harmless; a trick that Freud called displacement or it can project a whole cluster of desires onto an image in a maneuver that Freud called condensation: a dream figure can for instance combine characteristics of a number of people we know. The language that we use may always have hidden meanings of which we ourselves have no conscious awareness. If we repress our hatred for a person who usually wears red, we may accidentally say dead instead of red in a conversation, or we may dream that a red car is flattened in a traffic accident” (Bertens 159).

When certain repressed feelings or ideas can not be adequately released through dreams, jokes, or other mechanisms such as slips of tongue, the ego must act block any outward response.  In so doing, the ego and id become involved in an internal battle that Freud called neurosis. From a fear of heights to a pounding headache, neurosis shows itself in many physical and psychological abnormalities. According to Freud, it is the job of the psychoanalyst to identify those unresolved conflicts that give rise to a patient’s neurosis and through psychoanalytic therapy, which includes dream analysis, return the patient to a state of well-being.

Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen (7 June 1899 to 22 February 1972) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Bowen is well-known for her works, being awarded Doctorates in literature by Trinity College, Dublin (1949) and the University of Oxford (1959). She was also awarded of the CBE (Osby 107).

Bowen was born in Dublin and later brought to Bowen’s Court in Country Cork where she spent her summers. When her father became mentally ill in 1907, she and her mother moved to England, eventually settling in Hythe. After her mother died in 1912, Bowen was brought up by her aunts (Osby 106).

She was educated at Downe House. After some time at art school in London she decided that her talent lay in writing. She mixed with the Bloomsbury Group, becoming good friends with Rose Macaulay, who helped her find a publisher for her first book, Encounters (1923). She realized that her life time coincided with the death of one era and the birth pangs of another. At such a border crossing sensibility could not move forward unattended. With its cult of privacy, Bloomsbury tended to limit its communication to members of its own circle.  For Elizabeth Bowen, those who besought the muses prayed harder for skill in reaching readers than for fame as devisers of ciphers. While still an apprentice monitoring the London scene, she attended a reading by another of the gurus of Modernism, Ezra Pound. She found him “hypnotically unintelligible.” His cryptograms excluded too much. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator who subsequently worked for the BBC.

Bowen inherited Bowen’s Court in 1930, but remained based in England, making frequent visits to Ireland. During World War II she worked for the British Ministry of Information, reporting on Irish opinion, particularly on the issue of Irish neutrality. Her husband retired in 1952 and they settled in Bowen’s Court, when Alan Cameron died a few months later. For years Bowen struggled to keep the house going, lecturing in the United States to earn money. In 1959 the house was sold and demolished. After spending some years without a permanent home, Bowen settled in Hythe and died of cancer in 1972, aged 73. She is buried with her husband in Farahy church yard, close to the gates of Bowen’s Court.

Her style of writing highly wrought and owes much to Henry James. She was also influenced by Marcel Proust and by the techniques of film. Place has a central role in her work. She resisted approaches to storytelling that smelled of dogma. Homiletics grafted on fiction, for her, constituted a major heresy. Creative work was as essential as food, yet it remained irrevocably of this world.

 

Reading Strategy:

During the writing of this essay with the help of my sources, I tried to study Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “The Demon Lover”, and to find hidden points by applying Freudian psychoanalysis approach on the text. I followed the text carefully word by word to find various symbols which are directly or indirectly related to psyche of the characters. These symbols which consciously or unconsciously come from inner world, most of the time, they are connected to the childhood of characters or the author’s. To fulfill this job correctly, I followed images, objects, and symbols which are related to the inner world, they are hidden and the researcher has tried to reveal them. It ought to be underlined that, the essay you are reading is aiming to analyze “The Demon Lover” on a more psychoanalytical basis.

During the whole steps, I followed these questions: Is “The Demon Lover” a neurotic story? What are the images or symbols which are related to the inside world? What is the role of memories in this story? What are the impacts of war on characters’ mind? And at last, how to find Freud’s theories in “The Demon Lover”? These are the questions which I tried to answer them in the next part of my essay.

 

Freudian Approach on “The Demon Lover”

“The Demon Lover” was referred in “The New Yorker” magazine after its publication as a completely explanation of what war did to the mind and spirit of the English people.  The name and somehow the plot of “The Demon Lover” is inspired from an old English ballad whose poet is anonymous:

 

“O where have you been, my long love,

This long seven years and mair?”

“O I’m come to seek my former vows

Ye granted me before.”

 

“O hold your tongue of your former vows,

For they will breed sad strife;

O hold your tongue of your former vows,

For I am become a wife.”

 

He turned him right and round about,

And the tear blinded his ee:

“I wad never hae trodden on Irish ground,

If it had not been for thee.”

 

“I might hae had a king’s daughter,

Far, far beyond the sea;

I might have had a king’s daughter,

Had it not been for love o thee.”

 

“If ye might have had a king’s daughter,

Yer sel ye had to blame;

Ye might have had taken the king’s daughter,

For ye kend that I was nane.”

 

“If I was to leave my husband dear,

And my two babes also,

O what have you to take me to,

If with you I should go?”

 

“I hae seven ships upon the sea—

The eighth brought me to land—

With four-and-twenty bold mariners,

And music on every hand.”

 

She has taken up her two little babes,

Kissed them baith cheek and chin:

“O fair ye weel, my ain two babes,

For I’ll never see you again.

 

She set foot upon the ship,

No mariners could she behold;

But the sails were o the taffetie,

And the masts o the beaten gold.

 

She had not sailed a league,

A league but barely three,

When dismal grew his countenance,

And drumlie grew his ee.

 

They had not sailed a league, a league,

A league but barely three,

Until she espied his cloven foot,

And she wept right bitterlie.

 

“O hold your tongue of your weeping”, says he,

“Of your weeping now let me be;

I will shew you how the lilies grow

On the banks of Italy.”

 

“O what hills are you, you pleasant hills,

That the sun shines sweetly on”?

“O you are the hills of heaven”, he said,

“Where you will never win.”

 

“O whaten a mountain is you”, she said,

“All so dreary wi frost and snow”?

“O you is the mountain of hell”, he cried,

“Whre you and I will go.”

 

He strack the tap-mast wi his hand,

The fore-mast wi his knee,

And he brake that gallant ship in twain,

And sank her in the sea.

 

Since this story was written after the Blitz, the catastrophic aerial bombardment which took place over London between the years of 1940 and 1941; the main character of this short story, Mrs. Drovers is a person who has this post-trauma which she get confronted after all what had happened. Because of her psychological instability, Mrs. Drovers, confuses World War II with World War I. Returning home to collect some personal belongings, she remembers her long-dead fiancé to the point where one does not know if this is a gothic story that has some supernatural happenings or simply a story of one character’s neurotic mental state.

Far from being a supernatural story, the ghostly threat, rather than having any external reality, is a product of the disturbed mental state of the protagonist, Mrs. Kathleen Drover. Her guilt over her fiancé’s disappearance and presumed death in the First World War, buried by the conventional marriage, has been reawakened by another war, and she hallucinates his vengeful return.

Indeed, Freudian approach is essential to analyze this story properly not alone being appealing because Mrs. Drovers in the story, is not only having some homecoming and witnessing some abnormal activity aftermath; but she is also channeling with her psyche in an abandoned house and seeing the cracks in her soul. According to Freud, these cracks would refer to some sexual problems which are related to past or even childhood. These cracks would relate to womb or female sexual organ, “following Freud’s example in his interpretations of dreams, the psychoanalytic critic tends to see all concave images (ponds, flowers, cups or vases, caves, and hollows) as female or womb symbols, and all images whose length exceeds their diameters (towers, mountain peaks, snakes, knives, lances, and swords) as male or phallic symbols” (Guerin 128).

“The Demon Lover” starts on a humid August day. It is due to rain; there is a certain stress in the air and as the main character enters the street covered with clouds, one can sense that she is having this very same tension, the suppression the weather has. Thus, Mrs. Drovers, a “prosaic” woman goes back to her London house to look for several things, but what “things”? These things are unknown to the reader, as it is indeed unknown to Mrs. Drovers herself and this is why she has a suppressed feeling around, a sense of waiting, the tension before the rain. She is indeed going there to confront with the house that she had left since war has started; in some other sense she is going to face herself in the image of the house to understand what kind of damage has done while experiencing the measure of this damage deep inside. This personification theme linked between Mrs. Drovers and the house, is one of the most important elements of the story.

She tries to open the door for this confrontation but the key lock is quite stiff. She has to force it and then “dead air” of this unvisited, her unvisited portion of memories welcomes her just before setting her feet. Hear her unconscious becomes aware of the old memories. This door is indeed a portal of her very own past; she forces it since she hasn’t been thinking of her past but only trying to forget it because all bad memories, all suppressed traumas are there behind this door so are the several things which she returned to pick up. “Dead air”, coming out to greet her, shows that these memories are negative. These are especially, about the two world wars she witnessed and this house has suffered from the aerial bombardment that took over London during the war; situated on an abandoned street with its ruined neighbor houses. Mrs. Drover’s soul is one of the victims who suffered, like this empty, broken, ruined houses. Inside this personification theme follows: The “bruise” on the wall is indeed the bruise in Mrs. Drover’s psyche. The scratches on parquet which the legs of the piano left while they were moving symbolizes that the joy is taken from the her harshly; since piano as an instrument is seen and used as an entertainment object in that era mostly. The windows of the house have blocked, so there is no way to have some fresh air; thus a fresh start is impossible, there is no way to let go of the past and bad memories. She sees that marble mantelpiece has turned to yellow, losing its beautiful whiteness and brightness; it is matte now. Once it used to be white and its function warm up the house. Mantelpiece is not burning, only full of ashes, it is useless now. It is indeed like the piano taken away. It symbolizes joy, happiness, but it also symbolizes peace warmth and harmony that is lost; the tranquility which is erased from Mrs. Drover’s psyche.

Now she is more perplexed than she knew by every thing she saw by these traces of her former life. She goes to upstairs, leaving her parcels down in order to look for the things that are in the bedroom chest. Her proceeding to the upstairs shows that she is jumping one step further for exploring her suppressed memories and bedroom chest again links with the feeling of suppression since it is a way to hide and protect personal belongings mostly. The things inside it are her emotional luggage that is left in the house which represents her soul. These things are newly remembered, forgotten before since she comes to look for them though the house is abandoned. Her search for abandoned identity and memories buried down there are these things she needs.

“There were some cracks in the structure, left by the last bombing, on which she was anxious to keep an eye. Not that one could do anything-,” (Bowen 347). The cracks she is worried to see, are the cracks that the war created, are the ones, which disintegrated her soul. They are the results of her pain and she is utterly sure that nothing can be done about this situation. She gives away herself to the hands of insanity while progressing one level up in her trauma. Thus, a refracted light suddenly shines on a letter that is addressed to her in the hall. This is one of the things which she came back for. This refracted spotlight is her own torch she is projecting inside her. She takes the letter while trying to find a logical meaning for its presence in the hall and goes on her journey by following the stairs. She is indeed more like diving down to her unconsciousness; but this progress is symbolized by going up, which is rather showing Mrs. Drovers is bringing out her suppressed feelings, the trauma on the surface with the help of this letter. This letter is the final strike, left there to show the peak point of her delirium because of all this damage that the war has done on the fragile walls of her soul.

In the bedroom, she tries to let some light in while seeing that rain is coming. The tension in air reaches to a climax as the tension which is caused by the suppressed feelings of the main character reaches this very same point. Now that that cracks are so deep that Mrs. Drover loses all her control when she reads this letter, thinking that this a letter which written by her ex-lover who died in the previous war. But the letter is signed with the very same initial, with the letter “K” of her name which is “Kathleen”. One possibility is that “K” really is her long lost lover, the dashing soldier who vanished without a trace in the First World War. He has simply — and perversely — come to reclaim his betrothed after a twenty-five-year absence, during which he watched and waited, stalked and followed. Indeed this letter written by Mrs. Dover herself. It is her way of making something out of her guilt and her memories since she suppresses them all the time. Mrs. Drover, who has confronted with her soul in the image of her house, links and somehow mistakes her old memories about the previous war with this present one.

On the other hand world war or the dead soldier would be the symbol of id, without any limitation in pleasure and sexuality. We see this idea in the violent scene which the soldier rapes Kathleen. They were not married, and with no restriction they only think about their pleasure, (their first love, the irresistible incarnation of youthful passion and scandalous behavior). When the soldier goes to war she waits for him, but after a short period of time they bring the news for Kathleen that the soldier is dead. She became worried, and she could not have a nice relationship with any man. The society especially her family at the superego role encourage her to think of another man. Then she tries to control herself, she gets marry reluctantly with Mr. Drover, and brings up her three children, and thus she would be the representation of ego. But inside her psyche she loses the notion of time and her mental instability since the things she discovered inside are too much for her. She is disintegrated and going insane. As the rain falls; we see this pattern of insanity, this way of letting go which is mentioned above. By surrendering to hysteria the release of the tension comes at the end.

The hollowness of the house this evening canceled years on years of voices, habits and steps, putting her back into the more dominant awareness of war, and so her soldier appears — on one level perhaps an hallucination but on another a symbol of war that will not go away. This symbolism in the sentences is the major theme that keeps the story going. After seeing herself mirrored in the image of her house, Mrs. Drover freaks out so much about what she sees. Here in the story, Mrs. Drover looks back into her own past through the house image but still she can not find a logical explanation she wants and since she is the prosaic type she gets trapped with insanity seeing the outcome which is so illogically horrid.

This story is not only a homecoming for meeting some supernatural event only but it is a melodrama of what war did one’s soul: War, not a vengeful lover, is the demon that overwhelms this rueful woman. Elizabeth Bowen says in her book Bowen’s Court (1964) this: “War is not an accident: it is an outcome. One can not look back too far to ask, of what?” (411). One thing is absolutely clear at the end of the “The Demon Lover”: Kathleen Drover is never reconciled with her lost past. And the final image of Mrs. Drover trapped in the taxi speeding mercilessly into the hinterland of deserted streets perfectly portrays the feelings of millions of people who witnessed wasteland of rubble and death in Europe. War is the harsh demon lover which ruined the whole continent, and the all souls that hide in houses have their own deep cracks all over.

 

Conclusion:

“Of all the critical approaches to literature, Freudian psychoanalysis is perhaps the most controversial, the most abused, and — for most readers — the least appreciated.  But the psychoanalytical interpretation can afford many profound clues toward solving a work’s thematic and symbolic mysteries, it is excellent tool for reading beneath the lines” (Guerin 120 – 121). During the whole steps of studying Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”, I have found that the incidents are taken place in the mind of the main character, Mrs. Drover. The two World Wars had very bad influences on her psyche. When she visits her empty house in London, and her unconscious became aware of the past negative memories. Mrs. Drover disarrayed house, which Bowen describes in characteristic detail, reflects her internal collapse. All the things that she sees in that house are the symbols in her psyche. For example, the cracks she sees on the wall are the real cracks in her mind.  The letter “K” she recognizes one a letter on the table, in fact is she herself, Kathleen Drover. If Bowen were writing only about the women haunted by the memories of lovers lost in the First World War, however, she is hardly likely to portray Mrs. Drover’s fiancé in such harsh, negative terms. This story would be a pure Freudian story under the influence of Henry James’s literary works. By watching the cracks on the wall, Mrs. Drover remembers the violent moments of her sexual encounters with the vanished soldier. That soldier would be the incarnation of devil or the pure id in Freud’s theories. Her family who encourages her to get marry after the soldier’s death news would be the Freud’s superego. She has had an unsatisfactory marriage, marked by years of accumulated emptiness. Her London house is an objective correlative of Mrs. Kathleen Drover’s psychological state. Finally, I would like to conclude that the real demon lover or the real id in Freud’s theories is War. The two World Wars which destroyed the people’s mind and life, especially Europeans, are the real demon. The First World War and the Second World War made Mrs. Kathleen Drover insane who cannot control herself. In fact she is like millions in the world during the wars.

 

Works Cited

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Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory, the Basics. London: Routledge, 2001.

Bowen, Elizabeth. Bowen’s Court. London: Collins, 1964.

Bowen, Elizabeth. The Demon Lover. Oxford Book of Short Stories. Ed. V. S. Prichett. Oxford” OUP, 1981. 341-346.

Cuddon, A. J. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory. London: Penguin Books, 1999.

Green, Keith. Critical Theory and Practice: A Course Book. London: Routledge, 1996.

Guerin L. Wilfred. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Harper and Row, 1978.

Hall, Vernon. A Short History of Literary Criticism. London: The Merlin Press Ltd., 1964.

Osby, Ian. The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English. London: Cambridge University Press, 1992.