An Analysis of The Demon Lover by Elizabeth Bowen The Demon Lover , a short story by Elizabeth Bowen, incorporates both

suspense-inducing elements as well as various spectral components that prompt the reader to question whether it is a ghost story or the narrative account of a protagonists hallucination. The phenomena that the author conveys are not substantiated with enough plausible reasoning for the reader to give any credence to the sequence of events that occur. However, with an adequate familiarity of Elizabeth Bowen in either a literary or biographical context, the reader could assume that the story is referencing psychologicalrather than supernaturaloccurrences. An important factor to consider when analyzing the context of any work of literature is an authors intent. Oftentimes a characters thoughts and suspicions are projections of an authors own internal sentiments. An understanding of Elizabeth Bowen is just as important, if not more so, than of Kathleen Drover. If a reader of The Demon Lover is conversant with Bowen, the motivations for writing such stories will seem to be of a contemplative nature concerning reactions to the events in her own life. With this in consideration, the reader understands that Bowen is writing about very real fears, not ghosts. One could also make this interpretation through the general focus and tone of the story. Bowen places an emphasis on Drovers past. A short storyespecially one only a few pages longdoes not typically include content irrelevant to the immediate plot. The very fact that Bowen chooses to elaborate on Drovers issues with her ex-fianc, as well as her paranoid and unstable mentality, is evidence that the characters thoughts and reactions to the circumstances are of a greater significance than providing readers with a ghost story. Despite Bowens extensive use of imagery, its primary purpose is to provide an external context and for transitioning between events. The Demon Lover is the product of an authors sentiments projected onto a character; therefore any unexplainable occurrences in the story are due to Bowens bias. Although she writes the story as a third-person narrator, she is simultaneously within the story as well. The author does not separate herself from the character, causing inconsistencies in the plot to develop around the protagonists unstable consciousness. Irrational fears affect ones objective interpretation of reality, and such a bias is not diminished by writing in third-person if the origin of the bias is from the authors distorted perception. Achieving omniscience in ones narrating is unlikely, to say the least; especially if the story is influenced by ones own subjective perceptions of reality. The Demon Lover is not a ghost story, in the conventional sense; but rather, a hallucination of some formpersonal bias.

Elizabeth Bowen's short story, "The Demon Lover," is a truly dark and foreboding tale, made so by the scores of descriptive images it is so rife with. Bowen employs copious amounts of symbolic imagery in a largely successful effort to draw the reader, however briefly, into this world of her own design, and it proves to be an unsettling and sinister place; this feeling of foreboding that Bowen seeks to instill in the reader only becomes more pronounced as the piece progresses, until it reaches its startling and horrific conclusion.

The beginning of "The Demon Lover" is an innocuous one, belying the nature of events to come. Bowen introduces the main character of the story within its first innocent sentence, presenting the reader with a middle-aged woman who, as becomes apparent with further description, is the mother of multiple children and married, living in the country. She has returned to her home in the city of London from which her family has fled due to the bombings, presumably those the city suffered in World War II, in order to regain a few unnamed and, in effect, irrelevant articles from it. This act of a mother caring for her family is not a method by which Bowen seeks to instill the reader with a sense of doubt; it is, in fact, overtly mundane. However, it is with the first smatterings of Bowen's ultimately torrential deluge of descriptive images that she sews in the mind of the reader the first inklings of apprehension. After the story's outset, in which the reader is introduced to Mrs. Drover, and is presented some harmless and attractive imagery of the day and the surroundings, the sense of gloom and foreboding first manifests itself in the piece. The first doubt-instilling imagery the reader is presented with is that of the Drover's London neighborhood. The roofline is in itself ominous, its "broken chimneys and parapets" standing out against "the next batch of clouds, already piling up ink-dark." With this simple description, Bowen creates a dark and ominous atmosphere, the roofline standing as a broken silhouette against the sky, which is blackening with clouds. This is one of the first times Bowen employs light and dark imagery, one of her foremost methods of lacing the piece with its pervasive sense of an impending and unspecified calamity. Bowen further develops this bleak and forbidding mood with the description of the house itself. Mrs. Drover's entry to the house is in keeping with the feeling already established; it has to be forced,