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Gothic memory and forgetfulness in Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love and ‘The Demon Lover’

Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love (1954) and ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945) share an uncustomary usage of Gothic conventions: the Anglo-Irish writer invests the Gothic genre with new meaning for the war-torn Irish and the post-World Wars generation by skewing Gothic conventions, reflecting a new Gothic for a new age – one that has seen the effects of two catastrophic wars and not only dead soldiers, but dead-in-life survivors. In A World of Love, Bowen uses not a ghost that haunts the attic, but a nearly forgotten dead World War I soldier; not a male power of place and a fleeing female, but a female power of place and a displaced male; and not a lonely, menacing castle, but a dilapidated farm. In both the novel and the short story, the dead-in-life survivors must remember in order to successfully exorcise the war and the dead soldiers of war, thereby revitalizing themselves. Those who cannot remember are doomed to the past. This article examines the twist on the Gothic novel and its statement about the possibly disastrous effects of forgetting and of remembering incorrectly – anxieties shared by other twentieth-century Irish writers in terms of their eroding cultural identity and past.