Women Entrapped by the Past: The House in Paris and A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen

Autores

  • Olena Lytovka

Palavras-chave:

the uncanny, domestic space, gendered space, memory

Resumo

The uncanny atmosphere in E. Bowen’s novels and short stories is often related to the house and felt by its female inhabitants. Lilia in A World of Love, Karen in The House in Paris and other female characters experience the presence of something disturbing and frightening in the house, perceive the domestic space as strange, sinister and feel entrapped there.Relying on psychoanalytic literary criticism and G. Bachelard’s theory of space, I will argue that the uncanniness of the house originates in the women’s traumatic experience of the past. The haunted house appears to be a manifestation of “the crisis of the proper” dissolving the certainty about herself and the world. The house traditionally being associated with woman’s domain, symbolically representing the female body become the embodiment of her inner world with its uneasiness, anxieties and fears.

Biografia do Autor

Olena Lytovka

Olena Lytovka is a PhD student at the Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature, Maria Curie-Sklodovska University in Lublin, Poland. She is particularly interested in English modernist literature and psychoanalytic approaches to literature interpretation. In her PhD thesis she analyses E. Bowen’s fiction and focuses on the uncanny representations in the domestic space of the novels.

Referências

Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bowen, E. (1962) Afterthought. Pieces about Writing. London: Longmans.

Bowen, E. (1987) The House in Paris. London: Penguin Books.

Bowen, E. (2008) People, Places, Things. Edinburgh University Press.

Bowen, E. (1993) A World of Love. London: Penguin Twentieth Century Classics.

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Craig, P. (1986) Elizabeth Bowen. Penguin Books.

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Jentsch, E. (2008) ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’. In Collins, J., and Jervis J., eds., Uncanny Modernity: Cultural Theories, Modern Anxieties. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 216-227.

Kershner, R. B. (1997) The Twentieth-Century Novel: An Introduction. Boston, New York: Bedford Books.

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Whitehead, A. (2004) Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh University Press.

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, I. (2001) Women in twentieth-century Britain. Longman.

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Publicado

2013-07-29

Edição

v. 5 n. 1 (2013)

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Artigos

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