Bowen, Elizabeth | Daniel V. Fraustino (essay date fall 1980)
Daniel V. Fraustino (essay date fall 1980)
SOURCE: Fraustino, Daniel V. “Elizabeth Bowen's ‘The Demon Lover’: Psychosis or Seduction.” Studies in Short Fiction 17, no. 4 (fall 1980): 483-87.
[In the following essay, Fraustino counters Douglas A. Hughes's assessment of “The Demon Lover” as a “psychological delusion,” maintaining that the story is intended to be read as a “mystery of high suspense.”]
In a major article [“Cracks in the Psyche: Elizabeth Bowen's ‘The Demon Lover’,” Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 10, 1973] on Elizabeth Bowen's “The Demon Lover,” Douglass A. Hughes dismisses the popular ghost-story interpretation and advances his own psychological one. The story, he says, is “a masterful dramatization of acute psychological delusion, of the culmination of paranoia in a time of war. … War, not a vengeful lover, is the demon that overwhelms this rueful woman.” To support his argument,...
[The entire page is 2183 words long]
Navigate
