A Female Gothic Interpretation Of Elizabeth Bowen’s Wartime Stories

Elizabeth Bowen is an outstanding Anglo-Irish female writer of the twentieth century. Being aproductive author, Bowen is most famous for her wartime fiction, especially those depicting the city ofLondon in the bombing raids of the Second World War. The Demon Lover and Other Stories includesBowen’s wartime stories and is widely considered as her finest single volume of stories. In this collection,stories such as “The Demon Lover”,“The Happy Autumn Fields”,“In the Square”,“Mysterious K r”,“Pink May” are known as ghost stories which reflect the phantasmagorical effect of war on human beingsespecially women.In recent years, there has been an obvious growth in the scholarly attention to Bowen and her works.Yet in both the West and China, fewer studies examine Bowen’s wartime stories separately, let alone thecriticism from the female gothic perspective. The thesis adopts the female gothic approach to interpret thefive representative works of Bowen’s wartime stories, aiming to reveal females’ psychological traumas inthe androcentric society in the unruly wartime.This thesis consists of five parts: three main chapters plus the introduction and the conclusion.The introduction briefly introduces Elizabeth Bowen and her wartime stories, offers a review ofBowen studies both at home and abroad, analyzes the feasibility of the female gothic theory in the readingof Bowen’s five wartime stories, raises three research questions, provides the research motivation, researchobjectives, and the thesis organization.Chapter One explores female gothic features of Bowen’s wartime stories in terms of their settings. Thefive selected stories are all set in wartime London. This peculiar setting is quite different from that oftraditional gothic fiction—the foreign land in ancient times. In those stories, the old houses of wartimeLondon are the familiar locations in the particular historical period, where one can gain a feeling ofdreariness and uncanniness from their silence, darkness, and emptiness.Chapter Two goes into the discussion of the story plots, intending to probe into their female gothicelements—supernatural occurrences and suspensive narratives. In those stories, some of the supernaturalelements may be grotesque surreal phenomena without reasonable explanations while others can be perceived as female characters’ psychological delusions or illusions under pressure or some circumstance.As far as suspense is concerned, it is the typical feature of the female gothic narratives. By the means ofunique female voices and open endings, the stories are filled with quirky twists and turns, always keepingreaders in suspense. Thus everything goes towards mystery and uncertainty while the female characters areusually confronted with fear and anxiety.Chapter Three examines the female gothic themes. Bowen’s wartime stories expose, from theperspective of females, the dark sides of the disordered wartime world, namely violence, power, death,injuries etc. All the themes are quintessential female gothic ones: war is like a demon, haunting femalesthrough its double harm, physical and psychological; males are tyrants, torturing females in the ways of theconfinement and oppression; females are innocent vulnerable victims in androcentric society, making theirpowerless protests in the forms of the hallucination and escape.The last part makes a summary of the previous analysis and reaches a conclusion that Bowen’swartime stories can be regarded as a Female Declaration on Peace in the gothic genre—they presentreaders the ghostly effect of war on females as well as the patriarchal oppression on them, and alsoadmonish the whole world to keep peace and respect females.