THE MORAL ARGUMENT OF ELIZABETH BOWEN'S GHOST STORIES.(Critical Essay)

BY common consent, Elizabeth Bowen was a distinguished writer of ghost stories. While fully capable of giving her readers all the usual and anticipated satisfactions of such tales, she made, and fulfilled, other, larger claims for the form. As she remarked in 1947 in a preface to Le Fanu's Uncle Silas, "Our ancestors may have had an agreeable-dreadful reflex from the idea of the Devil or a skull-headed revenant, popping in and out through a closed door: we need, to make us shiver the effluence from a damned soul" (Mulberry Tree 112). Tales of terror may always have contained an element of "moral dread" but its "refinement" in literature has been "modern." She aimed to build on this post-Jamesian "refinement" to explore moral evil as well as, but much more than, the spooky or uncanny. Far from being marginal, if accomplished, diversions, Bowen's ghost stories offer some of the most concentrated examples of her moral vision. It is possible to explore the ghost stories, or that vision in general, in purely humanist terms. In such terms, the tales discussed in this paper deal with the consequences of failures of imagination or of sympathetic understanding. Although such readings may be sensible enough as far as they go, there is a loss in restricting oneself to a humanist frame of reference. Refusal to discuss the bearing of Bowen's strong religious beliefs and of her "feeling of the thinness of the barrier between the living and the dead" (Glendinning 236) on her writing is a "black hole" in recent accounts of her fiction. Bowen's ghost stories grow from, and yield their fullest satisfactions in terms of a spiritual vision, a sense of the utter reality of good and evil, of strange dimensions and unlooked-for consequences which lie beyond what "realism" may describe or contain. As Elizabeth Bowen uses it, the ghost story form touches a nerve of wonder, defamiliarizing English upper-middle class household scenes. It forces readers to see moral issues in far deeper and more spiritual terms, with the veils of habit and familiarity removed. Angus Wilson, a novelist nothing if not resolutely humanist, recognized the significance of Bowen's "apparent total acceptance of ghosts, of the occult" as part of her perception of life, and of her art. For her "ghosts make sense of life, not nonsense" (Collected Stories 10).

Complex and multi-faceted as Bowen's moral vision was, at its heart lay a concern with social, spiritual and emotional disintegration. The loss of order and rootedness, of agreed codes of manners and behavior, is a central concern in her novels. "Rootedness" had never been without its own pain or problems (as Stella reflects on her visit to Mount Morris in The Heat of the Day [174]) but the contemporary destruction or refusal of roots and order inflicted a deep damage on the individual and on society. Readers of Bowen will readily recall cases of psychological and emotional disturbance consequent on the loss of an agreed upon moral order; febrile, inward-turned relationships like that of Thomas and Anna in The Death of the Heart (40), dysfunctional, brittle, emotionally impaired families such as the Holme Dene menage in The Heat of the Day (107-24) or the Michaelis household in The House in Paris (126-33). Lack of the secure basis, of the ease accepted moral or social codes bring, produces a malaise whose various symptoms Bowen's novels chart; morbid self-consciousness, and a restless search for a "brilliant personality" like that of Eddie in The Death of the Heart (62-67); people (like Anna and Thomas in the same novel) who cannot receive a casual visitor (87-90) or make a young girl dependent on them welcome in their home; individuals, such as Markie in To the North, unable to eat a meal in quiet with a woman he is supposed to love (202), enraged at the mere thought of repose or content.

Deracinated, egotistical and ill-at-ease, many of Bowen's characters are also casually cruel and treacherous. They are betrayers of innocent young victims like Portia in The Death of the Heart and the children in The House in Paris or of love, as Markie betrays Emmeline in To the North. Very often, the "facts" of these acts of cruelty or treachery, the bare outlines of what is said or done, are unsensational, even mundane. Portia sees Eddie holding hands with someone else. Leopold's mother in The House in Paris breaks her promise to come and collect him from a house where he is being looked after. Emmeline's lover Markie turns up dishevelled and hung-over at a breakfast she wished to share with him. Bowen's intention, and her achievement, are to make us feel the emotional force, the devastating results, above all the spiritual dimension of such seemingly trivial acts.

A crucial point about Elizabeth Bowen's ghost stories is that their moral effect is cognate with that of her other fiction. They draw their power from the same imaginative impulse to render the ordinary as strange, to show what we take to be the way of the world in its true (and sometimes terrible) light. Indeed a sharp division between Bowen's ghost stories and her fiction in general is somewhat artificial. Two of her novels, The Heat of the Day and A World of Love are affected at crucial moments by incidents which border on the supernatural, Louie's intimations in the former novel that she was sought out by Stella to save her (248) and Guy's manifestation in the latter (68). Allowing for borderline cases and some inevitable imprecision in defining the term, ghost stories form about a tenth of Bowen's short fiction. More significantly, they include several of her acknowledged masterpieces in the short story, such as "The Cat Jumps," "The Happy Autumn Fields" and two stories discussed here, "The Apple Tree" and "The Demon Lover." This paper will examine the themes and technique of moral exploration in three of the ghost stories, a sequence marking Elizabeth Bowen's progress to mature achievement in this form.

"THE Shadowy Third" (1923) deals with the widower Martin's attempt to make a fresh start in a second marriage and the way in which his first wife returns as a "shadowy third," an unlaid ghost or unresolved guilt, to blight this new life. The story is less subtle than Bowen's later treatments of such themes as rejection of the past, the betrayal of love and the self-enclosed relationship built on lying or a denial of whatever world surrounds the lovers. Yet, this early tale is interesting for the very clarity with which it enunciates these subjects and because it places them on the margins of the supernatural. From the outset, Bowen's major preoccupations and her concern with the supernatural were inextricably linked. "The Shadowy Third" swiftly locates its characters in economic, social and emotional contexts. The first paragraph links the physically unprepossessing Martin's puzzling hold over women with his destructive effect on them. He has been loved by two wives, one now dead; by a mother whose "inarticulate devotion he resented"; and by "a pale sister, also dead" (CS 75). This opening association of love with death is not a common romantic cliche. Refusal of love, not love itself, is what kills. For Martin, being loved by women means having the opportunity to manipulate and, eventually, to reject them. He operates by a low-key but adroit emotional blackmail. Although, for example, he could have gone home "easily and luxuriously" on the half-empty 6:05 p.m. train, he catches the crowded 5:20 p.m. one to be with his young wife a little earlier in the evening. Whatever he currently pretends, however, his motive for this is not love but the power his "sacrifice" gives him over his wife. It is "[t]he consciousness of this, and of many other things, which made her so speechless when they met" (CS 75). He relishes her gratitude for his love, her awe of him and the way he can play on her feelings. Baby-talk forms the language of their relationship: ("She is such a pussy" [CS 78]). The atmosphere of their home is ostensibly one of domestic warmth. However, the underlying reality is control, the taming of the "little woman." When he discovers she has put some "drooping plants" in their garden (CS 75), he painstakingly points out that they are in the wrong place. In a burst of enthusiasm, she suggests going to a gardening exhibition ("We could learn a lot" [CS 76]) but he responds like the parent of an importunate child: "Well, we'll see." The baby they expect offers him a further means to control and regulate her: "Why, she would have other things besides sundials to think of then. What a funny little woman she was!" (CS 77). Too much physical movement by his wife irritates him: ("But he was still dissatisfied. Something was making her restless; she was out in the garden too much"). "Pussy" ought to be sitting quietly near the fire, sewing.

Martin and his wife live in a house "among the first two or three on a new estate" (CS 75), overlooking the "rolling country" on the west and the "house backs on new roads" (CS 75) on the east. It is an instance of that urbanization, the ribbon-development of the 1920s and 1930s which features in so many of Bowen's settings. Such descriptive passages link change in the landscape of southern England with altered social and class patterns, but, more significantly, with the changing nature of emotional expectation and response. The symbolism of these landscapes is rarely, if ever, a mere threnody for a vanished past. (Consider, for instance, the ambivalence, the balanced judicious effect of that simile in To the North (1932) where Cecilia's bereavement is compared to the destruction of a great house by fire and the building of a modern suburb in its place. (99-100). In "The Shadowy Third" the house has been "built for" Martin four years earlier (CS 75), during his first wife's life. The plaster on the walls is still not dry enough for papering. This building of a house to order, and to his own design, was a way of escaping the past. Martin finds the idea of connection, of being in any kind of pattern, irritating and threatening whether the pattern is one formed by previous events and past relationships or is simply that of a neighborhood where people have known him or are aware of him. He feels the windows of nearby houses "watching him; their gaze ... hostile, full of comment and criticism." This morbid English obsession with privacy is a current running through Bowen's later work, appearing in major scenes like Brutt's unwanted visit in The Death of the Heart or Stella Rodney's treatment at Holmdene in The Heat of the Day. Like many later Bowen characters, Martin is offended by rootedness or habitual associations. He finds something disgusting in having "lived in the same place all one's life" and in the people around him "being the same" (CS 80).

Rejecting the past in general, Martin rejects his own past, and his previous marriage with particular vehemence. Yet, there are odd features in his act of rejecting. He is continually aware of the way the house was furnished in his dead wife's lifetime, brushing aside the "musty velvet folds" of a non-existent hall-curtain (CS 78), or listening on the stairs "where the grandfather clock used to be" (CS 78). The curious point about Martin's unhappy first marriage and his current "happy" matrimonial attempt is that the emotional and domestic details of the second echo those of the first. Looking at "Pussy" sewing baby-clothes, he remembers "her making baby clothes" and holding them up for him to see. His first wife would "rattle her work-box maddeningly." His second wife opens the oak-chest "rattling things about in it" as if she were after a mouse (CS 78). His second wife's exploration of the east room and her attempt to open the white chest of drawers recall the first wife's "opening and shutting" those drawers in the months before her death (CS 81).