Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel

Bennett, Andrew; Royle, Nicholas

doi:10.1057/9780230374355

Cited by 85 publications

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“…5 Yet, as Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle have argued, living in Bowen's writing is itself cinematic. 6 Their observations of the cinematographic existences in Eva Trout (1968) and The Hotel (1927) remind us not only that Bowen's engagements with the cinema are more radical than a focus on topic or technique might allow, but also that this engagement emerges much earlier than is often acknowledged. By 1938, then, there is nothing naive about Bowen's 'Why I Go to the Cinema,' nor about her cinema aesthetic of 'synthetic affects'.…”

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confidence: 90%

‘I know it to be synthetic but it affects me strongly’: ‘Dead Mabelle’ and Bowen's emotion pictures

Schaller

2013

Textual Practice

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Bowen's writing is well recognised for its preoccupation with the cinema, and its cinematic techniques, leading recent criticism to align her writing with the experimentations and innovations of literary modernism. As a result Bowen's cinema writing has been read after modernism, and, in particular, after Virginia Woolf. Through a close reading of Bowen's critically neglected 1929 cinema short story ‘Dead Mabelle’, however, I show how Bowen is not simply writing in the wake of Woolf's cinema aesthetics, but in dialogue with them. Although similarly preoccupied with the cinema affects - or emotion pictures- that fund Woolf's writing, Bowen's story highlights the philosophic blind spots on which these aesthetics turn. Rather than agree with modernist aesthetics, 'Dead Mabelle' offers a critical counterpoint to modernist writing about the cinema that deconstructs the very discourses with which her work has been aligned

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confidence: 90%

‘I know it to be synthetic but it affects me strongly’: ‘Dead Mabelle’ and Bowen's emotion pictures

Schaller

2013

Textual Practice

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“…Ellmann suggests that Bowen's objects even have “neuroses—every house, for instance, has a watchful face; every car a gamut of anxieties” (p. 6). Many critics have noted that the houses and objects are personified and act like living characters, while the characters are objectified and inactive as if they are held hostage by the place (Bennett & Royle, 1995; Cammack, 2017; Ellmann, 2003; Wurtz, 2010). Recently, some critics have sought to explore the historical and political meanings embedded in Bowen's houses (D'hoker, 2012; Tivnan, 2015; White, 2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

Moving through places: Trauma and dislocation in Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris

2023

Orbis Litterarum

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In The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen presents the traumatic spatial experience of dislocation and homelessness of a number of characters centered around an upper‐middle‐class woman, Karen Michaelis, who defies the spatial confinement imposed by the dominant ideology regarding women in the interwar period, but ultimately becomes traumatized due to her failed quest for a place of identity, of belonging. The existing scholarship on The House in Paris tends to read the motifs of trauma and place separately. Those critics exploring place mainly concentrate on the Parisian house and tend to regard it as a symbol of the past and entrapment (Kershner, 1986, 407; Lytovka, 2016, 40), while those studying trauma mainly center on the psychological aspects of trauma, investigating either the structure and effects of psychic trauma or the effects of trauma on the narration of the novel (Bennett & Royle, 1995, 43; Gildersleeve, 2014, 50). This essay argues that a fuller understanding of Bowen's writing of women's trauma in the interwar period in The House in Paris must examine how their trauma is related to spatial experience. Linking the temporal experience of trauma—especially forgetting and repetition—with the spatial experience of Karen and the characters around her unfolds the historical and social contexts behind trauma, that is, it is impossible for women to rebel against the national ideology of womanhood embodied by her family home and to find a place of dwelling. For Bowen the voyage of the subjectivity of women in the interwar period merely renders her protagonists traumatized rather than enabling them to find an attachment to place. So detrimental is the effect that it is impossible for them to “work through” their trauma.

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“…When Matchett arrives at the Karachi Hotel to fetch Portia, '[w]e are left', as Bennet and Royle remark, 'with the unfinished movement of being sent towards a strange place and not arriving', 'a sense of movement which is not properly thinkable'. 23 For Bennet and Royle, the open ending reflects a postmodern indeterminacy. Its lack of closure might also be attributed to the novel's uncertainty about history as an unfolding process that Bowen and many of her contemporaries had long anticipated was leading towards war.…”

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confidence: 99%