The State of Exception and Exceptional States in Elizabeth Bowen’s Wartime Ghost Stories

In this article, I consider Elizabeth Bowen’s depiction of the impact on citizens of their changing political and legal relationship to the British state during World War II, using Agamben and Freud’s writing about wartime behaviour of the state to illuminate Bowen’s short fiction, in particular ‘The Demon Lover’ and ‘Green Holly.’ Although from different points on the political spectrum, Agamben, like Bowen, is opposed to the expansion of the state into the lives of citizens. As a legal philosopher, he has written extensively on the early to mid-twentieth century, and the article takes his theory, expressed in The State of Exception, as its starting point. The article goes on to compare the evocation of the state’s presence and treatment of its citizens in ‘The Demon Lover’ and ‘Green Holly,’ incorporating Freud’s essay ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.’ I then focus on Bowen’s portrayal of the socio-legal predicament that women were placed in through consideration of the literary antecedents to ‘The Demon Lover,’ the history of state surveillance of war widows, and Bowen’s short radio play, ‘A Year I Remember – 1918.’ The article culminates with the most exceptional state in the stories, and in Freud: the ghosts. I discuss the extent to which they represent the unmourned wartime dead or the existential anxiety experienced not only because of the threat of death during war, but also, the threat to individuality, rights and legal status created by the state of exception.

proper relationship between the state and the citizen…lies at the heart of Bowen's novel.' 2 In this article, I consider Bowen's engagement with the changing political and legal relationship between the British state and citizens during World War II, whilst she herself was actively engaged in work for the state.
In that time, as Bowen wrote in 1945 in a magazine article titled 'The Short Story,' she found that 'the discontinuities of life in wartime make such life a difficult subject for the novelist,' but 'the short story is the ideal prose medium for wartime creative writing ' (2008: 314-315). As such, it was as she was living ' as a civilian, and as a writer,' and as a government agent (albeit in a minor way), 'with every pore open,' that she produced her wartime short stories (Bowen, 1945). The first time she read them through as a collection in 1945, she was struck by what she termed the 'rising tide of hallucination', as the exceptional state of 'lucid abnormality' created by the war permeated the stories (1945). This heightened psychic state is exactly why her stories have been read from a psychological and psychoanalytical critical viewpoint, 3 often with a particular focus on her ghost stories as being in an Irish Gothic tradition. 4 Bowen's writing, including these comments on her own stories, reflects the fact that 'Freudian psychoanalysis' had become 'both familiar and influential in the interwar years' (McKibbin, 1998: 299). In this article, I consider how Freud's theories on the wartime behaviour of the state and its impact on citizens illuminates Bowen's writing. In his 1915 essay, 'Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,' written while his sons were fighting in World War I, Freud writes about state legitimisation of the illicit treatment of its citizens, including violence, and the psychic creation of ghosts in the face of death (Freud, 1985). It is these two areas, and how they interact, that I focus on in Bowen's well-documented story, 'The Demon Lover,' published in 1941, and her less examined piece, 'Green Holly,' published later in the war, in 1944. This will build on previous criticism and extend the analysis into considering the political elements of these two ghost stories.
2 See also Stonebridge (2011) on human rights and the social contract in Bowen's post-war writings. 3 See Ellman (2002), Corcoran (2004), Thurston (2012) and Gildersleeve (2014). 4 For example, see Lassner (1991: 10) and Bryant-Jordan (1992: 130). Bowen's Wartime Ghost Stories 4 In addition to being written during different stages of the war, the stories, between them, span the period from World War I (1914)(1915)(1916)(1917)(1918) to World War II (1939)(1940)(1941)(1942)(1943)(1944)(1945). In 'The Demon Lover,' the protagonist, Kathleen Drover, visits her evacuated home in post-Blitz London, only to find a letter from her former lover, a soldier reported to have died in the First World War (Bowen, 1980a). The impact of that earlier conflict is incorporated into the story by a flashback to their last meeting, and also through the threat of the soldier's ghostly return. In the later story, the characters have been working in a remote house as government intelligence workers (not unlike Bowen) since the beginning of the war (Bowen, 1980b). Moved to a new property at the government's insistence, they are haunted by ghosts of former occupants of the house.

Murphy: The State of Exception and Exceptional States in Elizabeth
In the period between Freud writing about the inhibitions placed on noncombatant's 'powers and activities ' (1985: 62), and Bowen's short stories, the ability of the state to intrude on the lives of citizens had, in fact, seen an unprecedented expansion. My opening quotation, from legal philosopher Giorgio Agamben's book The State of Exception, expresses his concern that this period enabled governments, incorporating Freud's writings on the topic. The argument then moves to focus on the particular socio-legal predicament women were placed in, giving a detailed analysis of the 'unnatural promise' (Bowen, 1980a: 746) by Kathleen to her soldier fiancé in 'The Demon Lover,' through consideration of the literary antecedents to the story, the history of state surveillance of war widows, and Bowen's short radio play, 'A Year I Remember -1918Remember - ' (2010. The article culminates in investigating the most extreme hallucinatory, exceptional state in the stories, the ghosts, considering the extent to which they represent ' all the dead,' who, '[u]ncounted…continued to move in shoals through the city day,' (Bowen, 1948: 90), or whether they act as an expression of the existential anxiety experienced not only because of the threat of death during war, but also, the threat to individuality, rights and legal status created by the expansion of the state. Schmitt's theory of the state of exception, whose goal he identifies as being 'the inscription of the state of exception within a juridical context' (Agamben, 2005: 32).
Schmitt posits that in the state of exception, when emergency powers are invoked, 'the juridical order is preserved even when the law itself is suspended' (Humphreys, 2006: 682). As Agamben points out, this is ' a paradoxical articulation,' and to achieve it 'what must be inscribed within the law is something that is essentially exterior to it, that is, nothing less than the suspension of the juridical order itself' (2005: 33).
Agamben goes on to sum up the ways in which Schmitt, across both his earlier works,  (Stannard, 1939). He goes on to list some of the highlights, giving government agencies' extensive powers over land and persons, including ' drastic precautions for the security of the State.' Agamben was certainly not wrong when he wrote that after World War I 'the principle of the state of exception had been firmly introduced into English law ' (2005: 19). It could be objected that the government did so out of necessity, to defend its citizens from a nation committing worse breaches of laws and rights. Yet this does not change the legal stance taken up, and the actual historical events make such clear-cut distinctions between nations far less comfortable. Although in '1939 it was not the original intention of the British authorities to embark on a policy of mass alien internment as had been carried out in the First World War…by mid-1940 the situation had changed' (Brinson, 2008: 288). As a result, 'by the summer of 1940, around 25,000 men and perhaps 4,000 women found themselves in internment camps on the Isle of Man and elsewhere.' (Brinson, 2008: 288) Although some were 'pro-Nazi' sympathisers, 'the vast majority' were 'refugees from Nazi oppression' (Brinson, 2008: 288). Of course, this is not to suggest that there is any parity between such internment camps and the Nazi concentration camps. Nonetheless, it does point to the ambiguity of claims by the British government to be acting wholly differently to her enemies. This is an ambiguity Bowen eventually expressed in her doubling up of the two Roberts in The Heat of the Day, with one being a British spy and the other a Nazi sympathiser.
The difficulty that surrounds attempts to define what is licit or illicit behaviour in the state of exception, from another angle, is also a question of violence. This is a question that Agamben considers through what reads as an exciting discovery while concern with the state's expansion is also evident in this earlier short story, it is more apparent in 'Green Holly,' written in 1944, by which time the impact and effect of state intrusion on daily life was felt more intensely (Bowen, 1980b: 811).
The characters in this story have been requisitioned to do secret government work, with 'their confinement' to a remote house dating 'from 1940,' and the narrator informs us that they 'were Experts' but archly adds 'in what, the Censor would not permit me to say.' (1980b: 811) For a moment such secretive work is almost glamorous, but Bowen quickly charts the more sinister impact of the state of exception on these individuals, who had ' dropped out of human memory' so that their 'reappearances in their former circles were infrequent, ghostly' (1980b: 811).
The story itself charts the increasing levels of interference and control practised by the nation, as 'The Army, for reasons it failed to justify, wanted the house they had been in since 1940; so they -lock, stock and barrel and files and all -had been bundled into another one, six miles away ' (1980b: 812). It could be argued this makes little difference to their lives; however, Bowen comically points out that it has actually made small but keenly felt changes, as 'their already sufficient distance from the market town with its bars and movies had now been added to by six miles' Bowen interprets the changes to the houses themselves as subtle, but lasting: Those unnumbered human beings who came and went -kept it in motion by the clockwork of wartime… -have left something behind them, something that will not evaporate so quickly as the smell of unfamiliar cigarettes.
These now departed dwellers in one's house cannot fail to be seen as either enigmas or enemies; one must try to dwell on them as enigmas (2008:  Only a little more than a minute later she was free to run up the silent lawn… she already felt that unnatural promise drive down between her and the rest of all human kind… She could not have plighted a more sinister troth (1980a: 746).
The soldier's demand, that she wait even if he is killed -or she hears that he is killed -requires the subordination of her private interests to the potential demands of his role as a soldier. She can hardly assert her right to be freed of the obligation if he dies, while he is ostensibly fighting to protect her. In some ways, it is a question that he should never have asked; it is an 'unnatural promise.' Yet, it could be argued, it is the kind of sentimental, romantic promise that abounds: particularly in wartime, or indeed, in literature. In fact, as Neil Corcoran reveals in his chapter on Bowen's wartime short stories, the promise has its origins in the title of the story: 'The Demon Lover' is the name of a Scottish ballad sometimes also called 'The Carpenter's Wife' (2004: 4). There are of course variants, but the tenets of the original narrative are worth comparing to Bowen's story. In it, a woman who was betrothed to a sailor, who she thought had drowned at sea, is now married to another man (usually a carpenter) and has a family. The story consists of a spirit or devil in the form of the former fiancée returning to lure the woman away with the promises of riches, only for her to realise she has been tricked, and then she either dies or descends to hell.
The woman is condemned for her unfaithfulness -for breaking her promise to wait for the return of her betrothed, even though he has died. This traditional tale would suggest that there is nothing unusual, or untoward, in the promise extracted from Kathleen.
However, there are a few crucial distinctions. As discussed in further detail later in this article, Mrs Drover does not choose to flee with her former lover, but is trying to escape his threatened return. The overall effect of Bowen's story is not to morally judge the woman's behaviour. In fact, the narrative voice instead points out that the soldier's demand is socially isolating and aberrant. Although Bowen's choice of the soldier can be likened to the sailor, not least in the likelihood of them dying, the authority with which he speaks is different. The soldier is depicted as exploiting the wartime situation to make a demand that extends beyond the grave. He does so through an oath -a form that should epitomise legal, normative bonds between people, but Bowen has located Kathleen in a twilight world, where she seems unable to avail herself of whatever socio-legal conventions underpin courtship (not that such conventions are at all straightforward). While the ballad of 'The Demon Lover' provides a framework for the genre expectations of the story, it is far more difficult to establish what standard practices were between men and women in the earlier half of the twentieth-century. So much so that, ' despite the difficulties historians face in accessing intimate physical experiences, we seem to know far more about English sexual lives than about how men and women contracted, negotiated, and maintained emotional intimacies prior to marriage' (Langhamer, 2007: 174).
Nonetheless, we do know there was an expectation that 'the war widow…was expected to remain faithful to her fallen husband' (Bette, 2015), and a 'war widow who did not behave in an exemplary manner risked reprobation' (Lomas, 2000: 137), as well as loss of her widow's pension. The ambiguity of Kathleen's position is heightened because she was not married to the soldier; if she were, one aspect of the state's expectation would have been for her to remain faithful to him. In fact, an extensive system of surveillance was established by the government to ensure that widows' behaviour was of the appropriate moral standard (Lomas, 2000: 131-132).
However, as Kathleen would not qualify for such investigation, it is as if the soldier has taken it upon himself to carry out the state surveillance, writing in the letter, 'I was sorry to see you leave London, but was satisfied that you would be back in time' (Bowen, 1980a: 744 (Bowen, 2010: 66). The piece involves broadcasts and recordings from the earlier period, along with snatches of conversations between the nurses. A gramophone is heard 'playing "Widows are Wonderful"' which is followed by 'the subsequent conversation':  (Bowen, 2010: 67).
The combination of wartime loss of life and governmental policy leaves the women in a social and legal no-man's land; this is in effect where Kathleen becomes located, or dislocated to, as the 'unnatural promise' he extracts which drives ' down between her and the rest of all human kind [,]' in effect asks her to behave like a widow without being married (Bowen, 1980a: 746). The extremity she was in causes her, years later, to ask herself, 'What did he do to make me promise like that?' claiming that she ' can't remember' only for the narrator to add, 'But she found that she could' (Bowen, 1980a: 748). Yet she avoids revealing why, instead describing how well: 'She remembered not only all that he said and did but the complete suspension of her existence during that August week' (Bowen, 1980a: 748). The equivocal legal status of her unnerving betrothal left her in a state of psychological limbo, even after he 'was reported missing, presumed killed' (Bowen, 1980a: 748). She is not that upset, in fact, 'her trouble, behind just a little grief, was a complete dislocation from everything.' whom there is something the matter, so they ask him, 'You been seeing the ghost?' (Bowen, 2010: 67). Alongside their legally liminal status, as neither widows nor notwidows, it is 'said the house was haunted' (2010: 67).
In Bowen, the ambiguous presence of ghosts becomes one of the extreme symptoms of the psychic stress experienced by civilians during wartime. In 'The Demon Lover,' Bowen delays the revelation that the soldier was presumed dead, allowing the uncanny to develop into a suggestion of 'the supernatural side of the letter's entrance ' (1980a: 746). Kathleen refuses to dwell on this, ruminating that 'As things were -dead or living the letter-writer sent her only a threat' (Bowen, 1980a: 746). She is haunted by the spectre of her former lover, whether he is a ghost or not, so that she hopes 'she had imagined the letter' (Bowen, 1980a: 746). In, almost playfully, having her character consciously rule out the hallucinatory, Bowen keeps open the possibility that Mrs Drover is sufficiently in charge of her mind for the demon's appearance at the end of the story to be real. Indeed, this is how Lassner interprets the story, so that on Mrs Drover's return, 'The empty house is now haunted…by the presence of a mysterious letter from her fiancé, who perished in World War I ' (1991: 64). Certainly, the presence of the letter in the house is hard to explain otherwise, although Bryant-Jordan argues the opposite, claiming that 'the piquancy of memory compels her to imagine that this man has written a letter to her ' (1992: 133). Significantly, Bowen does not allow the reader to be so sure of this, maintaining the ambiguity around the ghost; as Corcoran (2004: 158), in keeping with Ellmann (2002: 176), sums it up, the 'revenant is one of the 'missing' of World War I, 'presumed dead' but never actually found-so that his return may, just about, be susceptible to rational explanation.' This ever-oscillating uncertainty increases the uncanny tension in 'The Demon Lover,' especially when compared to 'Green Holly,' where Bowen almost seems to be parodying the clichés of ambiguity surrounding the presence of ghosts. From the description of the 'Gothic porch and gables' (Bowen, 1980b: 812), to the wry narrative comment, 'And not, you could think, by chance did the electric light choose this moment for one of its brown fade-outs,' during the apparition of the ghost, so that 'the scene…faded under this fog-dark but glassclear veil of hallucination' (Bowen, 1980b: 818). The ironic tone seems to imply Mr Winterslow's vision of the ghost at the top of the stairs is a product of psychological strain. However, as will be discussed a little later in the essay, the ghost in 'Green Holly,' is crucially different from Bowen's other haunting spectres: some of the story being from her perspective, albeit through free-indirect discourse, lends far greater veracity to her existence.
In 'The Demon Lover,' Bowen adds to the central ambiguity by continuing to create an atmosphere ever more psychologically charged: The desuetude of her former bedroom, her married London home's whole air of being a cracked cup from which memory…had either evaporated or leaked away, made a crisis -and at just this crisis the letter-writer had…struck (1980a: 747).
And, just as in Auden's poem 'As I Walked Out One Evening,' written in 1937, 'the crack in the tea-cup opens/A lane to the land of the dead ' (1991: 134). The crisis is created by the war, the state of exception that has returned and brought with it the ghosts of the past. It is here that Freud's claims about the creation of ghosts as a means of coping with death have resonance (1985: 82). In his paper, he writes of primeval man that, 'It was beside the dead body of someone he loved that he invented spirits, and his sense of guilt at the satisfaction mingled with his sorrow turned these new-born spirits into evil demons that had to be dreaded.' That such illusory spirits abound during a time of war is implicit in the psychological pressures that give rise to them.
Freud writes that, 'Just as for primeval man, so also for our unconscious…the two opposing attitudes towards death, the one which acknowledges it as the annihilation of life and the other which denies it as unreal, collide and come into conflict ' (1985: 87). As such, ghosts arise out of conflicting, contradictory drives in mankind: they are borne out of ambivalence (Freud, 1985: 82). The belief in our own immortality conflicts with the reality of death, and during 'war…[d]eath will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in it' (Freud, 1985: 79), while there is a mixture of love, relief and guilt directed towards those that die. Crucially, for modern man, all of this conflict is located in the unconscious, rather than in the presence of literal ghosts.
Without recourse to the primitive coping mechanism of unambiguous ghosts that can be exorcised, London and Mrs Drover both become haunted by the threatened presence of an equivocal ghost. In the ' dead air' of her house, surrounded by the empty, watching streets of wartime London, death becomes both undeniable and insupportable (Bowen, 1980a: 743). Here 'Green Holly' adds an interesting element to this concern, as it is the ghost itself that experiences the 'two opposing attitudes towards death' (Freud, 1985: 87). Her 'visibleness' is dependent ' on having fallen in love again', this time with the unpromisingly named Mr Winterslow, but 'because of her years of death, there cut an extreme anxiety: it was not merely a matter of, how was she? but of, was she -tonight -at all?' (Bowen, 1980b: 815). As Lassner argues, the ghost herself feels existential anxiety, which is not caused by the war, but by her lack of existence (1991: 56). However, Lassner's argument that 'The isolation of the group' of intelligence officers 'is matched by the acute loneliness of the ghost' suggests parallels between them (1991: 56). The fact that 'Death had left [the ghost] to be her own mirror' causes her to try and verify her existence in being seen by a man, which is what she puts all of her energy into achieving, as 'She gathered about her, with a gesture not less proud for being tormentedly uncertain, the total of her visibility' (Bowen, 1980b: 816-817). Yet her attempt fails bathetically, as not only does he just want her to let him past her on the stairs to get his 'spectacles' but he also then can't really see her, asking, 'Where are you?' (Bowen, 1980b: 818). In this, the ghost reflects the position of the other women in the house. Earlier in the story, we are told that 'Miss Bates had been engaged to Mr Winterslow; before that, she had been extremely friendly with Mr Rankstock,' and that 'Mr Rankstock's deviation towards one Carla…had been totally uninteresting to everyone' (Bowen, 1980b: 812).
In their anonymity, as Lassner argues, no matter how 'significant their war work, the threat of annihilation and the ambiguity of their intelligence work leave them in limbo. The ghost thus signifies the terrifying possibility that, they too, might not exist ' (1991: 56 Coming face-to-face with her fear, whether that is the ghost of her former lover or an hysterical projection, involves being whisked away to join the dead for ' eternity.' As in 'Green Holly,' parallels between the citizen living through the strain of wartime and the ghost emerge. Notably, the letter left in the house is signed 'K,' her own initial, (Bowen, 1980a: 744) and given that she admits that 'under no conditions could she remember his face,' it is not clear if she recognises the driver (Bowen, 1980a: 748). The ghostly presences summoned in response to the pressures of wartime are strongly identified with by the living, are persistent, and resist being exorcised. The ending of 'Green Holly,' depicts this even more firmly, with Miss Bates revealing that she also saw the ghost of the dead man at the foot of the stairs, which the ghost of the femme fatale had referred to earlier in the story, which leads her to exclaim, 'But who was she…? -I could be fatal' (1980b: 819-20).
As we have seen, for Freud, ghosts operate as a primitive way of coping with the belief in our own immortality when faced with death, whereas Bowen's ghosts reflect, and in some cases, create existential anxiety. Freud distinguishes between the practices of primeval peoples and contemporary European society. Although often guilty of primitivism, Freud actually commends practices of the so-called less civilised as they are connected with coping with violence and death, and in particular, for their practice of atoning 'for the murders they committed in war by penances' before they could even 'set foot in their village ' (1985: 84). This acts as an acknowledgement that violence committed against others, even in war, is still deserving of guilt, something that Freud believes modern humanity does not allow for (Freud, 1985: 84). Interestingly, this atoning does not rid us of the primitive 'fear of the avenging spirits of the slain' (Freud, 1985: 84). Yet, in a surprising move, Freud asks at the very end of his essay whether we would be better admitting that 'in our civilized attitude towards death we are once again living psychologically beyond our means' and whether would be better 'to give a little more prominence to the unconscious attitude towards death which we have hitherto so carefully suppressed' (Freud, 1985: 89). The unconscious attitude is the same as the primeval viewpoint, suggesting that for Freud, we would be psychologically healthier for acknowledging our guilt, and believing in ghosts.
Not so for modern humans, as rituals associated with mourning the dead, and in particular those who died in war, were actively reduced by the British state in the inter-war period. This began during World War I, where: Bodies of dead combatants and the funerary rituals associated with their disposal became the property and duty of the state, the Imperial War Graves Commission burying the dead, when conditions allowed, close to the site of battle, in cemeteries that emphasized their commonality with their comrades, rather than their civilian identity (Noakes, 2015: 75).
Of course, this did not lessen the psychological need for the bereaved to process their grief, as is suggested by, 'The numbers who queued to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and the Cenotaph in 1920' (Noakes, 2015: 75). Rather, it is another instance of the expansion of state powers into the private lives of citizens as a result of the state of exception caused by war. The extensive and deliberate nature of such steps is evidenced by the fact that when in the 1930s the 'Home Office and the Ministry of Health became concerned about the number of corpses aerial warfare was expected to create' they looked to amend World War I policy, which had been 'to inscribe the deaths of civilians in the limited air raids of that conflict with sacrificial meaning' (Noakes, 2015: 77). As a result, New guidelines were issued, discouraging the use of horses to draw hearses, and putting an end to the tradition of undertakers and mourners walking ahead of the cortege…and the government and local authorities planned for mass civilian casualties by stockpiling cardboard coffins and shrouds (Noakes, 2015: 77).
In addition to the huge numbers of deaths, this state control of mourning practices is in part responsible for the rise in the 'popularity of spiritualism in interwar Britain,' as 'the need of many of the bereaved to make contact with the dead continued' (Noakes, 2015: 75). This need to be in contact with the dead is palpable in the almost séance like atmosphere of 'Green Holly,' and crucially, of course, Kathleen's soldier was 'reported missing, presumed killed,' and so, other than at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, could not be ritually mourned (Bowen, 1980a: 746). It is likely that, the officially sanctioned 'silencing of grief may well have made the process of bereavement, or even witnessing death, harder to bear,' leading to a proliferation of ghosts, literary and otherwise, refusing to be laid to rest (Noakes, 2015: 83). Additionally, the extension of the state's jurisdiction over In her 'Preface' to The Second Ghost Book Bowen questions why 'ghosts should today be so ubiquitous ' (1952' ( , quoted in Lassner, 1991. If 'Tradition connects with the scenes of violence,' Bowen asks whether this means that ' any and every place is, has been or may be a scene of violence?' (Bowen, 1952, quoted in Lassner, 1991. In response to her own question, she acknowledges that, 'Our interpretation of violence is wider than once it was,' and includes, 'Inflictions and endurances, exactions, injustices, infidelities' (Bowen, 1952, quoted in Lassner, 1991. During World War II, the civilian population was subtly, but increasingly, subject to such inflictions and injustices by the operation of the nation state. The legal philosophy of Agamben and psychoanalysis of Freud demonstrate the fraught nature of the complexities that arose as a consequence for citizens, a complexity that is reflected in Bowen's stories which provide 'snapshots taken from close up…in the middle of the mêlée of a battle' of the exceptional states experienced as a consequence of living through the wartime state of exception (Bowen, 1945).