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ELIZABETH BOWEN: IMPRESSIONISM AND CHARACTERIZATION By LAVINIA DANIELA INBAR, B.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies In Part~al Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Deg:"ee Master of Arts McMaster University February 1984 MASTER OF ARTS (1984) McMASTER UNIVERSITY (Engl ish) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Elizabeth Bowen: Impressionism and Characterization AUTHOR: Lavinia Daniela Inbar, B.A. (McMaster University) SUPERVISOR: Professor A. Berland NUMBER OF PAGES: v, 118 i i ABSTRACT Elizabeth Bowen's merit as a writer lies in her style. She depicts people and places and British upper middle class life impressionistically. The impressionistic quality of her characterization and description is the central concern of this thesis. Bowen's use of the subject of love and marriage as a theme is explored and is approached by dividing the broad topic into certain more specific themes. The author's use of death as an impressionistic tool, her description of environment, and the uniqueness of her language, provide additional topics for investigation. Although the small body of criticism on Elizabeth Bowen deals extensively with her treatment of character and her descriptive style, nothing to my knowledge has been said about how her impressionistic technique relies on a sense of isolation. The way characters, author, and reader function in isolation from each other is a consideration that underlies this dissertation1s examination of Bowen1s fiction. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my supervisor Professor A. Berland for his patience and advice and to my mentor Dr. Gabriele Erasmi who inspired and encouraged me. i v TAB LE o F CON TEN TS Page INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I THEMES OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE 20 Love and Marriage: Innocence 26 Love and Marriage: Older Women 37 Love and Marriage: Self-awareness 43 CHAPTER II DEATH 57 CHAPTER III ENVIRONMENT: INTRODUCTION 73 Environment: The Houses 74 Environment: General 87 CHAPTER IV LANGUAGE 95 NOTES 108 BIBLIOGRAPHY 116 v INTRODUCTION In George Eliot's Middlemarch,l Sir James Chettam arrives on the scene accompanied by setters. The similari- ties between the average setter and James Chettam are striking. He has "sleekly waving blond hair" (p. 22). He is well- bred and "amiable" (p. 22). He even walks by Dorothea1s side " ••• at the rather brisk pace" (p. 22) that she sets. The good- natured faithfulness toward Dorothea that will later become so apparent in him is already being implied. He says, "You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is always a good opinion." (p. 22). When James offers to execute her pet scheme, that of building cottages, she regards him with her "best temper" (p. 23), in effect patting him on the head. He reacts to this treatment by coming away with " a complacent sense that he was making great progress in Miss Brooke's good opinion" (p. 23). Notwithstanding our heroine's initial irritation with Chettam, the reader cannot but look kindly upon this man, who, metaphorically speaking, puts his head on her lap and gazes benignly at her with setter dog eyes. So now we know Sir James completely and comfortably. He is knowable both as a character in the sense of an artistic creation, and as a person; he can be placed. In the 1 2 tradition of the Victorian novel (of which Middlemarch is typical), reality is seen as being objective and therefore definable. Characters are created in the same way: as packets of 1 i fe full of the necessary detai 1 s and neatly bound up by direct description. The move away from this kind of realism towards the impressionism of Elizabeth Bowen was probably initiated by writers like Joseph Conrad or Henry James to whom Bowen is often compared. "Impressionists Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James create the illusion of reality by combining description of an objective, material world with its effect on the material perceiver."2 Hermione Lee, in her critical study of Elizabeth Bowen, adds that "E1 i zabeth Bowen is an excepti ona1 Eng1 ish novel i st because she fuses two traditions that of Anglo-Irish literature and history, and that of a European modernism indebted to Flaubert and James."3 This fusion is exemplified by Bowen's description of her family house in Ireland. Like her fictional houses, it acts as a referent to its inhabitants: The land around Bowen1s Court, even under its windows, has an unhumanized air the house does nothing to change. Here are, even, no natural features, view or valley, to which the house may be felt to relate itself. ••• Like Flaubert's ideal book about nothing it sustains itself on itself by the inner force of style. 4 Isolation invites subjectivity. The Elizabeth Bowen gallery of characters seem to spend their time alone in a 3 crowd. They are mostly of the British upper middle class, and even when they are not, they seem to move in or be affected by that society. These characters are not only i sol ated from each other but from the reader as well. The manner in which Bowen draws her characters seems highly impressionistic. The reader may be able to acquire a great~ deal from inference but cannot really know the character in \ the same way that one can never really know people in life.~ Themes of love, marriage, the home, and the struggle for sel f-awareness are central to her works and I wi 11 be exploring her characterizations as they are expressed in these themes. With an eye to the subject of characteri za- tion, I will also examine her treatment of environment, her use of death as an impressionistic tool, and the quality of her language. A woman of letters, El izabeth Bowen wrote, among other pieces, ten novels and over eighty short stories. The novels which interest me are the earlier ones: The Hotel (1927),5 The Last September (1929),6 To the North (1932),7 The House in Paris (1935),8 which are her first, second, fourth, and fifth respectively. Her third novel, Friends and Relations (1931)9 is considered by most critics to be a minor work and I will deal with it only in passing. lO I will also occasionally refer to a number of her short stories. The novels which I will be dealing with focus on young and youngish heroines. These women have enough in 4 common that one can make from them a definition of what one might term "the Bowen woman." Such a woman is young, pretty, intelligent, intellectual, and to varying degrees, monied. Bowen's female child characters are similar, though at a more embryqnic stage. '\ While not always terribly discontented, these women suffer subtly nonetheless. They, as does the reader, struggle to catch a foothold of some absolute understanding in a subjective world. It is not some larger truth which they seek, but rather something for or about themselves: to do the right thing in a blurry world of no absolutes. Lois (in The Last September) and Sydney (in The Hotel) are the very young women not yet independent of their elders. Cecilia (of To the North), and Marda (in The Last September), are the sl i ghtly 01 der women of some experience, as is Emmeline (To the North), although in some ways she falls roughly between the two groups. Pauline (To the North) and Henrietta (The House in Paris) are the young gi rl s who mi ght become such women, and Karen, in the structural experiment with time that Bowen attempts in The House ion Paris, is shown to us in two stages of life. For every major female character there are other female characters, major and minor, against whom the central one is reflected. While no character is portrayed as existing in a vacuum, it is the women who seem to populate the scene as variable mirrors of each other, more so than do the men. 5 For example: for Sydney, there are women who repre- sent what she might become, what she is more likely to become, and even women set up to represent what she is not. The man wi th whom she is pa ired, the Rev. Mi 1ton, does not have a large group of male characters around him who are significant in his characterization to the same degree as are the women who surround Sidney. There are other men who have a bearing on his existence, but in Sidney's case, the other women represent actual permutations of herself. At the same time the supporting characters are often interesting studies in themselves. Some are, among other things, amusing; for instance, Lady Waters, whose pastime is teaching people how unhappy they are, even if they originally thought otherwise. Some, like Marda, Mrs. Montmorency, and Karen's dying aunt, are examples of sensitivity and wisdom in the face of real suffering. In the four novels which I will deal with, the fullest portrayals of both major and secondary characters are those of women. Bowen does not give the men equal artistic consideration. [hey exist more as natural obstacles to be dealt with in the lives of wome~ The novels are about women: women faced with questions which necessarily impli- cate men, -- love, marriage and the making of a heme. Less obvious is the theme around the struggle for self-awareness. As the women try to define themselves, their society identifies them according to the men they match them- 6 se1 ves wi th, and so the women must defi ne themse1 ves wi thi n this system of pairing.

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