Elizabeth Bowen’s Equivocal Modernism

The equivocal relation to modernist modes of narration exhibited by Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction provides a unique vantage point for revising critical understanding of modernism’s place in the history of the novel. Readings of The Last September (1929), To the North (1933), The House in Paris (1935), and The Death of the Heart (1938) show how these works both exploit stream of consciousness techniques and foreground the aspects of emotional life those techniques are poorly calibrated to capture. This growing skepticism of modernist narration is notably accompanied by freer use of an explicitly philosophizing narrative voice, tacitly justified by the premise that the fullest depiction of a character’s feelings requires a working theory of emotional attachment. Bowen’s fiction ultimately helps us delineate the fundamental affordances—and limitations—of modernist forms for representing affect and emotion.