[In the following excerpt, Hanson reassesses Bowen's oeuvre, particularly her representations of young girls and older women, using the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to provide a new understanding of Bowen's work.]

Elizabeth Bowen's fate has been typical of that of ‘the woman writer’. Her books were both popular and critically acclaimed in their day, but after her death in 1973, her reputation suffered a decline. Her status became that of a ‘minor’ writer, haunting about the margins of the literary canon, and her later work, in particular, was disparaged. Hermione Lee, for example, had this to say of The Little Girls (1964) in her study Elizabeth Bowen: An Estimation (1981):

Such ‘meaning’ as there is appears in fragmentary and diffused form and is presented in a manner which is without depth or resonance. Not only does the novel record an unlikely and whimsical situation, which is dressed up with awkward attempts at comedy, uneasy ventures into symbolism and contrived literary allusions … but it also feels dubious and illusive.

(Lee 1981: 204)

While this is a fair comment on its own terms, what it none the less suggests is how far terms have changed since 1981. It seems that it is only now, in the light of literary theory and the changes which have taken place in our understanding of literary texts, that we have caught up with Bowen and are able to read and understand her experimental later work.

Bowen's fiction is structured repeatedly around an oscillation between the perspective of a young girl and that of an older woman. Her concern with the figure of the girl can be read alongside that of Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and the thought of Deleuze and Guattari, I shall argue, is helpful for unlocking many aspects of Bowen's work. Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of the body as exceeding its assigned (Oedipal) subjectivity and its assigned identity as a functional organism is particularly relevant to Bowen's fiction. For Deleuze and Guattari the ‘Body without Organs’ (BwO) is the limit towards which all bodies aspire, a body before and in excess of the ‘coalescence of its intensities and their sedimentation into meaningful, functional, organised, transcendent totalities’ (Grosz 1994: 201). It is the encounters between such ‘excessive’ bodies which constitute what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘becomings’. A becoming occurs through the conjunction of bodies in a state of openness, unconstrained by pre-established ideas of what a given body is or what it is capable of. The example which they give throughout their work (and in A Thousand Plateaus), is of the conjunction or ‘nuptials’ of the wasp and the orchid. The orchid reproduces by incorporating the wasp into its sexual functioning, and the wasp feeds as it fertilises the orchid. There occurs an imaginative suspension of the separable, habitual status of the bodies involved: instead they participate in what John Hughes calls ‘a kind of creative symbiosis’ (Hughes 1997: 45). A related idea which Deleuze and Guattari develop in A Thousand Plateaus is that of the ‘haecceity’, an arrangement or ensemble of bodies produced by the movement of desire on the plane of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari define a haecceity in this way:

There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. A degree of heat can combine with an intensity of white, as in certain white skies of a hot summer.

(Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1988: 261)

Like Deleuze and Guattari, Bowen explores the potential of the body on the plane of immanence, explores ‘excessive’ encounters between bodies (as in the instabilities of the dinner-party scene in A World of Love), and also focuses intensively on seasons and hours and on their ‘perfect individuality’ (as in the opening scene of A World of Love, in which heterogeneous bodies are brought together to form a new ensemble, connecting rocks, fields, the implied human subject, heat, stillness and light).

As I have suggested, in representing the female body, Bowen focuses on the little girl and the large, solid (in every sense) woman. For Deleuze and Guattari, the girl is a privileged figure, linked with openness, possibility and ‘becoming’. They write that the girl is ‘defined by a relation of movement and rest, speed and slowness, by a combination of atoms, an emission of particles: haecceity. She never ceases to roam upon a body without organs. She is an abstract line, or a line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1988: 276-7). ‘The girl’ is, of course, a metaphor: ‘she’ can appear at any stage of life—‘girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes: they produce n molecular sexes’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1988: 277). None the less, as we shall see, the state of the (actual, historical) girl is more likely to produce that activity and energy which Deleuze and Guattari associate with ‘becoming’.

Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term ‘molecular’ refers to the distinction they make between dispersed libidinal energies (‘molecular’ energies) and those which strive to aggregate into totalities (‘molar’ energies). Molar energies attempt to form and stabilise identities through divisions of classes, sexes and races, whereas molecular energies, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, ‘traverse, create a path, destabilise, enable energy seepage within and through these molar unities’ (Grosz 1994: 203). Molar energies are linked with ‘majoritarian’ consciousness, which Deleuze defines as follows:

The majority does not designate a larger quantity, but in the first place, a standard in relation to which the other quantities, whatever they are, will be said to be smaller. For instance, women and children, Blacks and Indians, and so on, will be minorities in comparison to the standard constituted by any American, or European white-Christian-male-adult-city-dweller of today.

(Deleuze, ‘Un manifeste de moins’, quoted in Braidotti 1991: 115)

Molecular energies, by contrast, are linked with ‘minoritarian’ consciousness which tends towards the undoing of molar identities and which opens the way for revolutionary transformations.

Returning to A World of Love, Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between molar and molecular energies illuminates the marked contrast in this novel between the unassimilable little girl, Maud, who roves restlessly between the other characters, holds to no gender identity, ‘knock[s] other people about’ and yet has ‘a high look of candour’, and her mother, Lilia, presented in terms of a sedimented ‘molar’ femininity, ‘woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject’, as Deleuze and Guattari put it (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1988: 275). However, I want to go on to suggest that for the purposes of reading Bowen's fiction, we might wish to reconceive Deleuze and Guattari's ‘molar’ identities as Oedipal identities. In the volume which preceded A Thousand Plateaus, that is, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia ([1972] 1984), Deleuze and Guattari took issue with the way in which psychoanalysis, as they saw it, functioned as a repressive instrument of the capitalist system, imposing an Oedipal, heterosexual sex/gender identity as the only acceptable sex/gender identity. They argued, too, that while psychoanalysis privileged the subject whose desire was founded on lack, desire in fact does not lack anything: it is rather the subject which is missing in desire—the illusion of a fixed subject only comes about through the repressive law of Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari suggest, accordingly, that we should dismantle the whole cultural edifice of Oedipus, focusing instead on the impersonal but generative and productive force of (positive) desire. Bearing this in mind, I shall argue that the work of Elizabeth Bowen stages an opposition between anti-Oedipal (in Deleuze and Guattari's terms) and Oedipal structures of feeling. Her fiction is founded on a powerful conflict between anti-Oedipal/asocial and Oedipal/social structures and desires, and it is this conflict which I shall go on to explore in her last three novels.

As I have suggested, in A World of Love (1955), twelve-year-old Maud is the representative of ‘the girl’: disorganised and unassimilated, discountenancing all the other characters in the novel. She is linked with unsettling and subversive forces, following the tradition of the subversive woman's being associated with witchcraft. The narrator tells us that Maud has her ‘familiar’, defined by the OED as a ‘demon attending and obeying a witch’. She scuffles and spars with this familiar, who is called Gay David and has his own ‘small low cave’: she also partakes in ‘rites’ with him. Repeatedly, Maud is connected with hell—for Antonia at one point, for example, she wears ‘a select air of having been through hell’ (Bowen 1955: 158). Afflicted by hives (an inflammation of the skin), Maud is a tormented and tormenting figure, scornful of her sister's romantic preoccupations yet, as it turns out towards the end of the novel, unhappy because of her father's inability to fulfil his role as patriarch. She is, then, an ambiguous and unsettling figure.

Her twenty-year-old sister, Jane, is further along the Oedipal line: she has ‘a face perfectly ready to be a woman's, but not yet so’ (Bowen 1955: 11). The novel documents her entry into the Oedipal structure of patriarchy, an entry which is overdetermined because of the complex relationships between the adults in the story. Lilia, Jane's mother, was years ago engaged to Guy, the owner of the small estate, Montefort, where the novel is set. Guy was killed in World War I. His cousin, Antonia (also in love with Guy), feeling the need to ‘do something’ for Lilia after Guy's death, arranges a marriage between Lilia and her illegitimate cousin Fred. Jane and Maud are the results of this (mis)marriage. The story turns on Jane's discovery of a packet of old letters, from Guy, to whom is unclear—no name is apparent. Lilia clings to the belief that the letters were to her, a belief in which she is supported by Antonia, although in fact this is not the case. Jane, in this unprecedentedly hot Irish summer, falls in love with the letters, as Antonia remarks—she describes Jane as ‘[f]alling in love with a love letter’ (Bowen 1955: 55). The point Bowen makes is that the letters can seduce anyone: the Oedipal/romance script far exceeds any of the individual characters (the name Guy underlines this—the letters are from any man (guy) to any woman). The Oedipal structure of heterosexual romance is stressed: Jane is devoted to her father, and at one point Antonia cries out (in front of Fred) that Jane ‘should have been (Guy's) daughter’ (Bowen 1955: 117). Jane has, then, fallen in love with her (ideal) father, having repudiated and displaced her mother. Jane's absorption in this Oedipal plot leads directly to the romantic denouement of the novel, whereby Guy is replaced in Jane's affections by a cast-off lover of Lady Latterly, the local chatelâine. Jane is sent to meet him at Shannon airport, and as their eyes meet, ‘They no sooner looked but they loved’ (Bowen 1955: 224). These are the last words of the novel, ambivalently poised between belief and scepticism. However, the fact that the love is promoted by Vesta Latterly (a belated but certainly not virginal figure) suggests that we should view it with misgiving.

I want indeed to suggest that in this novel, Bowen presents two ‘worlds of love’. The first, associated with the script of romantic love, is viewed negatively, for it involves a diminishment of possibility, an acceptance of a restricted and restrictive identity. In A World of Love, this identity is an Oedipal identity, and there is no representation of an alternative, pre-Oedipal bond between mother and daughter. Indeed, I would argue that in this fiction, the Oedipal is challenged not by the pre-Oedipal (which would in this respect be an equally restrictive category), but by molecular, anti-Oedipal energies which work through and beyond the characters. Such energies are associated above all with the landscape, and it is this which constitutes the second ‘world of love’ in Bowen's novel, which could be called a world of desire, in the Deleuzian sense. Repeatedly, the text turns away from the characters qua characters, and concerns itself with a mood, an atmosphere, which derives in part from familiar human responses but which moves beyond them in the construction of a new ‘assemblage’ or haecceity. We might take this passage as an example:

The chestnut, darkening into summer, canopied them over; over their heads were its expired candles of blossom, brown—desiccated stamens were in the dust. Over everything under the tree lay the dusk of nature. Only the car-tracks spoke of ever again going or coming; all else had part in the majestic pause, into which words were petering out. This was not so much a solution as a dissolution, a thinning-away of the accumulated hardness of many seasons, estrangement, dulledness, shame at the waste and loss. A little redemption, even only a little, of loss was felt. The alteration in feeling, during the minutes in which the two had been here, was an event, though followed by a deep vagueness as to what they should in consequence do or say.

(Bowen 1955: 155-6)

This alteration in feeling between Lilia and Fred, involving not a denial of past dissonance but a new communication despite it, is inextricably bound up with the external world—the heat, the stillness, the redemptive dissolution of dusk. And it is noteworthy that in this dissolution Lilia, the ‘big’ woman who has seemed the exemplar of molar femininity, is de-massified, becomes open, like a girl—confirming the fact that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘girls do not belong to an age group—they slip in everywhere’.

The Little Girls (1964) explores this idea in detail. The novel is divided into three parts: the first representing the reunion of three sixty-year-old women who were at school together in the years before World War I; the second exploring their relationship in childhood; the third returning to the present day and examining the ways in which they re-establish their friendship. Unsurprisingly, the novel draws a sharp contrast between the ‘little girls’ and the women they have become, and its radical suggestion is that the bond between the little girls, and their life before they were separated at the age of twelve, is by far the most important element in their lives, the basis to which they must return as they begin to contemplate the end of life. At one point in the opening section, Dinah remembers the girls—nicknamed Sheikie (Sheila), Dicey (Dinah) and Mumbo (Clare)—playing on a swing:

Sheikie a firework in daylight. Dicey upside down, hooked on by the knees, slapping not kicking at the earth as it flew under. Mumbo face down, stomach across the seat, flailing all four limbs. Pure from the pleasures of the air, any of them could have shot into Kingdom Come. But they had not.

Most strikingly, she then continues:

Those were the days before love. These are the days after. Nothing has gone for nothing but the days between.

(Bowen [1964] 1966: 60)

What this—heretically—suggests is that love, Oedipalised heterosexuality and the lives which the women have lived under its rule, have all ‘gone for nothing’, that these things are of far less significance, in the end, than the freedom of movement of the little girls, signified by the game on the swing.

In the first section of the novel, Bowen considers in detail what each woman has become, the impression which she makes. Dinah, who has two sons and five grandchildren, has the habit and force of beauty—‘Her beauty, having been up to now an indeterminate presence about the room, grew formidable and stepped forward’ (Bowen [1964] 1966: 63). Clare has become an extremely successful businesswoman who, despite her childhood slenderness, is now a ‘massive’ and imposing woman—‘A big woman wearing a tight black turban, and on the lapel of her dark suit a striking brooch’ (Bowen [1964] 1966: 32). Sheila, in Dinah's opinion, has become more encrusted with the sediment of years of conventional living—she is ‘More barnacled over. Far, far more barnacled over than you [Clare] or I are. Wouldn't you say? She's certainly thickly covered with some deposit. Thanks to which, she is tremendously “the thing”—almost never not, doesn't one notice?’ (Bowen [1964] 1966: 157)

Against these molarised, Oedipalised feminine identities, Bowen sets the lives of the little girls. As Sheila remarks, ‘Little girls don't make sense’ (Bowen [1964] 1966, 33). Anarchic, rough, kicking and scuffling with each other, they have not acquired the niceties of feminine gender identity. They band together like nomads or wolves, both metaphors used by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus to describe the coming together of bodies in loose groups as lines of energies or force coincide. Deleuze and Guattari use these metaphors to help us to ‘think identity otherwise’, in Christine Battersby's words (Battersby 1998: 193). As Battersby points out, Deleuze and Guattari also use the metaphor of music to:

represent an alternative mode of ‘belonging together’ that is secured materially, and not just by the ‘syntheses’ of the imagination. Repeated musical phrases can order the ‘chaos’ of sensations in ways that do not involve representing identities as closed ‘unities’ that are ‘formed’ by the imposition of linear space-time grids onto a material world.

(Battersby 1998: 185)

Music, in other words, is made up not of ‘things’ but of actions and energies constituting a ‘becoming’ in which ‘everything happens at once’ (Deleuze and Guattari [1980] 1988: 297).

In a key scene in the central section of The Little Girls, Bowen describes a birthday picnic just before the onset of war. The children (rather like Maud in A World of Love) are lawless and ‘demonic’, and at one point, as they are resisting the adults' attempts to force them into organised games, Bowen brings together the motifs of the wolf pack and of music, suggesting the ways in which the children's energies exceed and circumvent any arrangements which the adults wish to impose on them:

Too late. The children were singing. It was a terrible wolf-like ululation, with a spectre of tune in it. Some, heads back, simply droned aloud to the sky. Any true voice, so far as it ever led, was once more drowned. Singers astray in a verse for a line or two boomed back again into the chorus with the greater vigour. Liked, the song seemed on the whole known.

(Bowen [1964] 1966: 134-5)

Still more tellingly, in the same scene, Bowen sets the image of Sheikie dancing against the threat of war. Dicey asks:

‘Who did kill that Australian duke?’

Confounded the minute she had spoken, the fool child hung for a minute longer upside down, as she was, in shame. Then she righted herself and got off the breakwater. Had the skies fallen? Every one of the children was staring her way.—No, though, not at her but beyond Mumbo at Sheikie, who was executing a tightrope two-step. This was going on farther up the breakwater, where the structure heightened as it approached the wall. To and fro, backward then forward along the wood-bone, bone-dry, dry-slippery edge of the topmost board jaunted the airily-balanced dancer—going away, returning, turning each turn into a nonchalant pirouette. She danced her music.

(Bowen [1964] 1966: 139)

Sheikie's dancing—a talent which defines her existence as a little girl—is a manifestation of bodily flows and energies which precede and resist social organisation. Dancing, she represents a ‘line of flight’, to borrow Deleuze and Guattari's phrase, which can only be opposed to the organised games like the ‘tug of war’ proposed by one of the fathers at the picnic, and which can only be opposed, too, to the gathering forces of war.

In this central section of the book, the three girls bury a coffer full of precious objects meant ‘for posterity’. Among the items which they discuss burying are a pistol and jewels—classic Freudian symbols of male and female sexuality. It is not too much to suppose that Bowen was aware of this—as Dinah later remarks, apropos of Clare's ‘knick-knack’ shops, ‘everything is a symbol’. Bowen plays with the idea of such interpretation—and of the coffer, then, as the place of repression of the knowledge of adult sexuality. Each of the girls also buries a secret item, later revealed to be in Dicey's case her mother's revolver, in Sheikie's case her sixth toe (both with clear sexual implications), in Mumbo's case the works of Shelley (signalling her poetic and imaginative aspirations).

In the third part of the novel, the three women locate and dig up the box, only to find that it is empty: this precipitates a crisis for Dinah, in particular. After the excavation, she begs Clare to come and live with her, and when Clare refuses, somehow manages to injure her head and retreats to her bed. Dinah's collapse is brought about by the hidden connection between what was buried in the box and her life as an adult woman. What was buried was something which she wanted to repress but which she (and the other girls) also valued, something which they thought of as precious, as a resource. The digging up of the box forces the recognition that adult social/sexual life, both feared and desired by the girls, has been, precisely, ‘nothing’, an unreality. For Dinah, ‘Nothing's real any more’. She goes on:

‘Nothing's left, out of going on fifty years.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘This has done it,’ said Dinah. ‘Can't you see what's happened? This us three. This going back, I mean. This began as a game, began as a game. Now—you see?—it's got me!’

‘A game's a game,’ Sheila averred, glancing down her nose.

‘And now,’ the unhearing Dinah went on, ‘the game's collapsed. We saw there was nothing there. So, where am I now?’

(Bowen [1964] 1966: 175-6)

This deepens Dinah's sense, expressed in the first section of the book, that the middle years of her life have ‘gone for nothing’—but she goes on, in this scene, to remark, ‘But you're real, Mumbo … You were there before.’ (Bowen, [1964] 1966: 176).

Dinah's appeal to Clare to come and live with her is connected with this sense of the reality of their early life. Clare resists her request because she doesn't want to fall in love with Dinah, to repeat relationships she has had in adult life. Dinah asks her at one point, ‘Mumbo, are you a Lesbian?’ and Clare does not deny it. A little later, she reveals that she had loved Dinah's mother, but tells Dinah, the ‘enchantress's child’, that ‘once is enough’. She then leaves the house and Dinah withdraws into her trance, lying in a bed under a canopy having ‘the look of a death bed’. She is roused first because Clare sends Sheila to nurse her, finally by Clare herself, who comes in while she is sleeping and thinks about their relationship, now and in the past:

We were entrusted to one another, in the days which mattered, Clare thought. Entrusted to one another by chance, not choice. Chance, and its agents time and place. Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. In its carelessness it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man. You—she thought, looking at the bed—chanced, not chose, to want us again.

(Bowen [1964] 1966: 255)

What Clare sees is that their relationship in ‘the days that mattered’ was entirely a chance relationship, without calculation or forethought, unmediated by social forms and structures. Chance is better than choice because, in Deleuzian terms, it represents the free play of desire, exceeding the limitations of human subjectivity and of socialised bodily desires. Dinah's renewed need of Clare (and Sheila) can, to a certain extent, set up a relation which reactivates the past. There can be no absolute return to little girlhood, as the last line of the text makes clear, with Dinah acknowledging Clare's adulthood—‘Not Mumbo. Clare. Clare, where have you been?’ (Bowen [1964] 1966: 256). But a revived friendship can allow for some interplay between past and present, for some renewed access to the profound freedom of early life.

Eva Trout, Bowen's last heroine, is an inscrutable and powerful figure. When we first meet her, at the age of twenty-four, this is the impression she makes:

The giantess, by now, was alone also: some way along the edge of the water she had come to a stop—shoulders braced, hands interlocked behind her, feet in the costly, slovenly lambskin bootees planted apart. Back fell her cap of jaggedly cut hair from her raised profile, showing the still adolescent heaviness of the jawline.

(Bowen 1969: 13)

Both massive and childlike, Eva, heiress to an immense fortune, seems to experience her adult female body as a burden from which she seeks to escape. Her background is as extraordinary as her appearance. Her father, a wealthy financier, committed suicide, tormented beyond endurance—Eva thinks—by his long-time male lover, now Eva's guardian. Her mother left when she was two months old, only to die almost immediately in a plane crash: Eva has by no means had a conventional family upbringing.

Eva's first love is Elsinore, a fellow pupil at an ‘experimental’ school to which her father consigns her at the age of fourteen (at which point, we are told, ‘Eva was showing no signs of puberty’). Elsinore is delicate, elfin. She walks into a lake, like Ophelia, and then goes into a coma: throughout her illness she is attended, silently, by Eva. The scene is reminiscent of Dinah's trance in The Little Girls:

What made Eva visualise this as a marriage chamber? As its climate intensified, all grew tender. To repose a hand on the blanket covering Elsinore was to know in the palm of the hand a primitive tremor—imagining the beating of that other heart, she had a passionately solicitous sense of this other presence. Nothing forbad love. This deathly yet living stillness, together, of two beings, this unapartness, came to be the requital of all longing.

(Bowen 1969: 64)

The references to Hamlet underscore the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal possibilities of this situation, and Eva's resistance to both positions. She refuses to accept either father- or mother-figures as objects of desire, adhering to the mute reciprocity of her childlike relation to Elsinore.

Eva's next object of love is Iseult Smith, a teacher at the next school she attends. The relation between the two is accidental—Iseult doesn't really know why she takes an interest in this awkward girl—but it brings Iseult Eva's complete devotion. Eva feels that she is a mute and ‘submerged’ creature, and Iseult's attention seems to hold out the possibility for Eva of speech and connection with others. None the less, the relationship is compromised by Iseult's marriage. When, after she has left the school, Eva goes to stay with her former teacher, she responds to the marriage in an extraordinary way, staging a fake adulterous relationship with the husband, Eric, and even going so far as to give Iseult the impression that she is pregnant by him. Eva mimics heterosexuality, having no great regard for love, as she later confides—‘I had had disagreeable impressions of love’ (Bowen 1969: 262).

Eight years later, Eva returns to England with Jeremy, the child she has (illegally) adopted to stand in for the child she is supposed to have had with Eric. Jeremy is a deaf mute, who thus perfectly replicates and mirrors Eva's mute and frustrated existence. The ‘inaudible years’ of his childhood are spent travelling about America, as Eva and he ‘[lord] it in a visual universe’. They live in an insulated, solipsistic world—‘Society revolved at a distance from them like a ferris wheel dangling buckets of people’ (Bowen 1969: 221). However, the return to England precipitates a break between Eva and Jeremy. Eva reestablishes her friendship with Henry Dancey, the son of a local vicar who had been her confederate when she was twenty-four and he was twelve years old. Their relationship is hardly a conventional hetero-sexual relationship—it is more like Eva's relationship with Elsinore than anything else, a link that is confirmed by Eva's associating both Elsinore and Henry with a honeymoon in the fantastic castle setting of her first school. The relationship remains in a sense childish—Henry's mother remarks that ‘from childhood they have been kindred spirits’ and that ‘Eva's a child at heart’ (Bowen 1969: 249). None the less, the relationship develops to the point where Eva proposes marriage to Henry. Meanwhile Iseult, Eva's old teacher, rouses Jeremy as she had earlier roused Eva, inspiring in him for the first time the desire to use language and make contact with the external world.

Bowen speaks of Eva's return to England as a return to ‘face the music’, music which once faced ‘stirs her’. The suggestion is not only that Eva must face the consequences of her actions, and their effect on others, but that she must enter the world of music, of relationships, of ‘becoming’. She enters this world fully only when Henry tells her he will marry her. She has her moment of becoming, of relationship, and speaks with her body, shedding the first tears she has ever shed:

They were far from alone; down the long, suave car various fellow-occupants were already seated. In here it seemed, after the platform, silent—to be not overheard, the two had to stand close together. As though the train had started and started swaying, they swayed slightly. ‘I'm not going to get off,’ he said, brushing his lips against her ear. ‘I'm not going to get off this train, I mean. Did you really want me to?—did you imagine I would?’

… Something took place: a bewildering, brilliant, blurring filling up, swimming and brimming over; then, not a torrent from the eyes but one, two, three, four tears, each hesitating, surprised to be where it was, then wandering down. The speediest splashed on to the diamond brooch. ‘Look what is happening to me!’ exulted Eva. She had no handkerchief, not having expected to require one—she blotted about on her face with a crunched-up glove. ‘What a coronation day …’.

(Bowen 1969: 315-16)

Jeremy, however, is still and may always be exiled from such connection: in the final ironic twist of the novel, he shoots Eva dead as she prepares to depart for her wedding journey.

Like Bowen's other late novels, Eva Trout presents a heroine who resists the Oedipal plot, and the novel may be said to be anti-Oedipal in this respect, especially in its delineation of the eccentric relationship between Eva and Henry. None the less, the strongest impression which the novel leaves is of Eva's entrapment in a curiously inert body. ‘Becoming’ in the world of Bowen's last novel seems to be an almost impossible feat, for both female and male characters. An image worth pondering in this respect is that of the trapped bird, which Henry watches as he listens to his father preaching, just before he leaves to join Eva at the end of the novel. The bird might be said to represent both Eva and Henry: Eva is repeatedly compared to a bird, and Henry is, like it, trapped in his father's church:

A thrush had got into the church. It was adolescent; though full-grown still hardly more than a bloated fledgling. Barely yet fit to fly, it did so with arduousness and terror, hurtling, hoping, despairingly losing height, not knowing where it was to land, if it ever did, or how again to take off, if it ever could … The thrush, gathering velocity from the distance, catapulted beak-on into the glass of the window above Henry. Like a stone it dropped. Henry fainted, alone in his corner of the vicarage pew.

(Bowen 1969: 295-7)

I would suggest, following Deleuze and Guattari, that it is Eva's capital inheritance (her ‘horrible money’, as Henry calls it, the product par excellence of damaging social relations) which petrifies her body, and that it is the church, with its misplaced emphasis on transcendence and its moribund ideas, which petrifies Henry. It is these overwhelming forces which ensure that their intersecting lines of flight, though embarked on with passion, with ‘arduousness and terror’, will ultimately fail. Bowen does not underestimate here the forces of habit and repression which inhibit the ‘becomings’ so eloquently explored by Deleuze and Guattari and so intensely evoked in her fiction.

References

Battersby, C. (1998) The Phenomenal Woman, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Bowen, E. (1955) A World of Love, London, Jonathan Cape.

———. ([1964] 1966) The Little Girls, London, Reprint Society.

———. (1969) Eva Trout; or, Changing Scenes, London, Jonathan Cape.

Braidotti, R. (1991) Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Cambridge, Polity Press.

Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, ([1972] 1984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London, Athlone Press.

———. ([1980] 1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi, London, Athlone Press.

Grosz, E. (1994) ‘A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics’, in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, London, Routledge.

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