32 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth BowenThe Demon Lover
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Promises of Marriage and Fidelity
Content Warning: This section mentions wartime violence, relationship abuse, sexuality, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and demon possession.
Bowen’s story can be read as a modern retelling of “The Daemon Lover,” an old folk ballad in which a woman’s first fiancé goes missing only to return as a spirit years after she has happily married another. The “Daemon Lover” is traditionally a story of the consequences of breaking a promise to be faithful regardless of circumstance, with the second marriage standing in for infidelity. In it, the betrothed always seeks revenge, and the story bears elements of horror, as in his return, he leads his beloved to hell.
Hints of the lover’s menacing presence appear early in Bowen’s story. The narration informs the reader that “no human eye watched Mrs. Drover’s return” (661). While this could refer to the cat in the street, it could also imply that there is a supernatural force—perhaps her fiancé’s ghost—lying in wait. Alternatively, the presence shadowing Mrs. Drover could be her fiancé in the flesh. The fiancé was reported missing, but no one ever confirmed his death, so it is possible that he survived World War I and has now returned to England for the woman he views as his possession; Mrs. Drover’s sense that he was “set on” her implies that he saw her as something he could claim. This reflects the era of the folk ballad, when engagements were nearly as binding as marriage and when women were in many respects their husbands’ property. While norms had shifted somewhat by the time of Kathleen’s engagement, English society was still relatively patriarchal in the early 20th century.
However, where the classic demon lover story endorses this arrangement, Bower’s story questions it. Supernatural or not, the fiancé is a menacing figure whose presence threatens to obliterate Kathleen’s (and later Mrs. Drover’s) sense of personhood. During his 1916 visit, Kathleen experiences a “complete suspension of her existence” (665), and the tone of his present-day letter is proprietary in the extreme. His remark that Mrs. Drover “will not have forgotten that today is our anniversary” implies that for her to do so would be unthinkable (662), either because he already “owns” her to the extent that they are functionally one person or because (as the use of the future tense suggests) he intends to forcibly remind her of the fact. Though the story hints that Kathleen’s fiancé might have been an especially cruel individual, his demeanor toward her encapsulates a patriarchal view of women’s status in society and (especially) in marriage, broadening the story’s critique. His featurelessness, both during the episode in the garden and in Mrs. Grover’s memories, underscores this point; she can’t imagine or describe him in any detail because he could be any man.
Within this societal context, the “promise” Kathleen makes to her fiancé becomes deeply suspect. For one, she doesn’t seem to know what she’s agreeing to, but her fiancé suggests that her ignorance is irrelevant; when she remarks that she doesn’t “understand” the soldier’s remark that he will not be “so far” away, he replies, “You don’t have to” (663). Furthermore, the story hints that Kathleen might also have been manipulated or coerced. When Mrs. Drover wonders, “What did he do, to make me promise like that?” (665), she finds that she can in fact remember “all that he said and did” with “dreadful clarity” (665). The word choice (“make,” “dreadful,” etc.) makes it clear that Mrs. Drover feels she pledged herself to her fiancé under some sort of duress. Finally, there is the nature of the promise itself, which struck her even at the time as a “sinister troth” (664). While the terms of their engagement aren’t entirely clear, the suggestion is that she vowed to remain faithful even in the event of her fiancé’s death, as he responds to her concerns about that death by telling her she “need do nothing but wait” (663). Ultimately, the story implies that this promise would have been deeply unfair and “unnatural” even if Kathleen had made it with a clearer understanding of what she was doing; it cuts her off from the world of the living, effectively killing her alongside her lover in the interests of ensuring women’s fidelity.
Trauma Over a Bad Relationship
There is evidence in the story that Kathleen Drover does not experience a spectral visitation from the demon lover of the title but rather succumbs to a very real mental crisis brought about by prior victimization. The anxiety created by the current war triggers Mrs. Drover’s memories of the past, which she has deliberately shut away. Wartime August 1941 takes her back to wartime August 1916 and its traumatizing events.
In 1941, Mrs. Drover, like most Londoners at the time, is living in a state of anxiety produced by the German bombing of the city. The blitz has caused “cracks in the structure” of her home (661)—a symbol of her life with her husband and children. This anxiety is difficult for Mrs. Drover because she prides herself on being “utter[ly] dependabl[e]” in her adult life after a series of traumas experienced in her youth (665). Coming from her new home in the country, her goal is to be efficient and practical, retrieve the items she’s come for, and meet her train.
In her subconscious, however, Mrs. Drover has already correlated the Augusts of past and present, so when she sees the unexpected letter, she is annoyed at being “intruded upon” and views the letter writer as “contemptuous of her ways” (662). The reader learns later that her first fiancé made the young Kathleen feel this way too, which suggests the soldier is on her mind before she opens and reads the letter about “our anniversary” and a scheduled meeting with “K” (662). When Mrs. Drover recognizes the handwriting as her former fiancé’s, her body goes into high alert.
Having just looked out at the 1941 garden of her home, Mrs. Drover immediately thinks of the 1916 garden, which was where she last saw her fiancé. Despite the proposal, the memory is not a scene of young love but of nervousness on Kathleen’s part and manipulation on the fiancé’s. The fiancé is not a warm figure: His face is in the shadows of the trees, and he speaks to her “without feeling” (663). Kathleen succumbs to his betrothal not because she loves him but because he uses the button of his uniform to cut her palm again and again “without very much kindness, and painfully” (663). The cruelty emotionally scars Kathleen, who is only 19 at the time. Further evidence that she fears him includes the fact that she is “intimidated” and longs to run to the “safe arms of her mother and sister” (663). Mrs. Drover also later remembers that when she was with her fiancé, there was a “complete suspension of her existence” (665). Moreover, the vow she gives him feels like a “sinister troth” that isolates her from everyone else (664). Her experience of being with her fiancé was therefore one in which she felt lost, vulnerable, and overwhelmed.
As Mrs. Drover navigates her traumatic memories about the soldier, she remarks that “[u]nder no conditions could she remember his face” (665)—an amnesia that many trauma victims encounter. While the immediate traumatic relationship ends when the soldier disappears on the French front, Kathleen has a subsequent “complete dislocation from everything” (664)—a phrase that recalls the numbness survivors of abusive relationships often feel. Not seeing the soldier’s dead body keeps her in a state of suppressed trauma, as she fears his return and the harm he might commit. It takes her years to recover from this relationship. She starts dating again in her late twenties.
When Mrs. Drover realizes the date of the letter corresponds with the current day and connects the words of the letter—“our anniversary” and “You may expect me […] at the hour arranged” (662)—to her former fiancé, she begins to anticipate his arrival. While Mrs. Drover tells herself this is unreasonable, a part of her believes it is true. Hyperaware of what she now perceives as a “threat,” Mrs. Drover’s main fear is that “wherever he may be waiting, [she] shall not know him” (665). Now very agitated, Mrs. Drover “lets herself out by inches from her own front door” and hurries to the taxi so she can make the train and get safely home (666). However, her anxiety has been ratcheted to the point that the combination of the clock striking seven—perhaps the “hour arranged” (662)—and the sight of the unknown taxi driver’s face sends her into a panic. In the back seat of the cab, she “scream[s] freely and [beats] with her gloved hands on the glass all round” (666), imprisoned by both the taxi and the trauma of the abuse she suffered at 19.
Anticipation of Death
To function in daily life, most people push the knowledge of their own mortality away from conscious thought. However, certain situations of exterior crisis—e.g., war, with its daily casualties and arbitrary wins and losses—can make this process more difficult, heightening apprehension regarding death.
For Mrs. Drover, World War II—and particularly the blitz of London—erases “years on years of voices, habits, and steps” and replaces them with “cracks in [the] structure” of her life (664, 661). Bombs could destroy her home, which represents the life she has built with William Drover and their children, at any minute. Moreover, her own life could end with little warning. The contents of the unexpected letter heighten Mrs. Drover’s anxiety about death, reminding her of the first significant death in her life.
Although it’s never specified who the letter writer is, Mrs. Drover connects the signature and handwriting with a young man she was engaged to in 1916, who went “missing, presumed dead” on the battlefield (664). The idea of his death bothered Kathleen even before the news of his disappearance. As he departs, she imagines crying to her mother, “What shall I do? What shall I do? He is gone” (663). However, Kathleen can’t imagine the worst-case scenario at this point and, in speaking with her fiancé, is unable to finish her sentence, “suppose you—I mean suppose—” (663). Later, Mrs. Drover recalls the “suspension of her existence that August week” (665), as though she were hovering between engaging in her life and anticipating its end as she knew it to be.
While her memories of the fiancé are highly ambivalent, Kathleen still has a shock response when he goes missing. Relieved her betrothal has ended, she must nevertheless contemplate the fact that people die, sometimes young and sometimes for what seem like nonsensical reasons. This contemplation perhaps contributes to the multiyear fixation that keeps Kathleen from functioning. Her marriage to William Drover helps her, but World War II’s similarities to World War I bring thoughts of death back to the surface. This is exacerbated by the fact that her “married London house” (664), which used to feel stable and secure, now feels “hollow,” as if the many years she has spent there have been “cancelled.” Mrs. Drover is beginning to experience the same sort of “complete dislocation” that put her life on hold after her fiancé’s death (664).
Preoccupied with death, particularly her own, she personifies it in the returning figure of this fiancé whose face she cannot remember. She imagines his malevolent spirit will come to retrieve her at the “hour arranged” (662). That he stands in for death is clarified by her reflection, “[W]herever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You have no time to run from a face you do not expect” (665). Mrs. Drover knows that life can be arbitrary, unsettling a house’s foundation, leaving a facial tremor after an illness, and taking a young man’s life. It is only a matter of time, she thinks, before the roulette wheel will stop at her place. Death will come; she just doesn’t know how.
This puts her in a state of hypervigilance that is so terrifying, she comes up with a solution to make it seem less arbitrary, giving death a corporeal form in the taxi driver. Mrs. Drover feels death has followed her since the age of 19. When the taxi driver turns to face her, she sees in some ways what she has been anticipating all along. Despite how ironic it seems, the vision of the taxi driver as death personified is an act of control: She takes away the arbitrariness and decides how and when death claims her for her journey into the “hinterland.”
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