Central to women’s issues in The Death of the Heart is the changing relationship between Anna and Portia in their tortured mother-daughter roles. Anna’s thwarted motherhood could find a new flowering with Portia, who has an immense capacity for love. Anna might be the sheltering mother Portia so desperately needs, and Portia’s affection would reward her. Instead, Anna views Portia as “trouble since before she was born.” She fears her as a spy and interloper; she resents her as a jealous mother might resent a sexually threatening daughter. Anna’s lack of charity contrasts with Portia’s memories of her biological mother, Irene, when the two shared a sisterly existence as poor but cozy roommates in Switzerland.

Other surrogate mothers are Matchett, whose basement quarters Portia prefers to the Quaynes’ drawing rooms, and foolish, kindly Mrs. Heccomb, who knew Anna as a girl. She shows Portia a pastel drawing that she made of Anna cuddling a kitten. The drawing moves Portia to identify with the younger Anna as well as the kitten, eliciting her anxiety over her precarious bond with her sister-in-law. As Anna sees herself in Portia’s diary, Portia sees herself in Anna’s portrait. For each, there is a potential of self-discovery through the other, but only if both caringly bend.

In the novel’s triptych structure, Bowen shows the modern world’s debased reformulation of traditional religious values. Drawn from the Bible (I John 2:15-17; Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13), “the World,” “the Flesh,” and “the Devil” signified humanity’s foes for the medieval Church. These foes reappear in Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, the English morality plays, and The Book of Common Prayer. Portia battles them in various guises. In a loveless world where material belongings are more sacred than human feelings, Matchett ministers to the house with “religious” devotion. When she prepares the bedrooms, she makes “a sort of an altar of each bed.” These are empty rituals, since no love thrives in these rooms. Though nominally Christian, Anna and Thomas lack charity. At Seale-on-Sea, Mrs. Heccomb fulfills churchly duties, but she has stored her prie-dieu (a kneeling bench for prayer) in the lumber room. Portia goes to church to meditate on her physical infatuation with Eddie.

As spaces devoid of emotion, the novel’s dwellings support the joined themes of domesticity and exile. Willful women (Anna and the elder Mrs. Quayne) preside over domestic spaces, while the men represent a displaced patriarchy. Because these women are unable to create harmonious domestic spheres, the men whom they have exiled receive the author’s sympathy. Portia’s tearful father was driven out in disgrace; Thomas, unloved in his own home, is pushed from his wife’s bedroom. There are no male heads of household in authority. Major Brutt and Eddie live in marginal rented rooms. Brutt, like Portia accustomed to dreary lodgings, reiterates the theme of homelessness when he exclaims that “the devil” has no permanent address.

The compartmentalized rooms of 2 Windsor Terrace show the inhabitants’ isolation. Thomas retreats to his downstairs study; Portia has a room with a barred window like a nursery; Anna secludes herself to reread the letters of Robert Pidgeon, her old flame, which she keeps locked in drawers beneath pigeonholes, as she locks away her emotions. Frequently she escapes to her bath, the only place she can find release. Using an image of running water, she confesses that Portia makes her feel judged, “like a tap that won’t turn on.”

Allusions to judgment appear throughout to reinforce the novel’s moral intent. Anna wonders at Portia’s name—that of the woman who adopts a lawyer’s guise in William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1596-1597) to...