Imagery is description that uses the five senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. In "The Demon Lover," Bowen uses visual images as the story opens to offer the reader a clear view of the scene entering the house:

[A] cat wove itself in and out of railings . . . Shifting some parcels under her arm, she slowly forced round her latchkey in an unwilling lock, then gave the door, which had warped, a push with her knee.

We can see a cat, a creature often associated with the supernatural, and the woman carrying packages as she forces open the door with her knee.

Bowen highlights another visual image by placing it in its own paragraph:

A shaft of refracted daylight now lay across the hall. She stopped dead and stared at the hall table—on this lay a letter addressed to her.

We see in our mind's eye the ray of sunshine falling on the hall table and lighting up the letter—an odd thing to find if nobody has been in the house for a long time.

Sound imagery is used in the following, which emphasizes how dead and silent the house is otherwise:

Through the shut windows she only heard rain fall on the roofs around.

Touch or feeling imagery occurs in the quote below, where the

air of the staircase was disturbed by a draft that traveled up to her face. It emanated from the basement: Down where a door or window was being opened by someone who chose this moment to leave the house.

Bowen uses imagery liberally throughout the story to build her eerie, supernatural mood.

In the short story, "The Demon Lover," Bowen uses imagery to build suspense. First of all, the house itself embodies the image of darkness and decay. When Mrs. Drover enters the house, "dead air came out to meet her." The weather is also foreboding with dark clouds "piling up." The reader is then told the story in flashback of Mrs. Drover's dead fiancee. The cold, stillness of the house sets the scene for Mrs. Drover's breakdown.

Furthermore, the image of her dead fiance also builds suspense. Mrs. Drover remembers how he cut her hand on his uniform buttons with his tight grasp as they said their goodbyes. Later in the story, she even looks for the return of the welt on her hand after all the years that have passed. Also, in the same flashback of their parting, she remembers imagining "the spectral glitters in the place of his eyes." The fiance is painted as a demon in Mrs. Drover's memory. The suspense builds when she recalls thinking, "She could not have plighted a more sinister troth" when she makes the "unnatural promise" to wait for his return, no matter what.

The images of the house and Mrs. Drover's demon lover serve to build suspense until the end of the story when, what appears as the supernatural taxi driver, takes off with his terrified passenger.

What are examples of imagery in "The Demon Lover"?

There is little in the way of physical action in Bowen's story, but plenty of interior conflict. Imagery plays a large role in setting the tone of the story and in conveying the dissociative feelings Mrs. Dover has about her married life and her promise to a mysterious suitor twenty-five years before.

Many of these images appear in a quick, impressionistic way and are meant to represent what Mrs. Drover takes in at a glance. Take, for instance, Mrs. Drover's quick perception of the drawing room in the old house: the "ring left by the vase" on the writing desk, the "yellow smoke stain" on the mantlepiece, the "bruise" on the wallpaper from the doorknob, or the "claw marks" left by the piano in the floor. These images are evidence of Mrs. Drover's "long former habit of life." In fact, the whole house is a mute testament to the fact of her marriage, but its emptiness, the "dead air"' that permeates the place, suggests that this history is also somehow dead or abandoned. In a similar fashion, she cannot remember the soldier she promised herself to all those years ago, only the painful impression the button on his uniform made on her hand—she cannot remember anything about his face. In a way, the specificity of the images in the story stands in contrast to the long years of Mrs. Drover's emotional disengagement in her marriage.

These images also suggest a conflict between the prosaic reality of Mrs. Drover's current life and the potential life she could have shared with her long-lost soldier. The letter she finds left for her crystallizes this conflict—in contrast to her hazy memory, the letter is physical evidence of this lost life.