"Comedies of Sex and Terror," in Elizabeth Bowen: A Study of the Short Fiction, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 54-74.

[In the excerpt below, Lassner examines the letter from the dead soldier in "The Demon Lover" and concludes that "the letter is a ghostly artifact, a sign that as a survivor of two wars she has internalized their terrors and guilt."]

In "The Demon Lover," justifiably one of Bowen's most famous and widely anthologized stories, a soldier avenges the grim fates of war. Written during World War II, the story embeds the psychological horrors produced by a Blitzed city in a plot about "sex-antagonism," but, in a rare move for Bowen, the haunting presence is a man. The result shows how rage transcends time and space. This man cannot simply murder his lover and be done with it; he instead carries her off in a way that suggests her terror will last forever. Strictly speaking, there is no comedy in this tale, but its extreme terror invites laughter that both expresses shock and is its antidote.

The subject of "The Demon Lover" is a woman returning to her house during the Blitz to retrieve some possessions. The empty house is now haunted, however, by the presence of a mysterious letter from her fiancé, who perished in World War I. Alarmed, she runs out of the house and takes a waiting taxi, only to discover that the driver is the ghost of her fiancé. The story ends with Mrs. Drover screaming endlessly as the taxi "made off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets."

The story is quite short, only six pages, and part of its terror derives from the compression of its events and effects. The narrative line follows Mrs. Drover's attempts to explain the letter, whose mysterious appearance is like an emotional bridge between the two world wars. Spanning the period of the stories discussed in this group, the letter thus also works as a puzzle containing the secret explanation of the rage each of the men in these stories expresses toward women. For this reason, it is useful to quote the letter in full:

Dear Kathleen: You will not have forgotten that today is our anniversary, and the day we said. The years have gone by at once slowly and fast. In view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely upon you to keep your promise. I was sorry to see you leave London, but was satisfied that you would be back in time. You may expect me, therefore, at the hour arranged. Until then . . . K.

The letter binds Kathleen Drover to a promise she has no way of fulfilling. "Presumed killed" in action for 25 years, her fiancé nevertheless expects her to drop whatever she has made of her life to fulfill his need to see her. The letter assumes betrayal because it allows for no other reality than his. Despite its polite language, his right of retribution is contained in his expectation that she be there regardless of her needs. And indeed, his appearance in a form symbolizing the infinite depths of his rage creates the story's terror. Kathleen Drover's everlasting terror is more clearly predetermined than the fates of Mrs. Bentley and Mabelle, for it is clear that she would always be compelled to build her life around her promise to him to "need [to] do nothing but wait." Ultimately, Mrs. Drover is driven by a male fantasy of her total devotion and by the rage that presumes she is doomed to fail. What is therefore so terrible is the sense of a setup—that she is damned to a lonely hell if she waits for her fiancé and doomed to be with him if she does not.

In her efforts to recapitulate the events leading up to the letter, Kathleen Drover reveals that the intervening years have indeed belonged to her fiancé. Her recollection of the moment he departed for the war front shows no chance for her to agree with or dissent from his expectation that she will wait. Her one attempt to clarify his demand is only a series of tentative phrases: "But that was—suppose you—I mean, suppose." Because Kathleen has no ability to assert herself, "that unnatural promise" makes its primacy felt and defines her character. Thus she experiences "complete dislocation" from sexual love, and after she does finally marry, her life is marked not by the joys of family life but by illness and an expression of "controlled worry," a tic that also signifies "assent." Given this profile, it is clear that Kathleen's fiancé had nothing to worry about, no need to doubt her bondage to him. What, then, is his terrible retribution about?

Kathleen's capture by her fiancé at the story's end merely activates what is implicit in his character from the beginning. Kathleen recalls that at their last meeting she "had not ever completely seen his face," that she "imagined spectral glitters in the place of his eyes." Already a ghost, the soldier is also cruel, even at this intimate moment: He presses her hand to his chest but does so "painfully," so that "[t]hat cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally what she was to carry away." If her character shows the indelible mark of his domination, he remains unknowable except through his demands on her; he is a mysterious, omniscient instrument of fate who even when he comes back to haunt her cannot be described, despite there being "not six inches between them" and doomed to spend "an eternity eye to eye."

The horror to which Mrs. Drover and readers respond is the recognition of an unknowable and therefore unmanageable oppressor. But he is neither godlike nor even heroic. Although assigned to protect his nation from invading evil, this soldier is himself an evil power. Suffering the ravages of one world war, he reappears in the next as an angel of death avenging his own suffering. The spectral soldier is thus not a self-made evil but the product of historical forces. His unverifiable death becomes a metaphor for the world wars that are certain only in their havoc but whose losses can never be fully tabulated and whose causes can never be entirely explained or understood. Because World War I was left unresolved, its casualties untold and its beginnings confused, it becomes a terrifying ghost in this World War II story. Neither Mrs. Drover's reconstruction of the past nor her ghostly fiancé's interpretation of it is a viable epistemological tool. If World War I was the war to end all wars, Bowen recreates it as extracting a terrible promise, a promise the war's incomprehensibility makes it impossible for its survivors to fulfill.

This ghost is not terrorizing the woman because she fails to fill the emptiness in his life. Terrorized himself by historical forces he cannot redirect, much less understand, he imposes a promise on his fiancée that will provide the one stabilizing element in his life and death. But this victim of history is also one who helped create and perpetuate it. As a man, he is empowered by historical precedent to govern; if his efforts end in war, failure turns to rage. Thus the soldier carries off his woman to share the terrors of history. Just as the past invades the present, his consciousness overtakes hers. This process is so complete that, as the "K" of his signature shows, Kathleen is haunted by becoming his reflection. Like his hidden face at their earlier parting, the letter represents him only as she responds to it. Like her memories, the letter is a ghostly artifact, a sign that as a survivor of two wars she has internalized their terrors and guilt. Accordingly, she is terrorized at the end by being the passive victim of a ghastly history.