It is surely the heritage of horror indissociable from Ireland's past that has left its stamp on Irish writers, many of whom have themselves lived through atrocities and all aware of them through family annals or the history of their country.

As regards the background in which Elizabeth Bowen sets two stories pervaded by undertones of horror, “Look at All Those Roses” and “The Cat Jumps,” it should be remembered that she is a writer of Irish stock transplanted to a non-Celtic country at the age of seven, and, therefore influenced in different ways by heredity and environment. Such a writer occupies a privileged place as observer, who feels to some extent set apart from the surrounding culture, and can therefore write from the partially detached viewpoint conferred by that perspective.

The two stories to be examined in detail here are both placed in recognizable but widely differing English backgrounds. The first has for its setting the almost deserted countryside and quiet minor roads that a motorist has preferred to busier thoroughfares for his return to London with his girl-friend Lou, after a weekend away. The thinly populated country, probably based on Suffolk acts as a foil for the sudden and startling vision of beds of roses ablaze with colour, round an otherwise rather run-down house “set in a sheath of startling flowers.” (p. 97) The subsequent breakdown of the car, the discovery that the people in the house live three miles from the nearest village and without a telephone or any form of transport pinpoints the isolation of this rural area, although it is probably only an hour or two's drive from London. The second story deals with what seems a very different scene, centred on a young and very modern couple who have chosen to buy a house within commuting-distance of the City, situated in a much sought-after area overlooking the Thames valley, but bought for a most reasonable figure by its new owners as it had been the scene of a particularly atrocious case of wife-murder two years before.

Whereas the occupant of the Suffolk house is difficult to assign to any social category: “a lady or woman looked out, they were not sure which,” (p. 99) the young couple in the second story represent a very recognizable type of fashionable intellectuals; they pride themselves on being rational, unemotional and objective:

They believed that they disbelieved in most things but were unprejudiced; they enjoyed frank discussions.

(p. 32)

In this way, through a few significant details in each story the author evokes two contrasting backgrounds in England against which appropriate figures are seen, thus providing authenticity and realism as a setting through which incipient horror will gradually emerge.

Before proceeding to study the handling of horror, that strong and increasingly pervasive impression of something fearful either seen or thought, underlying both “Look at All Those Roses” and “The Cat Jumps,” we may briefly recall the main trends of this literary mode in some of its manifestations from the Gothic novel onwards. One of the main practitioners of the last, Mrs Radcliffe situated her plots in dark castles and convents, dungeons and passages, for the most part located on the Continent, generally in remote areas of the Alps. She and other specialists of the genre deemed it necessary to place their stories in foreign setting, and Edgar Allen Poe continued to propose a kind of horrific tourism with, for example The Murders in the Rue Morgue, or The Maelstrom set in northern seas.

At this point it may be suggested that, in contrast to the above writers it is specific to the Irish imagination, fostered perhaps by familiarity with atrocity throughout the history of Ireland, to see horror as intrinsic to the human condition, for writers such as Sheridan Le Fanu and more recently J. D. Donleavy show in homely, everyday settings the dark depths hidden below appearances whenever men and women live together. Elizabeth Bowen, too, demonstrates how horror may lie just below the surface of apparently harmless domestic settings.

.....

First, only gradually emerging as a possibility and never clearly announced as a confirmed fact in “Look at All Those Roses,” but presented as a sensational event on the first page of “The Cat Jumps,” a horrific theme, the murder of a marriage partner, appears as a link between these short stories.

Just as the treatment in the two stories differs with regard to the evocation of the central fact, so undertones of horror felt to be present in both narratives are built up in different ways in order to create an atmosphere conductive to horror. Effects are attenuated in the first story, that contents itself with suggesting the final notion of unpleasant murder that will be presented as accomplished fact in “The Cat Jumps.” The Mathers' house is simply charged with a hint of menace: “The house looked like a trap baited with beauty, ready to spring.” (pp. 98-99) Attention is from the beginning centred on the roses, and what may lie beneath them is only momentarily conceived as a “fancy” by Lou, and even at the end is only indirectly alluded to:

Edward began to tell Lou what he had heard in the village about the abrupt disappearance of Mr Mather.

(p. 104)

By this horrific suggestion progressively conveyed the first story may be considered as a kind of prelude to the more complete orchestration of horror in the second.

Characteristically, horror may be considered as gravitating between the twin poles of revulsion and fascination, as Elizabeth Bowen shows in her presentation of husbands and wives viewing the property after the murder in “The Cat Jumps”:

“Oh, no, dear!” many wives had exclaimed, drawing their husbands hurriedly from the gate. “Come away!” they had urged crumpling the agent's order to view as though the house were advancing upon them. And husbands came away—with a backward glance at the garage. Funny to think a chap who was hanged had kept his car there.

(p. 31)

Here the women shrink in distaste and fear from the house with its awful associations, whereas the men are more fascinated by the garage, a reminder that the murderer had had an ordinary existence like their own, as driver and owner of a car, as well as the much more extraordinary destiny of being hanged for the butchery of his wife.

It is these two impulses of revulsion and fascination, sometimes working together, sometimes with one dominating the other that in fact constitute the appeal of horror in literature and in journalism, the latter skilfully shown by the allusion to the sensational headline that had first made the Bentley murder known to the public: “The Rose Hill Horror.” (p. 190)

Horror stems from what deviates from the normal, and in the first house, smothered in roses, there is something slightly monstrous, a child crippled, we are told, by her father. Her very presence, the odd intensity of her gaze, her room conveying an impression of having been “gutted” by a similar intensity of living prepare the ground for the emergence of a further possibility of horror, the murder of a husband by his wife. In Rose Hill, the house in the second story, the horrific nature of the events there two years before is openly discounted by the new occupants, the Wright couple priding themselves on an objectively scientific approach to all things:

They had light, bright, shadowless, thoroughly disinfected minds.

(p. 190)

They knew all crime to be pathological, and read their murders only in scientific books.

(p. 191)

Ironically, however these very people and their like-minded friends are caught up in a resurgence of that very monstrous element already associated with the house, and are made by its oppressive force bearing on their lives and personalities to re-enact the circumstances leading up the first horrible crime.

Somewhat surprisingly the rose, frequently seen as a symbol of perfection, often allied with feminine beauty and even mystic aspiration is integrated into the prevailing atmosphere of horror, and even conveys it in both the stories. It is by their omnipresence and their excessive colour: “overcharged with colour” (p. 99) that Mrs Mather's blooms achieve their effect. “Startling” in their brightness evoked in the first line of the story, they focus Lou's and the reader's attention. Later, however their very opulence comes to seem unnatural to the young woman: “she thought they looked like forced roses, magnetised into being.” (p. 100) Finally, when following Mrs Mather's suggestion that she cut some to take back to London, Lou's fascination turns to disgust, and she thinks: “I shall certainly never want to look at roses again.” (p. 103). Here Elizabeth Bowen never commits the error of openly stressing the obvious connection between red roses and blood, but this is conveyed by the allusion to damson jam, liberally spread on bread and butter and eater: “in a calmly voracious way” by Mrs Mather, the notation disquietingly hinted at in the first story reappear among the “dreadful associations” (p. 190) of the second house, with its “pergola cheerfully rose-encrusted” (ibid.) and even its name, Rose Hill.

The burning horror of Mrs Mather's roses prepares the reader for another symbol, the sun, always seen in its blazing force that has been at work in the crippled girl's room: “extinct paper and phantom cretonnes gave this a gutted air.” (p. 102). The same intrusive power is present, with less intensity, at work in Rose Hill, where:

the sun, looking more constantly, less fearfully in than sightseers' eyes through the naked windows, bleached the floral wallpapers.

(p. 190)

If in the creation of an atmosphere propitious to horror the symbols just seen are static although destructive, the author also and more traditionally uses animism to create menacing and unnatural effects in suggesting a climate in which the horrible growths of the imagination may take root. So we read:

an oppressive, almost visible moisture, up from the darkening river pressed on the panes like a presence and slid through the house.

(p. 193)

the light seemed to be losing quality, as though a film, smoke-like were creeping over the bulbs. The light, thinning, darkening, seemed to contract round each lamp into a blurred aura.

(p. 195)

As a result of this apparent weakening of the electric current the faces of the guests seem as though devoid of their usual life, or even of their identity, left “gutted” like the wall-paper in the other house:

on the intelligent sharp-featured faces all round the table something—perhaps simply a clearness—seemed to be lacking, as though these were wax faces for one fatal instant exposed to a furnace.

(Ibid.)

Probably the most powerful effect of horror permeating atmosphere and consciousness is that where Jocelyn Wright has taken refuge in her bedroom:

The house, fingered outwardly by the wind that dragged unceasingly past the walls, was, within, a solid silence: silence heavy as flesh. Jocelyn dropped her wrap to the floor, then watched how its feathered edges crept a little.

(p. 40)

Several words in this passage serve to render the horror almost palpable: “fingered,” “dragged” and “flesh,” for they recall the dreadful circumstances of the half-butchered Mrs Bentley's attempts to drag herself up to what is now Jocelyn Wright's bedroom, in a vain attempt to escape her murderer.

The insidious pervasiveness of horror working on the imagination has now taken hold of the woman lying in the bedroom of the previous victim, but as yet its sway is not complete; she still retains the power to move which distinguishes terror,¹ together with the ability as yet to envisage definable forms of the fearful. For Elizabeth Bowen so describes her at this stage; menaced by her husband's arrival: “she leapt from the bed to the door”, and previously to that last desperate action the word “terror” is used to describe her agony of mind:

death (now at every turn and instant claiming her) was, in its every possible manifestation, violent death: ultimately, she was to be given up to terror.

(p. 198)

The final shock of utter horror for Jocelyn Wright is hearing her husband say as he enters the bedroom: “Here we are” (p. 199) These apparently innocuous words are heard by his wife as an echo of the last recorded utterance of the murderer, ghoulishly recalled by Muriel Barker:

He went upstairs after Mrs Bentley … He looked into room after room, whistling; then he said “Here we are,” and shut a door after him.

(p. 196)

The announcement “Here we are” had thus been the preface to the last stages of the murderer's dismemberment of his wife behind that closed door, and that appalingly sinister connotation had been subtly continued in the presentation of Harold Wright in a vampire-like attitude, and using the same words while offering one of his guests a drink:

“Here we are,” said Harold, showing his teeth, smiling, as he stood over Muriel with a syphon in one hand, glass in the other.

(p. 197)

So for Jocelyn Wright and the reader, the third time the words are spoken comes as the culmination of a frightful progression. Harold Wright's wife is caught up in the horror of nightmare, with its predictable and dreaded slow advance while the sleeper remains paralysingly unable to move.

Here we may leave nightmarish horror as endured by the central woman character of “The Cat Jumps” for a reference to another dream-state, this time not conducive to the powerlessness of horror endured to its climax. In “Look at All Those Roses” the sultry afternoon, the soporific countryside and the glare of the sky combine to leave the young woman visiting the house surrounded by roses, in a dream-like state, in which she achieves a moment of perception as regards herself and her hitherto frantic search for a meaning in her existence: “People who stay still generate power.” (p. 103) This insight, and the resulting serenity after waking, have already been prefaced by an intuitive vision, probably corresponding to reality but at that point quickly dismissed as fancy, of what might lie beneath the disquieting splendour of the roses:

Lou indulged for a minute the astounding fancy that Mr. Mather lay at the roses' roots. …

(p. 102)

In view of the taxi-driver's reaction at the end of the short story: “The taxi-driver sat staring at the roses.” Lou's dream-like intuition seems likely to be correct, but in any case the moments of perception attributed to her by the author here go beyond the monstrous and horrifying aspect of human experience; they touch rather the field of sacred awe, that divine horror alluded to by Rudolf Otto² and Mircea Eliade.³ Such a state is rarely evoked in modern literature, and in a faithless age can only be obliquely suggested as Elizabeth Bowen does here.

In the same way the author's introduction of the supernatural, as adapted to a modern and sceptical audience is light and subtle. Reduced simply to the state of metaphor in “Look at All Those Roses,” the allusions to the ghostly are effective, and even startling:

The garden … stayed in their minds like an apparition,

(p. 97)

and later:

“phantom cretonnes.”

(p. 102)

In the second story the suggestion of impalpable presences is conveyed, without being laboured, by olfactive suggestions. The stuffiness that stubbornly persists despite weeks of airing cannot readily be explained by rationality or science. Nor can the sudden whiff of “Trèfle Incarnat” alluded to by Mrs Monkhouse and scornfully dismissed by her hostess as impossible in connection with any of the women present in that coolly enlightened gathering: “Now whoever would …”.

More compelling and more complex than these individual touches is the suggestion gradually set up, through an atmosphere little by little invading the house and the reader, that the same evil agency as that which had inspired the murderer might still be at work in the house. Not only do all the stages of Mrs Bentley's long-drawn-out dismemberment by her husband, stages recounted in morbidly loving detail by Muriel, serve to bring those events, two years before, close to present time, but by a very simple device the now-executed murderer is made to live again through his successor in the house, Jocelyn Wright's husband. For the latter bears the same Christian name as his predecessor, that is, Harold. This detail facilitates the suggestion that Harold Wright may be predestined, as it were to re-enact the sinister role of Harold Bentley in that setting. Further, the prominence given to the bath, evidently put to macabre use by the murderer, but insensitively appreciated as one of the assets of the place by Jocelyn Wright: “I've always wanted a built-in bath.” (p. 19) cannot but awaken echoes in the reader of a most notorious criminal affair; Harold Bentley had re-performed, if only once, the central act of the Brides in the Bath murder case.

Accordingly, for Jocelyn Wright, already visited in imagination by Mrs Bentley re-enacting her last minutes of desperate life, seeking to drag her partially disabled body to safety before her husband attacked her again, and for the reader, horror of a fearful repetition of the act is built up and focussed on the Harold now present in the bathroom behind the door. By insistent repetition of that Christian name common to the murderer and to his successor it is suggested that Harold Bentley is not only accompanied but inhabited, even possessed by his predecessor, until the reader and the waiting wife feel that there are two Harolds in that bathroom, the first one the murderer returned from the grave to press with all the force of horrific suggestion on the second in order to impel him to repeat the murder on his own wife:

The door opened on Harold …

The Harolds, superimposed on each other, stood searching the bedroom strangely. Taking a step forward, shutting the door behind them:

“Here we are,” said Harold.

Jocelyn went down heavily. Harold watched.

(p. 199)

What Elizabeth Bowen does here is to focus attention on the fact that the apparently docile and affectionate husband has for a moment been inhabited by the murderous instinct that Harold Bentley had obeyed when he butchered his wife by easy stages. Whereas the Wrights: “knew all crime to be pathological” (p. 191) that is, attributable to notably unbalanced people, the writer here depicts horror overcoming Jocelyn at the realization that murderous instincts may awaken in someone familiar to her and whom she considers normal. The reader now shares the characters' awareness, culminating in this demonstration that people subjected to strain such as that of co-habitation in this house heavy with its past, and in oppressive conditions caused by the night and the elements working on townspeople unused to lashing wind and rain and creeping mist, may well give way to abnormal and anti-social behaviour.

Elizabeth Bowen's achievement in presenting horror thus owes less to the psychic elements already mentioned as establishing atmosphere, than to the observation of psychological reactions in testing conditions and to their realistic portrayal here. The final emergence of horrible depths in Harold Wright is foreshadowed by the sudden appearance of brute instincts in the hitherto admirably behaved children whose faces are suddenly seen “dark with uninhibited passion” (p. 193), and the “outburst of sex-antagonism” (p. 194) in the pair of domestics usually remarkable for their “most intelligent discussions” (Ibid.). Jocelyn Wright's own realization of the dark underside of human personality is admirably shown in the glimpse she finally has of herself in a mirror, the intelligent, detached lucid being previously seen “laughing lightly” (p. 191) at the bath with its grisly associations, now: “faced the two eyes of an animal in extremity, eyes black, mindless.” (p. 198). The sick degeneration of personality behind pathological states is here metaphorically presented, and is horrifying to Jocelyn herself and the reader.

The presentation of horror in this short story is then completed by a third aspect, that may be termed metaphysical: Jocelyn Wright

then, within herself, heard this taken up: “But the death fear, that one is not there to relate! If the spirit, dismembered in agony, dies before the body! If the spirit, in the whole knowledge of its dissolution, drags from chamber to chamber, drops from plane to plane of awareness (as from knife to knife down an oubliette), shedding, receiving, agony! Till long afterwards, death, with its little pain, is established in the indifferent body.”

(p. 198)

This is another and deeper nightmare imagining of what Mrs Bentley had undergone, the nightmare of becoming a soul adrift with no lodging; since the sheltering body had been slowly dismembered while the state of sentience was still a reality, horror is the only thing left of total being, still obliged to subsist, but in a void. This representation of identity reduced to mere consciousness of non-being is a refinement of horror that may be called existential, situated in the field of metaphysics for man faced more than in preceding ages with the question of sudden and absolute physical dissolution through a nuclear holocaust. Horror has reached a new and specific dimension today, and Elizabeth Bowen has anticipated it in her short story, ironically portraying its emergence in what is first presented as an ideal house occupied by an advanced couple with their well-planned children, problem-free domestic staff and carefully chosen clear-thinking friends. This is her principal achievement in this short story, the gradual deepening of shuddering sensation until it reaches the metaphysical horror of modern man before his ultimate fate.

The effect is achieved by the relative detachment and vividly varied style, skilfully integrating the avid retailing of effects by Muriel, whose morbidity itself hinges on the pathological, highlighting the manner of Mrs Bentley's death by focussing on certain details with frightening matter-of-factness: “he put her heart in her hat-box. He said it belonged in there.” (p. 197) The grating humour that emerges from this hideous and grotesquely comic juxtaposition of recently living heart and inanimate hat-box is of the same kind as the contrast between the Wright parents' detached comment: “Other teeth won't grow at once you know” (p. 193) and the spectacle that provoked it, their generally model children rolling on the ground and savagely biting each other. Humour may thus accompany horror, and do nothing to attenuate it. Finally, behind the horror so amply developed for their reader there lies something else, an education in hideous experience for those presented at the beginning as thinking themselves “right” in attitude, to match their name, discovering that pathological deformity may be no farther from the Wrights than it was from the Bentleys who preceded them.

Returning briefly to “Look at All Those Roses” in order to conclude, we may underline that its evocation of horror is left at the level of implication and suggestion, never confirmed: the probable reality that the splendour of the roses comes from a macabre kind of compost is dismissed by Lou as a “fancy” that “Mr Mather lay at the roses' roots.” (p. 102) Horror is left literally underground, covered and out of sight in a parody of ritual interment where the bed of roses may well be Mr Mather's last resting-place. The reader is asked to envisage this possibility, never more, merely invited to “Look at All Those Roses,” at the beginning, throughout and at the end, finally left staring in fascinated horror over the taxi-driver's shoulder at those splendid blooms.

In contrast, more active participation is required of the reader in the case of “The Cat Jumps” where, as the title suggests, suspense is present throughout, culminating in the final discovery that Harold Bentley, like Harold Wright, felt frustratingly smothered by his wife; while the latter lay transfixed with horror as her husband waited behind the bathroom door, she was during that time visualized by her partner as:

densely, smotheringly there. She lay like a great cat, always over the mouth of his life.

(p. 199)

Despite that feeling of revolt, “Harold Wright was appalled” (ibid.) at his wife's fainting when he appeared and spoke, so the ending remains ambivalent and ironic. Nevertheless the wife who until then has seen herself and has been seen as a potential victim suddenly appears in the guise of an oppressive tormentor also, and therefore liable as Mrs Bentley had been to awaken the murderous instincts of her husband. So, to conditioning and an atmosphere of horror, provocation and temptation to murder are suddenly added as monstrously real in the present, as well as in the past. With this last effect of horrifying discovery only moments before “the cat jumps” we may conclude that in Elizabeth Bowen's story of growing, gathering and cumulative horror “the sting lies in the tail.”

Notes

1. Maurice Lévy makes a useful distinction between horror, a state distinguished by paralysis of the physical faculties, and terror accompanied by the desire and the ability to run away. (see M. Lévy, Le Roman Gothique anglais, 1964-1824, Toulouse Association des publications de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1968).

2. Rudolf Otto, Le Sacré. L'élément non rationnel dans l'idée du divin et sa relation avec le rationnel. Payot, 1969.

3. Mircea Eliade, Le Sacré et le Profane, Gallimard, 1969.

Works Cited

The pages indicated after the passages quoted refer to the following editions:

Elizabeth Bowen, The Cat Jumps—The Penguin Book of Irish Short Stories, ed. Benedict Kiely, Penguin, 1981.

Elizabeth Bowen, Look at All Those Roses—Short Stories—Dorothy Parker & Frederick B. Shroyer, Charles Scribner' Sons, New York, 1965.