1
'Unsuspected Meaning in Everything Shines Out': Broken Objects and
Fragmented Selves in the Bowen Imaginary
In the postscript to The Demon Lover and Other Stories, written between 1941 and 1945,
Elizabeth Bowen recalls wartime London as a ‘landscape always convulsed by some new
change’.1 Disembowelled houses, squares littered with broken telephones and headless
dolls, bits of stocking hanging from unlit streetlamps: the city has become a veritable
collage of those nightmarish themes Freud had described, thirty years earlier, inThe
Uncanny.2 The retrieval of those objects is imperative:
[p]eople 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 (PTDL, 95).
The sight of these strange objects, and the precariousness to which they testify, will
continue to haunt Bowen’s work; her fascination with them will reach new heights towards
the end of her life, as she looks back on the ravaged past. Perhaps it is the fear that these
objects will defy any attempt at either interpretation or reparationthat renders these texts
disquieting. For what do we do with those signifiers that war, and the passing of time, have
1 ‘Postscript to The Demon Lover’ (1945), in The Mulberry Tree: The Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. by
Hermione Lee (London: Virago, 1999), 99. Henceforth referred to as PTDL.
2 'The Uncanny' in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: vol.
XVII, trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 228-256.
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rendered meaningless – or with the ‘doubling, dividing, and interchanging’ self that may be
beyond repair?3 What new meanings can be fashioned out of these relics?
This paper seeks to understand the productive functions of Bowen’s broken, lost, and
unearthed objects, and the important role of the imagination, by examining their
manifestation in three texts: ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’ and ‘Mysterious Kôr’, written at the
height of the war, and her penultimate novel, The Little Girls, published in 1964. I use
Freudian psychoanalysis, with particular attention to Freud’s theories of the uncanny and
the death drive, as a main frame of reference. Shafquat Towheed’s geo-spatial readings of
Bowen’s texts, and his identification of ‘positive-negative space’ in the narratives – that is,
the ‘physical and emotional remainders’ that allow us to trace what has been, and is now
gone (or, indeed, what never was), is also useful to my line of enquiry.4 Towheed allows a
better appreciation of Bowen’s interest in the mind’s ability to re-inhabit the past, and her
identification of the imagination as a ‘shelter’ from which one must emerge in order to
move forward. In my concluding remarks I consider the representational function of the
broken object as manifest in The Little Girls. Jane Goldman’s study of modern collage will
inform this reading, and her understanding of the form as a manifestation of the modern in
the course of deconstructing itself – a salient function of the Bowen reliquary.
Bowen’s own experience with psychoanalysis makes attempting a Freudian reading of her
work especially appealing: she consulted a specialist in the early 1940s to cure her of her
lifelong stammer, and had worked with shell-shocked soldiers at the end of the previous
3 'The Uncanny', 233.
4 Shafquat Towheed, 'Territory, space, modernity: Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover and Other
Stories and wartime London' in Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives, ed. by Susan Osborn (Cork
University Press: Cork, Ireland, 2009), 113-131 (115).
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war.5 Dreams and hallucinations, re-visitations of the past, uncanny resemblances and
repetitions, and constant allusions to the subconscious: these texts are littered with
psychoanalytic themes, while the plots, as Maud Ellmann notes, have a tendency to
‘psychoanalyse themselves, tracing present crises to past causes’.6 Or to quote Bowen
herself, ‘[u]nsuspected meaning in everything shines out; yet, we have the familiar resheathed in mystery’.7
In the broadest terms, an uncanny effect arises whenever things are not as they should be
– and whenever this dislocation provokes anxiety in the viewer. Disregarding boundaries,
sequence and conventional conceptions of temporality and possibility, the uncanny allows
experiences from the past to leap into the present, the dead to move freely among the
living, and inanimate objects to appear alive ('The Uncanny', 233). The uncanny allows
reality itself to take on a fictitious, dream-like quality ('The Uncanny', 244). But for Freud,
the uncanny also has a ‘secret nature’ ('The Uncanny',245). Certain objects and
encounters provoke unease because they re-awaken repressed experiences or
unconscious fears. Perhaps more interestingly, they confirm an animistic mode of thinking
meant to have been abandoned at infancy: superstitious beliefs that can, in turn, be traced
back to primordial times, and which the adult, like Western civilization, has learned to
surmount ('The Uncanny', 249). Thus, uncanny impressions need to be negated or
controlled in order for civilized society to continue functioning; it is only in the artistic
space, or on the psychoanalyst’s couch, that these sensations can be safely explored. At
the end of the therapy session (the page, the film reel, the exhibition) these impressions
5 Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003), 6.
6 Ellmann, 7. Towheed likewise notes that the first recorded use of the word ‘claustrophobic’ occurs in the
interwar novel To the North. See in particular 114.
7 Elizabeth Bowen, ‘The Roving Eye’, in Afterthought: Pieces about Writing (London: Longmans, 1962),
191-194 (194).
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are locked away again, and that which ought to have been concealed is concealed once
more. The unhomely, re-housed, becomes homely again. In peacetime, that is.
In Bowen’s wartime London, the uncanny ‘slips out’, manifesting itself on the streets and in
the minds of ordinary people: little is left to divide interiors and exteriors (material or
psychic), while meaning itself appears to constantly elude one’s grasp.8 But the author’s
characters find ways to re-map this alienating landscape. In her war narratives, the
dangerous hinterland of the mind becomes a fertile ground for dreams, both utopian and
apocalyptic: past and present collide, while visions of an enchanted future rise just beyond
the confines of the texts. In her post-war writing, the future has arrived, and another
process of deconstruction is being staged, the return to the past informing a search for
new ways of seeing and representing. Here, the uncanny is part of an effort to re-elaborate
and cast anew: an effort to ‘allow’, as she said of her stories, for ‘fantasy [and] what is
crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, “immortal longings”’ to inform an
understanding of what has been, and vision of what may be.9
An examination of ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’, a late story written in 1944, provides a
useful point of departure for exploring Bowen’s representation of loss, dislocation and
rupture. For here, the uncanny has, quite literally, come out of its ‘strange box’.10 The
story opens with a family in a field, as seen through the eyes of two telepathic twins, Sarah
8 My reading chimes with a number of other recent Bowen studies: Towheed terms Bowen’s ‘overcharged
concern with place’ as ‘verg[ing] on the obsessive and the Unheimlich’, 113, while June Sturrock identifies
‘the diction of the uncanny’ in The Little Girls. (June Sturrock. ‘Mumbo-jumbo: the haunted world of The
Little Girls’ in Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Susan Osborn [Cork: Cork University
Press, 2009], 83- 95 [83]).
9 Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Stories by Elizabeth Bowen' (1959), in Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (London:
Longmans, 1962), 77-81.
10 For an extensive discussion of Bowen’s representation of colliding temporal frameworks in ‘The Happy
Autumn Fields’, see Ellmann, 128-172. Ellmann highlights the significance of dislocated objects and ruins
in the construction of a literature that can ‘tell’ war, and a literary tradition that can survive it.
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and Henrietta. The latter senses that her sister’s imminent marriage to a man called
Eugene will cause an irreparable severance: ‘[o]ne more moment and it will be too late; no
further communication will be possible […]. Speak the only possible word! Say – oh, say
what? Oh, the word is lost!’11 The text itself breaks off and the reader finds themselves in
a bombed London flat. The story of the Victorian sisters is a nerve-shattered woman’s
hallucination: the shock of the bomb has unearthed a traumatic incident from the life of a
family (the building’s previous inhabitants?) that died long before she was born. Upon
waking, Mary surveys the room, the body she is in, and the man – her lover – who has
come to take her out of the detritus, resenting all three for keeping her from the ‘moment in
the field’. He picks up a box of yellowed photographs: they are the people she’s been
dreaming about. She flinches at Sarah’s photo as if glimpsing herself for the first time
(THAF, 257). As we follow her back into the dream, the parallels between the dread felt by
the sisters and that of the woman dreaming them become evident. The precariously piled
plates in the family’s kitchen, Sarah’s stupefied state, her sense of imminent disaster, her
powerlessness to stop it – all this is the stuff of neurotic dreams:
[h]ow could she put into words the feeling of dislocation, the formless dread that
had been with her since she found herself in the drawing room? The source of
both had been what she must call her dream. (THAF, 261)
The sound of another explosion brings Mary back into the Real. Travis has taken the box,
the dream is gone, and, having survived the ceiling collapsing above her, Mary cannot go
back to it. Trapped in an unfamiliar present, ‘no longer reckoning who she is’ (THAF, 264),
she weeps.
11 ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’, in The Collected Stories (London: Vintage, 1999), 254. Henceforth referred to
as THAF.
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We are essentially looking at the loss of the I – reflected in the identification with a dream
figment that has lost both the ‘other half’ of its childhood self (Henrietta), and the ‘other
half’ of its adult one (Eugene). ('The Uncanny', 234.) ‘Sarah’, or the ego, has been left
bare: the past is irretrievable, the future no longer there (late Freud would have spotted in
Henrietta the id, in Eugene the structure allowing the ego to continue functioning – a
fragment of the cultural super-ego that war undermines).12 But what of the mysterious
box, with its patchy evidence that Eugene was inexplicably thrown off his horse on an
autumn day before the wedding? In this, ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’ might be read as the
textual equivalent of the traumatic experience (object, memory) that remains defiantly
sealed against analysis – whether because the language to express the loss has, itself,
been lost (blitzed? repressed because its retention would make reality unbearable?), or
because the patient in shock is not only a person, but history itself.
Mary does exhibit the signs of a recovering patient. She lets go of the box (recoiling from it
with the same urgency with which she had previously sought it, the way the conscious
recoils from the uncanny relic it views as foreign). She answers to her name. She agrees
to leave the flat. But Bowen intimates that something else has been irreparably damaged,
and that the severed self will never be whole again, because the language with which to
communicate with others – let alone the feelings that drive the desire to express – is no
more: ‘[a]ll we can do is imitate love or sorrow’ (THAF, 265). Moreover, the rupture Mary
describes precedes the bombing: as if the story of people, with no language to tell it,
reverted to a process of endless, senseless, repetition long ago. If so, then the afternoon’s
shock (the shock of the war itself) is only a reverberation, a repetition, an imitation of a
12 'Civilization and its Discontents' (1929), in The Freud Reader, ed. by Peter Gay (New York: W.W.W.
Norton & Company, 1995), 722-773 (770).
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history that dried up before she and Travis had even been conceived. ‘What has happened
is cruel’, she says:
I am left with a fragment torn out of a day, a day I don’t even know where or
when; and now how am I to help laying that like a pattern against the poor stuff
of everything else? […] I have had a sister called Henrietta (THAF, 265).
The self lies in a truncated past that in turn refuses to relinquish little beyond negatives:
the sisters never married (Mary cannot be descended from them), an unnamed man died
alone in a field, and if Henrietta was the perpetrator, there is no evidence. And while the
orphaned ‘I’ checks her smudged face in the mirror and mechanically prepares for what is
to come, the reader is left with the impossibility of resolution. The horse without a rider is
signifier throwing off signified meaning as it ‘sh[ies] away’ from both audience and horizon,
time galloping sideways instead of forwards, a destination never reached (THAF, 261).
Dispensing with objects and stable reference points in order to break from the past, and
imagine an unfettered future, is central to one of Bowen’s last war stories, ‘Mysterious
Kôr’. Written in 1945, the narrative fixes its gaze on a blank future that lies beyond the war
– and beyond the text. This elsewhere is the stuff of dreams, the imagination and
primordial urges. A closer look at Freud will provide a useful framework with which to
address these themes. At perhaps the most fascinating point of ‘Beyond the Pleasure
Principle’, after having outlined repetition’s productive functions, Freud offers the possibility
that the compulsion to repeat is driven by instincts, ‘inherent in all organic life’, to return to
their initial state.13 The implication of this argument is that an unconscious urge exists in
13 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, vol XVIII, trans. James Strachey, (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 7-68 (37).
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all of us to ‘return’ to the ‘death’ (if by ‘death’ we mean inanimate state) before life. In
which case:
[w]e have no longer to reckon with the organism’s puzzling determination (so
hard to fit into any context) to maintain its own existence in the face of every
obstacle. What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in
its own fashion. Thus these guardians of life too were originally the myrmidons
of death ('Beyond the Pleasure Principle', 39).
The struggle for life is but an acceleration towards an end that precedes the beginning.14
As well as calling to mind the anxious gaze of ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’ (and the
preoccupation with the impossibility of setting history ‘back on its tracks’), this theory
provides the basis for an interpretation of ‘Mysterious Kôr’ as a text preoccupied with
envisaging a future unfettered by both the errors and the paradigms of modernity.
The central characters of this story, Pepita and Arthur, recite a poem about an ancient city
as they walk aimlessly through moonlit London, using the poem to imagine an a-temporal
place ‘with no history’: the blank space that will remain when the rest of the world has been
‘blown out of existence’.15 For Pepita, the beauty of this city lies in its abstraction, in its
disconnection from the here and now. Moreover, her conception of Kôr predates the
poem: '[o]h, I didn’t get much from that. I just got the name. I knew that must be the right
name; it’s like a cry […] What [the poem] says doesn’t matter. I see what it makes me see'
(MK, 148). If Arthur’s Kôr is a starting point for ‘“two people who have got no place’”
(MK, 160) whose aspect remains entrenched in the text from which it originates, and
14 For a nuanced analysis of this theory’s possible application to narrative structure, see Peter Brook,
‘Freud’s Masterplot’, in Yale French Studies, No. 55-56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of
Reading: Otherwise (1977), 280-300. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930440> [Accessed 19 December
2009].
15 ‘Mysterious Kôr', in The Collected Stories, (London: Vintage, 1999), 149. Henceforth referred to as MK.
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whose delineation requires the establishment of a fixed (narrative, geographic, temporal)
frame of reference, Pepita’s Kôr is both an end and a doubling back to a subconscious,
pre-historic idea – an organic germination, inexplicable, unknowable, and thus untainted
by any external influence or need for a coherent interpretation.
There is something peculiarly destructive about this vision. For the ‘I’ lost in a landscape of
meaningless signifiers (pavements stripped of people, traffic lights that blink for ghost
cars), Kôr is both a blank imaginative space divested of the need for signification and a
veritable customised coffin: the destination for the organism that ‘wants only to die in its
own fashion’ ('Beyond the Pleasure Principle', 39). While conscious Pepita concedes she
and Arthurmight ‘populate Kôr’, our final view of the city is from her subconscious’
perspective. The sleeping girl’s gaze into Kôr involvesturning away from Arthur – from the
dream figment (organic entity, narrative device) with whom procreation would have
enabled the continued deferral of death. The structure of the text itself reflects this
subversion. Originally driven by desire – two lovers’ search for a place to be alone – what
ensues is the death of desire: the ‘loss of [the self’s] mysterious expectation of her love for
love’ (MK, 159).
However, this death wish, viewed for the first time, itself signals a new beginning. A
dialogue between conflicting visions of imaginative expression has given way to a third
representation – a dream space whose ‘wide, void streets’ and ‘statues, pillars and
shadows’ (MK, 161) intimate unfathomable depths as yet to be explored.
‘The end’ is a central theme of Bowen’s penultimate novel, The Little Girls, reflecting, as
critics have noted, both the uncertain climate of the Cold War and a personal struggle
within the ageing novelist herself to come to terms with the death of her husband and with
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the recent sale and demolition of her family home.16 Objects in this text serve as a
reminder of the past, and as a way of allowing the self to stay in a history that appears to
no longer need it. The landscapes in the text are likewise depicted as both ravaged and
reconstructed: unwitting ‘fragments’ whose use in creating ‘pretty little gardens’ belies a
sense of bereavement for those gardens and pastures that were there before.17 But if a
need to understand the past informs much of the narrative, there are also glimpses of
something else germinating. As in ‘Mysterious Kôr’, a ‘fresh reality’ lies outside of the text.
And again, it is through the imagination, and through language, that this possibility is seen
to emerge.
It is the early 1960s. Dinah (‘Dicey’) has decided to fill the grotto near her house in
Somerset with ‘expressive objects’: a ‘museum’ of human peculiarities with which
generations ‘hundreds or perhaps thousands of years hence’ will be able to read their
predecessors(LG, 9). A chance utterance (the question ‘[w]ho is going to seal the cave?’)
triggers the realisation that she has, in fact, done something like this before: as a child,
with her two best friends, Clare (‘Mumbo’) and Sheila (‘Sheike’). She decides to contact
the two women (now in their late fifties), and the second section of the novel, which bends
back to the summer of 1914, tells the story of the original project: the burial of a time
capsule in the school playground together with a letter in an ‘Unknown Language’
addressed ‘to posterity’ (LG, 134). The final section takes us back to the present, narrating
16 See in particular Anne M. Wyatt Brown, ‘The Liberation of Mourning in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Little
Girls and Eva Trout’, in Ageing and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, ed. by Anne M. WyattBrown, and Janice Rossenn (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 164-186
17 The Little Girls (London: Cape, 1964), 173. Henceforth referred to as LG. Hermione Lee (‘Psychic
Furniture: Ellmann’s Elizabeth Bowen’, in Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing [London: Chatto and
Windus, 2005], 187-193 [195]) notes the strong influence of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu on
both the themes and the structure of the novel, while Sturrock (89) aptly attributes the novel’s
preoccupation with collecting, listing and repairing broken objects on the novelist’s own sense of
displacement and alienation.
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the women’s search for the (ultimately empty) time capsule, allowing us to slowly piece
together, through their conversations, an impression of the intervening years, while
revealing what each had secretly placed in the time capsule.
Having failed as a dancer and lost her first love in a freak car accident, Sheila ended up
marrying Trevor, one of the girls’ old schoolmates. In the capsule, she had placed her sixth
toe (a secret deformity, removed at birth), for safe-keeping. The premise: whensoever she
should choose to unearth it, ‘[t]here it will be […]. There it will be’ (LG, 275). If the
revelation of the deformity speaks of corporeal fragmentation, the actual disappearance of
the appendage denotes a permanent severance with the past, the irretrievability of the lost
‘I’.
Dinah’s, meanwhile, is the voice, throughout the novel, that advocates the ‘bend back’;
hers are the eyes that, glancing over people, places, and things, insist on seeing what isn’t
there. Having lost her mother to the Spanish flu of 1918, and later been widowed, she now
lives in a house furnished solely with the items of her childhood home: objects that predate the war. Tellingly, her gift to posterity is a revolver – an object stolen from her
mother’s dresser, and the subject of ongoing arguments between the girls, and later the
grown women, regarding its proper name (revolver, pistol, or gun). In light of its function,
the gun speaks of destruction and annihilation; but the ambivalence surrounding
the naming of this object (LG, 105; 219), is also significant. In staging a failure to ‘fix’ an
object to one referent, Bowen questions the ability of language to secure meaning –
highlighting, in turn, the self’s precarious place in the world.
The objects in Clare’s life further elucidate this ‘precariousness’. The great reader of poetry
and history who ‘could have done almost anything’ is now the owner of a gift shop chain
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(LG, 165). What she sells goes against all conceptions of chronology, tradition,
nationhood, or history:
Swedish, Spanish, Finnish, Italian, Provencal, Japanese, and Japanese
novelties, and others. Driftood, primitive art. Witch balls, wind harps. Neckwear,
place mats, personalized dog dishes, book ends, saris, door knockers, goat
rugs. (LG, 42)
What links these objects is their transience, and in their ongoing circulation they speak,
more than anything else, of impermanence. Like the ‘unknown language’ Clare invented
only to relinquish it to a future that would then see it erased, like the empty capsule, they
remain unsolved mysteries, unsignifying signifiers: textes scriptibles on which customers
can cast their own interpretations. This is evidenced most clearly by Dinah’s complex
‘reading’ of a butter knife in Clare’s shop. Requesting to purchase the knife, Dinah refers to
the various interpretations such a request might invite, including the superstitious (the
severing of friendship), and the criminal (LG, 175). Dinah speaks of a temporal landscape
in which ‘practically everything’ has become a symbol; a notion that, by the end of the
novel, takes on negative connotations: if everything can be deconstructed, what referents
remain? Such precariousness is further underlined by the revelation of what young Clare
had buried: a book by her once-loved Shelley, now deemed ‘wrong’ (LG, 219). In part
suggesting a severance from literary tradition, this purgation implicitly suggests the need
for new ways of representing, and of locating the self.
The critical dialogue around this text has focused a great deal on the (ultimately fallible)
function objects serve in allowing Dinah to hold onto the past. In this context, the discovery
of the empty time capsule is the ‘shock’ that brings her back into the present, triggering a
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belated mourning for her mother.18 Ellmann goes even further, diagnosing Dinah’s cave
project as a case of ‘encryptment’ (that is, in which the ego attempts to incorporate, rather
than articulate, its loss), reading the narrative itself as one preoccupied with the
inevitability of death.19 While Ellmann’s use of ‘encryptment’ is illuminating, I resist her
overall argument: the assembly of objects speaks of a desire to express, the search for the
capsule suggesting a desire to understand the past. Hermione Lee, likewise, detects the
danger such a schematic Freudian reading has of ‘burying [the author] alive’ (LG, 190).20
My own reading seeks to understand those points at which objects draw the self – and the
text – out, and facilitate its ‘unsealing’.
Towheed’s idea of positive-negative space, alluded to in the introduction, provides a useful
framework for considering this. An examination of an early scene in the second section of
the novel, in which Clare contemplates the china in Dinah’s mother’s drawing room,
elucidates my point. For Clare, the objects’
look of eternity could be taken in in less than a minute. She had lived within
them. That she knew each landscape, to her a planet, to be linked in
destructability with the cup, bowl or plate upon which it was, added peril to love.
One saw, here, how china could break. One foresaw also how, one day or
another, it must do so beyond repair. (LG, 85)
The meditations of the Army child sensitive to the convulsions of history and resigned to
transient living (an existence ‘round [which] nothing but intangibles can accumulate’) are
then re-cast in the last passage of the novel (LG, 85). Clare looks into ‘the world of china’
18 See Wyatt Brown, 176.
19 Ellmann, 198.
20 Lee, ‘Psychic Furniture: Ellmann’s Elizabeth Bowen’, 190.
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gracing the chimneypiece in Dinah’s room as her friend lies sleeping. Having survived two
wars and several moves, the objects, now, are indeed broken:
[b]eautiful bowls stayed cradled within their networks of cracks; stitches held
obstinately together what had been broken […] She was looking into a fragile
representation of a world of honour, which was to say unfailingness. (LG, 276)
A temporal doubling occurs: the ‘soldier’s child’, Clare’s childhood self, also contemplates
the china, realising that ‘never has she found anywhere else’ the ‘everlasting’ spaces
reproduced on its surfaces (LG, 276). But in these negations we see the trace of where
she is: an affirmation of her presence in the here and now. Combined with a thought just
prior (aptly placed in brackets – a negative space in the text itself), in which desire is
posited as an uncanny force, allowing for the disembodied self to connect with others, both
living and dead, the passage affirms Clare’s place in the real world. The bracket in the text
‘([a]re not desires acts? One is where one would be. May we not, therefore, frequent each
other, without the body,not only in dreams?)’, provides an uncanny elision, a last trace of
that imaginative space in which past and present can indeed co-exist (LG, 276).
Crucially, it is not just the self that is located in this last scene of the novel: it is the self in a
social context. We see a re-birth through dialogue, a re-affirmation of the lost ‘you’. As
Clare silently contemplates the china, adult Dinah awakens. She recognises Clare by her
adult name – while the question, ‘Clare, where have you been?’ compels a reading beyond
the last page (LG, 277). A new conversation is about to begin, driven by a compulsion not
to sleep, not to repeat, but to listen. This, in itself, signals a new way of inhabiting the
present. Safely re-housed in brackets, the Uncanny gives way to the kind of painful
dialogue the novel has, hitherto, been unable to do more than attempt: one in which both
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parties can bear to hear.
21
For the reader, meanwhile, there remains a space in which –
perhaps like Pepita in Kôr – to ‘blow’ their own interpretations; to contemplate, rather than
be ‘waylaid’ by the significance of those impressions they have gathered.
I used the term ‘collage’ at the beginning of this paper, to refer to a war-torn landscape
scattered with strange objects. I return to this image in my conclusion to consider the
reparative and representational function of the found object as manifest in a key scene,
occurring towards the end of The Little Girls, in which a gesture is made towards the
creation of a real collage. Initiated by the central protagonists’ granddaughters, this
juxtaposition of broken images signals at once an attempt to ‘make new’ and a creative
impasse.
While the adults concern themselves over Dinah’s health, her granddaughters have been
occupying themselves with the task of cutting up a stack of magazines: Nature, an old
motor show catalogue, and a ‘bygone’ copy of Vogue. The images the girls cut out (a
dinosaur, an Aztec altar, a Jaguar, and a ‘heart-shaped’ lady from a corset ad) are likewise
selected haphazardly, while the magazines themselves are not only dated, but ‘heavily
mutilated’ from previous processes of excision (LG, 263).
According to the Guggenheim Online Glossary, ‘emphasising concept and process over
end product, collage [brings] the incongruous into meaningful congress with the
ordinary’.22 Jane Goldman likewise defines the collage as a conflation of disparate
21 Informing my reading is Lyndsey Stonebridge’s exploration of post-war group psychology, and her citation
of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ vision of recovery as the moment in which a person ‘can bear to
listen to what other people have to say [and] rediscover an appetite for talking and for listening and for
disagreement’. See Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century
British Culture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 115.
22 Guggenheim Online Glossary, <http://www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/concept_Collage.html>,
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sources that provide a ‘transgressive, sometimes dissident, hinge onto the real, outside
world, at the same time as transforming these materials into something new’.23 Goldman’s
reading of the collage form as an epitome of modernity’s ‘apocalypse of image’ is
especially useful, as it allows us to read the creation Bowen stages as both a destruction
of the old and a preparation for the new.24 That Bowen engages her characters with a
form
that
emphasises
not
only
experimentation
over
tradition,
but process over completion is also indicative: for as a game without a purpose, and a
temporary measure to fill time, the scene speaks, in part, of transience and imminent
endings. ‘No good starting anything else’ one child says: ‘we’re only going to have to go’
(LG, 265).
The rapidity with which the girls have, in turn, ‘attacked’, ‘detached’ and discarded the
images is, likewise, reminiscent of Clare’s philosophy of consumption (LG, 212). But if the
‘heart-shaped lady’ and the corset advertisements point to the very constructed,
manufactured quality of the world these children (and the modern artist) inhabit, their
energetic engagement with that world (a brashness equivalent to that of their elder
counterparts), indicates an ability to survive it, to meet it on their own terms: ‘Pamela,
having completely detached the dinosaur from its former surroundings, plac[es] it beside
her on the end of the sofa, anew to behold it’ (LG, 254). There is something
wonderfully regenerativeabout this scene. Bowen has, in fact, staged a process of both
deconstruction and artistic renewal. Caught in the space between the imaginative, the real,
and the constructed/commodified, and unable to stay fixed in one location, the child/artist
is driven to find new ways of understanding and representing their world. She has ‘brought
[Accessed 31 July 2010].
23 Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910 – 1945: Image to Apocalypse (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 58.
24 Ibid., 21
©Rachele Dini
17
the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary’, the wild into the domestic, the
pre-historic into the present, the already-seen into the as-yet-to-behold. In so doing,
Pamela has unwittingly – uncannily, even – initiated that which her grandmother has been
asking of herself, and of her friends, since the discovery of the empty coffer, since her
recognition that ‘[n]othing is real’: a new way of seeing (LG, 194).25 Recalling Mary’s
‘laying’ of dreams over ‘the poor stuff of everything else’ in ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’
(THAF, 265) and Pepita’s search for Kôr, Pamela’s selection and vision, in its very act of
de-contextualising, de-historicising and displacing, traces a new artistic trajectory.
If in ‘The Happy Autumn Fields’ the uncanny object serves as a repository for experiences
too difficult to fathom, and if in ‘Mysterious Kôr’ the absence of objects speaks of an all-too
uncertain future and of the a-social’s self desire to ‘die only in its own fashion’ ('Beyond the
Pleasure Principle', 39), then in The Little Girls it is the sheer number of objects, and their
many significations, that provide both salient evidence of the past, and ample material with
which to create the future. In her characters’ multi-faceted engagement with these objects,
Bowen suggests the many ways in which the self, like the artist, might continue to locate
themselves. And it is fitting that it should again be the figure of the child – for Bowen, as
with Freud, the epitome of artistic germination, embodying that ‘immediacy and purity of
sensation’ necessary for any form of creative expression – that is entrusted with the task of
exploring this modern space.26 ‘Should we not look for the beginnings of poetic creativity
in childhood?’ Freud suggests in his early study, The Creative Writer and Daydreaming, for
both the artist and the child are intent on ‘imposing a new and more pleasing order on the
25 I am referring, in particular, to Dinah’s restless, if vague, vociferation: ‘there’s so much else to get on with.
Such widening horizons […]. So much more to get one’s hands on to’ (LG, 194).
26 ‘Stories by Elizabeth Bowen’, in Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (London: Longmans, 1962), 77-81
(81).
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18
things that make up [their] world’.27 Bowen implicitly echoes this thought throughout her
writing career as she peoples her texts with characters whose engagement with their
precarious, fragmented worlds remains always exploratory, always curious, always intent
on finding new ways to behold.
27 'Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming' (1907), in The Freud Reader, trans. by Peter Gay (New York:
W.W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 436-442 (436).
©Rachele Dini