ZAA 2014; 62(4): 273–289

Laura Lojo-Rodríguez*
‘The Saving Power of Hallucination’:
Elizabeth Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr” and
Female Romance
Abstract: This article discusses Elizabeth Bowen’s appropriation of a tradition-
ally male-addressed literary genre, namely, of what Elaine Showalter has termed
“male romance,” which Bowen radically reformulates in order to foreground the
complexity of female subjectivity and sexuality against a backdrop of war. In her
short story “Mysterious Kôr” (1945), Bowen both draws and departs from Henry
Rider Haggard’s prototypical male romance She: A History of Adventure (1887) not
only by intertextually incorporating Haggard’s literary landscape in her story, but
also by inserting contemporary assessments of Haggard’s novel – most notably
those of his friend and admirer Andrew Lang in his sonnet “She” (1888). Like
Haggard and Lang, Bowen produced “Mysterious Kôr” in years marked by a pro-
found sense of crisis and disenchantment which, in Bowen’s case, was enhanced
by the horrors of the Blitz War in London. Haggard, Lang, and Bowen articulate
their respective narratives as a literary response to such disenchantment, shaped
as a quest-myth of ‘re-enchantment’ which departs from a civilization on the
verge of collapse to a mythical destination. However, Bowen is also careful in
articulating difference from Haggard’s male narrative and Lang’s appreciation
of it: Departing from many of these writers’ literary motifs, Bowen produces a
female version of an imaginative escape which entails a woman’s experience of
war, and her mental strategies to preserve sanity.

DOI 10.1515/zaa-2014-0044

1 Introduction
Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) first read Henry Rider Haggard’s She at the age of
twelve, being at the height of her “first winter of discontent” with “the sheer uni-

*Corresponding author: Dr. Laura Lojo-Rodríguez, Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemá,

Facultade de Filoloxía, Campus Universitario Norte, Avda. de Castelao, s/n, E-15782 Santiago
de Compostela (A Coruña), Spain, e-mail: laura.lojo@usc.es

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274      Laura Lojo-Rodríguez

formity of the human lot” (Bowen 1986, 247). At that time, Bowen had already lost
“the myths of childhood,” and the “thunder clouds” that mounted on the horizon
which “were to burst in 1914” conveyed a feeling of bitter disenchantment (Bowen
1986, 246). In those days, Haggard’s novel was envisaged by young Bowen as “a
book of promise,” a “novel of adventure” ideally directed to the “frustrated, non-
moral, pre-adolescent child” (Bowen 1986, 247), which she, however, would later
relate in a more complex manner to her own capacities as a writer and to “the
power of the pen” (Bowen 1986, 250).1
This article discusses Elizabeth Bowen’s appropriation of what Elaine Show-
alter has termed “male romance” (Showalter 1990, 79), which Bowen radically
reformulates in order to foreground the complexity of female subjectivity and
sexuality against the backdrop of war. In “Mysterious Kôr” (1945), Bowen both
draws and departs from Henry Rider Haggard’s prototypical male romance She:
A History of Adventure (1887) not only by intertextually incorporating Haggard’s
literary landscape in her story, but also by inserting contemporary assessments of
Haggard’s novel – most notably those of his friend and admirer Andrew Lang – as
well as her own understanding and personal appreciations of She. Like Haggard,
Bowen produced “Mysterious Kôr” in years marked by a profound sense of crisis
and disenchantment which, in Bowen’s case, was enhanced by the horrors of
the Blitz in London. As Sara Wasson has argued (Wasson 2010, 5), Second World
War London shared a number of social and historical features with fin-de-siècle
London which resulted in both cases in uncanny literary narratives that entailed
prospects of an apocalyptic future war and a sense of the individual’s struggle
with dark and primitive forces.
Both Haggard and Bowen articulate their respective narratives as a literary
response to such disenchantment, shaped as a quest-myth which departs from a
civilization on the verge of collapse. However, Bowen is also careful in articulating
difference from Haggard’s narrative, and draws from many of his literary motifs to
produce not only a female version of an imaginative escape – which she defined
as “the saving hallucination” (Bowen 1986, 97) – but also a woman’s experience
of war, and her mental strategies to preserve sanity. As Kristine Miller argues,
during the Second World War traditional notions of the home’s seclusion and
security collapsed; in fact, the Blitz meant that many civilians – mostly women –
experienced a violence previously known only to soldiers in the front line (Miller
1999, 140). During the Second World War, civilians, and more particularly those

1 This essay benefits from the collaboration of the research project ‘Women’s Tales’: The Short
Fiction of Contemporary British Writers, 1974–2013 (FEM2013-41977-P) and the research group
Discourse and Identity (GI-1924).

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 “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance      275

inhabiting the urban areas, were constant potential targets for German bombing
raids: “Londoners feared death, loss of property, injury, bereavement, and, on a
broader scale, the loss of war and the end of Britain” (Bell 2012, 153).
A number of scholars writing on Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr” have signalled
Bowen’s intertextual commentary of Haggard’s She (Mitchell 1966, 48–49; Medoff
1984, 77–78; Showalter 1990, 88–89; Arata 1996, 96–97; Ellmann 2003, 172). For
Showalter, Kôr stands for all that has been lost in the war, and figures “a spe-
cifically feminine fantasy” (Showalter 1990, 89) which the main character’s male
partner cannot grasp. Arata reads Bowen’s story as a dramatization of the conflict
between the magic femininity represented by Haggard’s Ayesha and what Bowen
calls the “power of the pen” related to Horace Holly (Bowen 1986, 97), one of
the male protagonists and narrator of the novel. Although both approaches to
Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr” are most enlightening in various ways – especially in
those having to do with the social and ideological context of Haggard’s novel –
the fact that allusions to Haggard’s novel in Bowen’s short story are not directly
retrieved from She but from Andrew Lang’s sonnet “She” is not explored in its full
significance. As Maryssa Demoor (Demoor 1987, 313) and Julia Reid suggest (Reid
2011b, 355), writer and literary critic Andrew Lang was personally involved in the
composition of She from the novel’s point of inception, assessing and correct-
ing Haggard’s manuscript at different stages of the novel’s process of composi-
tion. The year after its publication, Lang produced a collection of poetry entitled
Grass of Parnassus (1888), where the sonnet “She” – both homage and a personal
appreciation of the novel – was included: the poem was dedicated to Henry Rider
Haggard himself, and it often appeared printed alongside the novel in many early
twentieth century editions.
Whereas Haggard’s novel – or rather, Bowen’s own perception of it – is
central to understanding the aesthetics and general mood pertaining to the writ-
er’s process of composition of “Mysterious Kôr,” Lang’s poem deserves full atten-
tion in Bowen’s construction of an alternative to war and annihilation, which the
story’s main female character, Pepita, puts forward. The lines of Lang’s “She”
reverberate through the story from its very title, and are alternatively recited by
the two main characters: It is my stand that Bowen primarily uses Lang’s for its
overt redressing of the profound sense of “disenchantment of the world” which
prefigured a large number of fin-de-siècle works, and with which Pepita identifies.

2 Male Romance
When Henry Rider Haggard published She in 1886, he never imagined that the
novel would arouse enthusiastic literary responses in women, having primar-

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276      Laura Lojo-Rodríguez

ily in mind as an ideal reader a male audience. Arata argues that late-Victorian
romance was attractive to its many readers for, among other things, its interest
in maleness (Arata 1996, 89), as shows the comment of one of Haggard’s friends,
Walter Besant, concerning a prospective negative review of the novel should the
critic be female: “If the critic is a woman she will put down this book with the
remark that it is impossible – almost all women have this feeling towards the
marvellous” (Koestesbaum 1986 cited by Showalter 1990, 88). As will be argued,
Bowen’s literary meditations on Haggard’s She prove Besant’s statement wrong,
both in terms of the novel’s influence on Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr” and of her
own preference for the marvellous, for “what is crazy about humanity: obstina-
cies, inordinate heroisms, ‘immortal longings.’ At no time, even in the novel, do I
consider realism to be my forte” (Bowen 1986, 130).
However, Besant’s caveat may respond to his own particular anxiety pro-
voked during the Victorian fin-de-siècle by an unprecedented upsurge of women
writers both producing and consuming novels, which “created identity problems
for male artists,” most often resulting in male fantasies of self-creation and “envy
of the feminine” (Showalter 1990, 77–78). A fictionalization of such fantasies
strongly re-emerged in the 1880s, as was the case of R.L. Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and She itself, all of them narratives
involving in various ways fantastic metaphors for male self-begetting. Thus the
revival of romance in the 1880s could be explained as the literary expression of
male anxiety to replace “the heterosexual romance of courtship, manners, and
marriage that had been the specialty of women writers” with “the masculine and
homosocial ‘romance’ of adventure and quest, descended from Arthurian epic”
(Showalter 1990, 79). Discussing Victorian literature, Bowen herself insists on
what she terms its “feminine” nature: “In its subjectivity, in its obsession with
emotional power, the age was feminine: the assertions by the male of his mascu-
linity, the propaganda for ‘manliness’ go to show it” (Bowen 1986, 165).
Andrew Lang, a close friend and collaborator of Haggard, produced a pas-
sionate defence of the Romance Revival in an attempt to redefine popular culture
and to counterbalance “the effete world of capitalism” (Reid 2011a, 153). As Lang
saw it, the novel of adventure also possessed the value to reverse the pernicious
effects of incipient literary innovation and excessive refinement to authentic
roots in myth and folk narratives:

King Romance was wounded deep,

All his knights were dead and gone,
All his court was fallen on sleep,
In a vale of Avalon!
Nay, men said, he will not come,
Any night or any morn.

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 “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance      277

Nay, his puissant voice is dumb,

Silent his enchanted horn! […]
Then you came from South and North,
From Tugela, from the Tweed,
Blazoned his achievements forth,
King Romance is come indeed!
All his foes are overthrown,
All their wares cast out in scorn,
King Romance hath won his own,
And the lands where he was born!
(Lang 2000, 42–43)

Lang dedicated the above poem “The Restoration of Romance” (1887) to Robert
Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Haggard himself, who also expected
the genre to recover its virility and power. In addition to this, Lang and Haggard
sought to counteract the growing appeal of realist fiction and its narratives of
introspective analysis by advocating for romance’s potential to address a “univer-
sal, primitive human nature” (Reid 2011a, 153) and to produce a bonding and reju-
venating effect on readers (Arata 1996, 92). As opposed to those domestic novels
addressed to young women aiming to indoctrinate them in domesticity, marriage,
and motherhood, romance largely served public ideals and, more specifically, the
colonial enterprise. As Stephen Arata has suggested, the most visible feature of the
romance genre was “its engagement with issues of empire” (Arata 1996, 79). Cen-
trally concerned with the possibility of renewal, the works of male romancers invar-
iably dramatized an escape from a rigidly structured society in terms of gender,
class, and race to a new, unexplored and mythical landscape where “fantasies of
a revitalised masculinity are played out” (Arata 1996, 80) – often also involving a
blurring of sexual boundaries and of traditional categorizations of gender – in a
realm void of the weaknesses of modernity, as the “decline of English letters, the
degeneration through overrefinement of bourgeois society, [and] the ‘emascula-
tion’ of the middle-class male” (Arata 1996, 94). As will be suggested, Bowen’s
“Mysterious Kôr” also draws from the fantasy of escaping disenchantment.
The male protagonists of Haggard’s novel, Horace Holly and Leo Vincey,
leave Cambridge to set off on a journey to the heart of Africa, with the intention of
avenging Kallikrates’s death, Leo’s ancestor. As Holly and Vincey journey across
a symbolic, primeval landscape, they withdraw from the historical sites of Euro-
pean civilization. Kôr, the characters’ final destination – axis mundi – brings to
mind a primordial journey to the origins of humanity:

One is able to appreciate the historical significance of these [the novel’s] events. That an
Egyptian goddess should have a priest indicates, in the first place, that both old orders
have begun to decline; the marriage of the Egyptian Amenartas and the Greek Kallikrates,

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278      Laura Lojo-Rodríguez

in turn, signals the birth of the new order, specifically, the beginning of the Western world;
the flight-exodus motif, finally, suggests […] the Judaic cast of the resulting culture and the
accompanying linear nature of its concept of time and history. (Hinz 1972, 419)

The male protagonists of fin-de-siècle romances ‘penetrate’ the centre – the core,
Kôr – of an exotic civilization, significantly construed by the Western man as the
‘primitive’ where his wildest sexual fantasies can be realized as opposed to the
strictures of Victorian sexual mores in a place “where one could look for sexual
experience unobtainable in Europe” (Said 1979, 190). Yet in fact, these romances
actually represented “allegorised journeys into the self” (Showalter 1990, 82), thus
revealing in a most significant manner the profoundest fears and anxieties of the
Victorian fin-de-siècle. Ayesha, Haggard’s immortal queen at the heart of Africa,
is both powerful and destructive in her awesome beauty and magical powers,
thus bearing striking “sororial ties to other nineteenth-century fatal women –
Lamia, Carmilla, Faustine, Lilith, Salome” (Arata 1996, 97). In this sense, Haggard
expresses through Ayesha the anxiety which the progressive visibility of women
entailed in late nineteenth-century England, and which many of his contempo-
raries may have perceived as a threat to normative masculinity: non-coinciden-
tally, and as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have suggested (Gilbert and Gubar
1989, 3), Haggard set the action of the novel in 1881, the year when women were
first allowed to take examinations in Cambridge. In another fin-de-siècle narra-
tive, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Sigmund Freud revealingly equates
Haggard’s female protagonist with his own anxieties regarding his printed work,
as expressed in a dream of his own:

Let us consider the occasion of the dream. It is a visit of this lady, Louise N., who helps me
with my work in the dream. She says: ‘Lend me something to read.’ I offer her She, by Rider
Haggard. ‘A strange book, but full of hidden meaning,’ I try to explain; ‘the eternal femi-
nine, the immortality of our emotions –’ Here she interrupts me: ‘I know that book already.
Haven’t you something of your own?’ ‘No, my immortal works are still to be written.’ ‘Well,
when are you going to publish your so-called ‘latest revelations,’ which, you promised
us, even we should be able to read?’ she asks, rather sarcastically. I now perceive she is a
mouthpiece for someone else, and I am silent. I think of the effort it cost me to make public
even my own work in dreams, in which I had to surrender so much of my own intimate
nature. (Freud 1995, 397)

In his interpretative method Sigmund Freud alludes to Haggard’s She numerous

times in his critical writings, which Psomiades regards as an attempt “to define
civilized, European masculinity against its others – femininity, the ‘primitive,’
the ‘savage’” – by praising a genre, Romance, which could restore “savage mas-
culinity to a civilized world overtly dominated by feminine concerns.” In this
sense, Freud would employ imperialist metaphors to describe his own intel-

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 “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance      279

lectual quest, and would subsequently quote some of Lang’s anthropological

studies – Social Origins (1903) and The Secret of the Totem (1905) – in Totem and
Taboo (1913) (Psomiades 2013, 1; 22).
Haggard’s She is only an example of a large number of late Victorian narra-
tives which address what can be called “reverse colonization” (Arata 1996, 108):
Ayesha’s plans to assume dominion over the British Empire dramatize the anxiety
of Western countries of being overrun by primitive forces, where a fearful reversal
of antagonistic positions occurs. As will be argued, Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr”
also lays bare the anxiety of foreign invasion and eventual annihilation: the 1940s
witnessed to the revival of older Victorian fears in the face of London’s destruc-
tion, which functioned as a synecdoche for the disintegration of Imperial Britain.

3 ‘The Rising Tide of Hallucination’

In 1945 Elizabeth Bowen wrote a postscript for the American edition of The
Demon Lover and Other Short Stories, where “Mysterious Kôr” was included. This
essay has become one of Bowen’s most enlightening reflections on war, female
subjectivity, and the healing power of writing. The composition process of these
stories – produced between the spring of 1941 and the late autumn of 1944 – acted
as a ‘release’ from a pervading sense of loss and fear of annihilation during the
Second World War, and as a reflection of “flying particles of something enormous
and inchoate that had been going on” representative of a collective conscious-
ness: “During the war, I lived […] thousands of other lives, all under stress […] I
do not feel I ‘invented’ anything I wrote. It seems to me that during the war the
overcharged subconsciousnesses of everybody overflowed and merged” (Bowen
1986, 95).
In this essay Bowen also emphasizes the absence of “war action” of these
narratives, which she chooses to call “wartime” rather than “war stories,”
thus foregrounding a subjective vision of the Blitz as a “study of war-climate,”
“more as a territory than as a page of history,” which Bowen ultimately equates
with female perspectives on war (Bowen 1986, 95). Against the “lucid abnor-
mality” which ordinary experience entails during war time, Bowen poses the
concept of the “saving hallucination” (Bowen 1986, 97), an “unconscious,
instinctive, saving resort on the part of the characters […] emotionally torn and
impoverished by changes” (Bowen 1986, 96). As Bowen saw it, reading and
writing were the sole mental strategies then available to her and her contem-
poraries to put up “resistance to the annihilation that was threatening,” and
which the war represented. In like manner, the quest for Haggard’s mythical

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city of the female protagonist in “Mysterious Kôr” exemplifies such resistance

by searching for “indestructible landmarks in a destructible world,” as well as
by posing the need to produce small “worlds-within-worlds of hallucination”
(Bowen 1986, 97).2
As will be argued, in Bowen’s story Kôr functions as the protagonist’s “inde-
structible landmark” to preserve hope and sanity in war-stricken London (Jordan
1993, 8), a metonymic reference for an ancient civilization which, like Kôr itself,
is rapidly disintegrating, and whose spectral quality is enhanced by the moon-
light over bombed London: “FULL moonlight drenched the city and searched
it; there was not a niche left to stand in. London looked like the moon’s capital
– shallow, cratered, extinct” (Bowen 1983, 728). London is here described as a
landscape of fear, surreal in its extinction and gloominess, uncanny in its empti-
ness and suppressed emotions, stripped of familiar landmarks. In the midst of
the city’s desolation, “a girl and a soldier” wander through the streets, seeming
“to have no destination but each other” (Bowen 1983, 729). The soldier, Arthur, is
on leave, and has come to London to see his girlfriend Pepita, but their hopes of
sharing some moments of intimacy are shattered by Callie’s – Pepita’s roommate
– refusal to leave the flat which the two girls share. The characters’ frustration
is increasingly evinced as the story progresses, alternatively focusing on Arthur
and Pepita’s reflections as they sleep in their separate beds, which uncover their
respective anxieties and their uncertain prospects about the future.

2 As has been suggested (Jordan 1993), the short story was Bowen’s preferred literary genre dur-
ing the war years – if the criterion of productivity is to be observed – since its brevity allowed
the writer the means of literary expression despite the state of chaos and fragmentation which
characterized those years. Moreover, Bowen conceived of the short story as a genre more prone
to innovation than the novel itself, and therefore as a more suitable vehicle for events or patterns
of behavior that would in principle deviate from realist accounts of experience. As Bowen saw
it, the novel worked well for the exploration of the complex relationship between individuals
and the social order; in turn, the short story would not allow “the analysis or development of
character,” being primarily concerned with other issues, such as “speculations, unaccountable
stirs of interest, longings, attractions, apprehensions without a knowable cause” (Bowen 1986,
129). At least in principle, Bowen distanced herself from the factuality which her view of the
novel implied and invested in short fiction other qualities which would signal what is hidden
in or repressed from the mainstream of culture: “The short story is an advantage over the novel,
and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more
visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanations, or analy-
sis” (Bowen 1986, 128). The emphases upon dream, the irrational, and fantasy suggest, as Paul
March-Russell observes, “a correlation with Sigmund Freud’s exploration of the unconscious”
(March-Russell 2009, 125) which may ultimately regard the short story as a “dissident form of
communication” (March-Russell 2009, ix).

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 “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance      281

4 Kôr: The Abiding City

“Mysterious Kôr” opens with the narrator’s panoramic vision of bombed London,
whose emptiness and devastation recalls the “moon’s capital,” in whose light
the “black-out” becomes “laughable” in its futility (Bowen 1983, 728). The nar-
rator describes a deadly atmosphere of fear which prevents Londoners from
leaving their houses; like the inhabitants of the ancient city of Kôr, they have
abandoned their ruined buildings to seek refuge underground, sharing the
certainty of another bombing despite a relative calm: “The Germans no longer
came by the full moon. Something more immaterial seemed to threaten, and to
be keeping people at home. This day between days, this extra tax, was perhaps
more than senses and nerves could bear” (Bowen 1983, 728).3 This emotional
state of ominous apprehension which the narrator describes responds to the
certainty of the existence of “something enormous and inchoate” going on, as
Bowen put it: a generalized fear of a German invasion and eventual dominion
over Britain. Significantly, Haggard’s She – like many other fin-de-siècle nar-
ratives in Britain – already partakes of the anxiety produced by the decline of
Britain as a world power at the close of the nineteenth century, perceived by
Haggard’s contemporaries as the threat of a foreign invasion, often articulated
as a response to the “cultural guilt” which colonization may entail (Arata 1990,
623). Like fin-de-siècle London, during the Second World War, London was imag-
ined to be “in the shadow of Apocalypse” (Wasson 2010, 6). Similarly, and as
will be argued, Bowen’s characters in “Mysterious Kôr” share gloomy prospects
for the near future, as well as the fear of eventual annihilation in an apocalyptic

3 Bowen draws an interesting parallel between London’s air raid shelters and Kôr’s caves in op-
position to the magnificent monuments which had in the past testified to the greatness of both
empires. Significantly, and as Wasson suggests (Wasson 2010, 5), late nineteenth century Britain
had been extremely concerned with images of racial degeneration. Such images return to haunt
Bowen’s narrative, and “underground sheltering” may also imply some kind of degeneration
into “troglodyte beings.” In an article entitled “London, 1940,” Bowen explains the resistance of
a number of civilians to seek refuge in air raid shelters for fear of being buried in those “caves”:
“This is the fine buoyant view of it – the theatrical sense of safety, the steady breath drawn. We
shall be due, at tonight’s siren, to feel our hearts once more tighten and sink. Soon after black-
out we keep that date with fear. The howling ramping over the darkness, the lurch of the barrage
opening, the obscure throb in the air. We can go underground – but for this to be any good you
have to go very deep, and a number of us, fearful of being buried, prefer not to. Our own ‘things’
– tables, chairs, lamps – give one kid of confidence to us who stay in our paper rooms. But when
tonight the throb gathers over the roof we must not remember what we looked at this morning
– these fuming glissades of ruin. No, these nights in September nowhere is pleasant. Where you
stay is your own choice, how you feel is your fight” (Bowen 1986, 23).

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282      Laura Lojo-Rodríguez

panorama of world destruction where Kôr would stand as the sole “abiding city”
(Bowen 1983, 730).4
As the story progresses, the narrator leaves behind a general vision of French
soldiers and air wardens to focus on Arthur and Pepita’s “synchronized bodies,”
and on their conversation: “‘Mysterious Kôr.’ What is?’ he [Arthur] said, not quite
collecting himself. ‘This is – Mysterious Kôr thy walls forsaken stand, / Thy lonely
towers beneath a lonely moon – / – this is Kôr’” (Bowen 1983, 729). Pepita’s first
words – uncannily doubling the story’s title, and which sound so enigmatic to
Arthur – immediately recall Rider Haggard’s imperial city of Kôr in She, which
Arthur fails to identify. However, and despite the fact that Pepita accurately
describes Haggard’s imaginary landscape in the novel, she quotes Andrew Lang’s
sonnet “She”:

Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand,

The fever-haunted forest and lagoon,
Mysterious Kor [sic] thy walls forsaken stand,
Thy lonely towers beneath the lonely moon,
Not there doth Ayesha linger, rune by rune
Spelling strange scriptures of a people banned.
The world is disenchanted; over soon
Shall Europe send her spies through all the land.

Nay, not in Kor, but in whatever spot,

In town or field, or by the insatiate sea,
Men brood on buried loves, and unforgot,
Or break themselves on some divine decree,
Or would o’erleap the limits of their lot,
There, in the tombs and deathless, dwelleth SHE!
(Lang 2007, 42)

4 The destruction of London’s edifices works both as a literal and metaphorical reference to
the disintegration of the nation and its citizens as occasioned by the war. In the preface to The
Demon Lover and Other Short Stories, Bowen relates the war’s physical destruction with psy-
chological disintegration: “To survive, not only physically but spiritually, was essential. Peo-
ple whose homes had been blown up went to infinite lengths to assemble bits of themselves
– broken ornaments, odd shoes, torn scraps of the curtains that had hung in a room – from the
wreckage. In the same way, they assembled and checked themselves from stories and poems,
from their memories, from one another’s talk. Outwardly, we accepted that at this time individual
destiny became an obsession in every heart. You cannot depersonalize persons. Every writer dur-
ing this time was aware of the personal cry of the individual. And he was aware of the passionate
attachment of men and women to every object or image or place or love or fragment of memory
with which his or her destiny seemed to be identified, and by which the destiny seemed to be
assured” (Bowen 1986, 97).

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 “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance      283

Pepita’s fascination with the “book” (Bowen 1983, 729) mirrors Bowen’s; She
glutted the writer’s imagination “with images and pictures of which I could
not have enough” (Bowen 1986, 249), as Bowen argued in a radio talk deliv-
ered two years after the publication of The Demon Lover and Other Short Stories.
In fact, Bowen’s description of London as the “moon’s capital” draws from her
personal recollection of Haggard’s book cover: “The book cover [showed] an
extinct, deserted city under the moon” (Bowen 1986, 247). More significantly,
Bowen consistently equated Kôr with London long before writing “Mysterious
Kôr.” Haggard’s description of the English capital was more vividly preserved in
her imagination than her real experience of the city years later: “I saw Kôr before I
saw London; I was a provincial child. Inevitably, the Thames Embankment was a
disappointment, being far, far less wide than Horace Holly had led me to expect.
I was inclined to see London as Kôr with the roofs still on” (Bowen 1986, 249).
Similarly, Pepita can see beyond the waste of London a city – Kôr – altogether
different: “‘It’s very strong; there is not a crack in it anywhere for a weed to grow
in; the corners of the stones and the monuments might have been cut yesterday,
and the stairs and arches are built to support themselves’” (Bowen 1983, 729).
Kôr’s magnificent, intact monuments are opposed to London’s ruined buildings,
which not only enhance the destructive effects of the Blitz, but also relate to
Bowen’s belief that “life in any capital city must be ephemeral, and with a doom
ahead” (Bowen 1986, 249).
Like Bowen herself, Pepita, the female romancer – whose name briefly recalls
Vita Sackville-West’s adventurous protagonist in Pepita (1937) – does not identify
with Ayesha, but with the vision of Kôr that Horace Holly and Leo Vincey describe
on their arrival to the imperial city.5 As opposed to this, Arthur – the legendary
King of epic narratives – ironically remains in ignorance, failing to be enlight-
ened by Pepita’s imaginative vision of her “saving hallucination,” and continues

5 “I wish that it lay within the power of my pen to give some idea of the grandeur of the sight that
then met our view. There, all bathed in the red glow of the sinking sun, were miles upon miles of
ruins – columns, temples, shrines, and the palaces of kings, varied with patches of green bush.
Of course the roofs of these buildings had long since fallen into decay and vanished, but owing
to the extreme massiveness of the style of building, and to the hardness and durability of the rock
employed, most of the party walls and great columns still remained standing. Straight before us
stretched away what had evidently been the main thoroughfare of the city, for it was very wide,
wider than the Thames Embankment, and regular […] On either side of this great thoroughfare
were vast blocks of ruins, each block, generally speaking, being separated from its neighbour
by a space of what once, I suppose, been garden-ground, but was now dense and tangled bush.
They were all built in the same coloured stone, and most of them had pillars, which was as much
as we could make out in the fading light as we passed swiftly up the main road, that I believe I am
right in saying no living foot had pressed for thousands of years” (Haggard 2007, 315).

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to be sceptical: “‘It [the poem] goes on, as I remember, to prove Kôr’s not really
anywhere. When even a poem says there’s no such a place –’” (Bowen 1983, 730).
Pepita energetically replies that what the poem “‘tries to say doesn’t matter: I see
what makes me see’” (Bowen 1983, 730), which mirrors Bowen’s fictionalization
of Haggard’s landscape: “There are – there can but be – startling divergations
between what I remember and what is written […] The book She is for me historic
– it stands for the first totally violent impact I received from print” (Bowen 1986,
250). In reading She Bowen first became aware of the power of the “inventive
pen,” and of the healing properties inherent to writing, “that creaking, pedan-
tic, obtrusive, arch, prudish, opaque, overworded writing […] what it could do!”
(Bowen 1986, 250). In like manner, Pepita firmly believes in the existence of an
“indestructible landmark” in a “destructible world”: “This war shows we’ve by
no means come to the end. If you can blow whole places out of existence, you can
blow whole places into it […] By the time we’ve come to the end, Kôr may be the
one city left: the abiding city” (Bowen 1983, 730).

5 A World Disenchanted
In “Mysterious Kôr,” Arthur and Pepita do not discuss Haggard’s She directly;
Pepita’s knowledge seems rather to derive from Andrew Lang’s poem, whose lines
are directly quoted in Bowen’s narrative. Lang’s verses, which Pepita recites like a
refrain, function as a mental strategy to fight back the disenchantment which the
collapse of Western civilization entails, and which the poem had also propheti-
cally pictured half a century earlier: “The world is disenchanted; over soon/Shall
Europe send her spies all through the land” (Lang 2007, 42).
Whereas Pepita is attracted by the musical quality of the city’s name – “‘I
knew that must be the right name; it’s like a cry’” – down-to-earth Arthur seeks
for textual evidence of the city’s fictional nature in the poem itself: “‘But the poem
begins with “Not” – Not in the waste beyond the swamps and sand –’” (Bowen
1983, 730). Unlike Arthur, Pepita’s understanding of the poem privileges her own
personal interpretation over the poet’s intentional meaning: for her, Kôr might be
the sole, “abiding city” standing after the war’s universal destruction. More sig-
nificantly, Pepita quotes Lang – and not directly Haggard – to enhance a general
sense of profound disenchantment which Lang’s poem best conveys: “‘The world
is disenchanted, it goes on. That was what set me off hating civilization’” (Bowen
1983, 730).
Pepita’s “disenchantment” – a direct echo of Lang’s disillusionment at
the progressive abandonment of man’s epic roots and religious belief in a

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 “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance      285

progressively secularized society – mirrors in turn Max Weber’s famous phrase

“the disenchantment of the world” as argued in “Science as Vocation” (1917) and
in the introductory remarks to his studies on the sociology of religion (1920): “The
fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and,
above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most
sublime values have retreated from public life” (Weber 1946, 156). In these essays
Weber speaks of the displacement of magical beliefs about nature and religion as
part of the process of rationalization which he regarded as the defining feature
of Modernity in Western civilization. Weber’s particular stance towards Moder-
nity mourned the absence of communal beliefs and ideals in an age that seemed
dominated by positivism and materialism, and responded to a climate of cultural
pessimism at the dawn of the twentieth century which presented a bleak picture
of human existence, governed by instincts reducible to mere chemical and physi-
cal processes. In this way, Weber’s sense of disenchantment was also articulated
in the writings of, among others, Arthur Schopenhauer or Max Nordau, whose
work Degeneration (1892) reverberates in the pessimistic vision of many of his
contemporaries. Although Weber’s essay was published years after Lang’s poem,
his essay discusses the anxieties of an age with which Bowen may have detected
some similarities. As W.J. McCormack suggests, Bowen had a profound sense of
historical movement, of which “Sigmund Freud and Max Weber may be taken as
the symbolic leaders […] Like Weber, she experienced the dis-enchantment of the
world, its loss of aura” (McCormack 2011, 239).
As earlier argued, Haggard and Lang conceived of romances as a literary
response to the sense of “disenchantment” with a progressively mechanized,
scientific, and reason-governed world, which could be, however, ‘re-enchanted’
through the imaginative quests which these narratives entail: Kôr’s autonomous
mythic world would provide readers with the enchantment which the scientific
discourse had superseded. Similarly, Pepita quotes Lang’s poem as a more overt
expression of a feeling of disenchantment with the present state of Western civi-
lization, yet also as a response to it: Pepita’s ‘re-enchantment’ is firmly rooted
in the existence of her own “indestructible landmark” in a “destructible world,”
which Kôr eventually epitomizes.

6 ‘Populating Kôr’
As the story progresses, the narrator’s omniscience becomes alternatively
restricted to the characters’ consciousness: Pepita’s, Callie’s, and eventually
Arthur’s. Pepita’s thoughts revolve around the sexual frustration generated by

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Callie’s refusal to leave them in the flat on their own: “Pepita tried to be grateful
for Callie’s forbearance – but how could she be, when it had not occurred to Callie
that she would do better to be away tonight?” (Bowen 1983, 731). While delaying
the arrival at home where she and Arthur would have to sleep in separate beds
(Ellmann 2003, 21), Pepita thinks about Kôr as a means of relieving frustration at
Arthur’s suggestion to “populate Kôr” (Bowen 1983, 731).
Significantly, and as noted above, most romances dramatize a yearning for
escape from a sexually confining society towards a mythologized place, usually
the East or the heart of Africa. In this sense, Kôr is literally the heart of Africa,
yet also a place where the sexual fantasies of the male explorers can be safely
realized. As some critics have suggested (Arata 1996, 80; Reid 2011a, 153), such
an escape to imperial territories often implied a revitalizing release from civi-
lized life and the “corrupting knowledge of telegraphs, steam, daily newspa-
pers and universal suffrage” (Reid 2011a, 153). In Africa’s more primitive realm,
Ayesha, the Queen of Kôr, appears constructed in terms of nineteenth century
colonial stereotypes, suggesting an exotic sensuality which is both threatening
and destabilizing even for “sullen” and “misanthropic” Holly (Haggard 2007, 10).
As Edward Said noticed when discussing Western constructions of topographies
loosely called the “Orient,” these places suggest “not only fecundity, but sexual
promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative ener-
gies” (Said 1979, 188).
Although Bowen’s depiction of Kôr largely partakes of Haggard’s stereotypes of
exoticism and sexual promise, sexual agency pertains in Bowen’s story to Pepita,
who contemplates Kôr as a place of possibilities where she might eventually expe-
rience sexual desire at full, as she rather enigmatically says to Arthur: “‘To think
about Kôr is to think about you and me […] We’d be alone [there]’” (Bowen 1983,
730). As suggested, such a journey entails a flight from the strictures of conven-
tional society and morals, which in Bowen’s story is suggested by the narrowness
of the flat and the discomfort of the bed which Pepita is forced to share with Callie:

She had been reminded that they were homeless on this first night of leave. They were,
that was to say, in London without any hope of any place of their own. Pepita shared a
two-roomed flatlet with a girl friend, in a by-street of Regent’s Park Road, and toward this
they must make their half-hearted way. Arthur was to have the sitting-room divan, usually
occupied by Pepita, while she herself had half of the girl’s bed. There was really no room for
a third, and least of all for a man, in those small rooms packed with furniture and the two
girls’ belongings. (Bowen 1983, 731)

In the narrative Callie, the “physically shy, brotherless virgin” (Bowen 1983, 732),
– the “unlit candle,” as Arthur describes her (Bowen 1983, 735) and the “callow”
maiden, as her name suggests – stands for sexual propriety, and assumes the role

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 “Mysterious Kôr” and Female Romance      287

of preserving Pepita’s virtue: “‘It wouldn’t be proper, would it, me going off and
leaving just you and Arthur; I don’t know what your mother would say to me’”
(Bowen 1983, 733). In opposition to exuberant Pepita, repressed Callie dreads
physical contact, and is anxious about sharing her bed with her friend: “She had
kept physical distances all her life. Already repugnance and shyness ran through
her limbs; she was preyed upon by some more obscure trouble than the expecta-
tion she might not sleep” (Bowen 1983, 733).
Callie’s words are premonitory in the narrative; wakeful after an argument
with frustrated Pepita, she hears Arthur awake in the living room and gets up to
talk to him. During their brief exchange of words, Arthur confesses to Callie that
both himself and Pepita had been captive of Kôr’s promise of escape and inti-
macy: “‘So we began to play – we were off in Kôr […] A game’s a game, but what’s
a hallucination? You begin by laughing, then it gets in you and you can’t laugh
it off’” (Bowen 1983, 738). Perplexed, and unprepared to share Pepita’s power
to construct alternatives, Callie remains untouched by “the moon’s power over
London and the imagination,” and returns to her bed to consider “the loss of
her own mysterious expectation, of her love for love, […] a small thing beside the
war’s total of unlived lives” (Bowen 1983, 739). In opposition, and far from the
landscape of war, Pepita journeys through the colonnades of mythical Kôr, thus
evading the strictures of her home and realizing herself in every possible way:

She still lay, as she had lain, in an avid dream, of which Arthur had been the source, of
which Arthur was not the end. With him she looked this way, that way, down the wide,
void, pure streets, between statues, pillars and shadows, through archways and colonna-
des. With him she went up the stairs down which nothing but moon came; with him trod
the ermine dust of endless halls, stood on terraces, mounted the extreme tower, looked
down on the statued squares, the wide, void, pure streets. He was the password, but not the
answer: it was to Kôr finality that she turned. (Bowen 1983, 740)

The narrative closes with Pepita’s dream, which asserts the independence of
the character’s sexuality of which Arthur is “the password, but not the answer.”
Unlike Callie, who had been “content with reflecting the heat of love” (Bowen
1983, 732), Pepita is aware of her own desires and emotional needs, although,
ironically enough, is prevented from giving way to them: as Bowen seems to
suggest, social constrains regarding sexual behavior still operated in the early
1940s, not only in Haggard’s Victorian England. Pepita’s unconventional behav-
ior puzzles both Arthur and Callie, who repeatedly blame the full moon for her
departure from established behavior. However, and unlike most male romances –
which associated the Empire with the escapism of sexual fantasy and the freedom
of licentious sex available for male voyagers (Said 1979, 190) – “Mysterious Kôr”
departs from what Said termed “a display of impressive but verbally inexpres-

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288      Laura Lojo-Rodríguez

sive femininity” (Said 1979, 187) which had characterized female portraits in male
romances. Bowen’s narrative accounts for the complexities of Pepita’s sexuality,
which is independently verbalized in contrast with traditional musings on male
desire and self-sufficiency.

7 Conclusion
Lang’s poem resonates through Bowen’s “Mysterious Kôr” as a literary response
to the “disenchantment of the world.” In fact, Lang’s plea for a return to epic and
magical roots accounts for the “mysterious” quality which Kôr still holds for dis-
enchanted Pepita, and is regarded as a symbol, as a “pure abstract empty timeless
city [which] rises out of a girl’s troubled mind,” as Bowen described it (Bowen
1986, 96). In fact, Pepita’s personal understanding of Lang’s poem brings out the
mystery and suspense of the narrative’s apparent conventionality, and lays bare a
web of covert meanings. For Pepita, the imaginary existence of Kôr offers the thera-
peutic value of compensating for the ‘desiccation’ produced by war, re-enchanting
the subject in the face of grounded fears of death and complete annihilation: “The
outside World War news was stupefying: headlines and broadcasts came down
and down on us in hammerlike chops, with great impact” (Bowen 1986, 96).
In “Mysterious Kôr,” Bowen incorporates some of those anxieties which had
prefigured Haggard’s and Lang’s narratives of disenchantment. However, Bowen
also holds on to the power of the “saving hallucination” which literature offers
to create alternative realities as a strategy to re-enchant the subject and to “fill
the vacuum for the uncertain ‘I’” (Bowen 1986, 98) by enabling individuals to
live “so many lives […] lived among the packed repercussions of so many thou-
sands of other lives” (Bowen 1986, 95). Against the uncertain quality of the char-
acters’ nature, and of their future, the ghost of Kôr – for so it is, the presence of an
absence, repeatedly invoked and materialized in the story through Pepita’s cita-
tions – reverberates through the pages of the narrative for, as Bowen suggested,
ghosts are the sole “certainties” able to fill the subject’s void (Bowen 1986, 98).

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