The Gaze in Elizabeth Bowen’s Spectral Resistance Fantasies

Abstract

In this chapter Foley draws from Jacques Lacan’s formulation of the gaze to read the haunting registers of a selection of the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s novels and short fiction. Two short stories from Bowen’s first collection Encounters (1923)—that is, “The Shadowy Third” and “Daffodils”—are analysed to demonstrate the importance of visuality and the gaze to Bowen’s aesthetic and the ways in which her characters rely upon fantasies of self-fashioning to survive as subjects. This haunted model of subjectivity is then traced across two of her major novels: The Hotel (1927) and The House in Paris (1931). The power of the gaze in these novels is maintained by a symbolic and super-egoic register that often finds voice in the judgements of older, dominating women. The purgatorial models of self-fashioning that younger characters construct to protect themselves from such an assault are evident, too, in Bowen’s understanding of the short story—particularly in her reading of “resistance fantasies” that may terrify and yet sustain the subject at times of crisis that she puts forward in the postscript to her collection The Demon Lover (1945).