‘The Road Was in Ireland’: Modernist Ecologies of Estrangement in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Fiction

Abstract

Attending to Elizabeth Bowen’s environmental descriptions in her short fiction, including her landscapes, weather, flora, and fauna, reveals a modernist ecological sensibility. In stories such as ‘Summer Night’ and ‘Human Habitation,’ Bowen’s characters find themselves estranged from the kinds of attachment to place fostered by a national ecological imaginary. While Bowen’s own nationality, and the effect of her Anglo-Irish class and heritage on her writing, has been a central area of consideration for many scholars, this essay offers an ecocritical reading of her short stories and argues that these works interrogate the viability of national ecologies to help understand the experiences of her characters within a modern world. Whether they find themselves in Ireland or in England, Bowen’s characters inhabit a world that perpetually leads to feelings of detachment and alienation from the terms of belonging and place that underlie such national ecologies. By building on the recent modernist and ecocritical turn in scholarship on Elizabeth Bowen, this essay argues that her short stories challenge the explanatory qualities of romantic national ecologies by instead evoking a modernist ecology of estrangement.

1. Introduction

In her 1947 preface to the Cresset Press edition of Uncle Silas, Elizabeth Bowen suggested that Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic novel was ‘an Irish story transposed to an English setting.’ (Bowen’s (1999k) ‘Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu’). Bowen proceeds to define her conception of the national tale through almost cliché colonial affectations; Le Fanu’s novel is Irish in that it is belated, that it ‘is sexless, and [that] it shows a sublimated infantilism.’ (Bowen 1999k, p. 101). The delineation of an ‘Irish tale’ is somewhat oddly prescriptive for a writer who otherwise held complicated views about national identity, given her own Anglo-Irish class and heritage. Allan Hepburn points to an example from Bowen’s time teaching at Vassar College to illustrate the ambivalences that vexed her understanding of something like the ‘national imprint’ of a literary tradition. As an exercise in one of her seminars, she looked to the examples of Frank O’Connor and Seán O’Faoláin and inquired as to whether their nation could be deduced in their short fiction if all markers of place—town names, mountains, rivers, etc.—were removed (Hepburn 2020, p. 229). At first glance, Bowen’s preface to Uncle Silas would suggest her own answer to that question is resounding in its affirmation of national legibility. Yet even in this preface, Bowen’s views about the innate qualities of this ‘imprint’ are complicated by the problem of setting and environment: ‘having, for reasons which are inscrutable, pitched on England as the setting for Uncle Silas, [Le Fanu] wisely chose the north, the wildness of Derbyshire. Up there, in the vast estates of the landed old stock, there appeared, in the years when Le Fanu wrote…a time lag—just as such a time lag as, in more marked form, separates Ireland from England more effectually than any sea.’ (Bowen 1999k, p. 101). On the one hand, Bowen reaffirms the idea that nationality is an attachment to an idea and set of characteristics that is not bound by land. Yet Le Fanu is ‘wise’ to choose a setting with landscapes that are legible to those characteristics. On the other hand, then, Bowen complicates an underlying pillar of romantic conceptions of the nation, which is that a fundamental component of imagining the continuity of those characteristics is through an ecological attachment to place. What happens to that attachment if a ‘national tale’ can be so easily transported elsewhere?

Bowen does not necessarily seek to answer this question in her writing, even when directly addressing ideas about nationality, as in her non-fictional works such as her study of English Novelists or in the essay ‘Eire’ for the New Statesman, which sought to explain Irish neutrality to an English audience during the war effort. Her fiction, by comparison, shows Bowen to be more animated by slippages between underlying principles of national attachment—fellow feeling, belonging, reverie for a land and its people—and the actual experiences of her characters. These slippages are particularly evident in her short fiction; whereas the novel might, as Ian Watt or Raymond Williams formulate in varying ways,1 be contoured by the politics and vistas of place, the snapshot of the short story (Bowen 1994), to borrow Bowen’s own visual metaphor for its art, perhaps leaves more room for expressing detachment from, and ambivalence towards, scene and setting. With particular attention to ‘Summer Night,’ a story set in Ireland, and ‘Human Habitation,’ which is set in England, this essay argues that attending to the relationship between Bowen’s characters and her descriptions of their environments, built or natural, reveals a writer who consistently interrogates the governing ideas that tie nationality to ecology. Absent from these stories is any semblance of a nineteenth-century romantic ecology of the nation (or of nationalism), and in its place is instead a modernist ecology of estrangement.

In many ways, the argument of this essay is therefore not an attempt to wade into longstanding debates about Bowen’s own nationality—not to answer her own question about national imprint. Questions of nationality have certainly been understood as sources of estrangement in Bowen’s writing; Vera Kreilkamp, for example, roots Bowen’s ‘brooding vision of the past’ in her position as the last member of an Anglo-Irish family lineage (Kreilkamp 1998, p. 141). However, many scholars have extended this estrangement well beyond the field of nationality. For instance, Elke D’Hoker suggests that in Bowen’s short stories, houses, no matter where they are located, have a tendency to ‘[dwarf] and [obscure] the characters…by attributing life to the house, in other words, the characters themselves become lifeless, divested of the very emotions that motivated the personification in the first place.’ (D’Hoker 2016). Bowen’s environments—as a composition of landscapes, atmospheres, flora, and fauna—frequently create a similar dynamic with her characters, a point that can be accessed by framing her ecologies of estrangement against the ideas of belonging and inheritance derived from national ecologies. This framework is not designed to add new definition to existing debates about Bowen’s nationality, nor is it to suggest Bowen was a radical critic of the nation as a unifying concept; instead, this argumentative framework is meant to show how even in the writer’s own enduring image of her nationality, in which, as Anna Teekell notes, she positions herself ‘in the middle of the Irish Sea,’ Bowen evokes an estranging ecology: the sea floor is solid, but its surface is liquid (Teekell 2017).

By actively examining aspects of Bowen’s short stories that challenge the easy compartmentalising of the nation into defined and fixed ecologies, this essay is in conversation with recent work that situates Bowen in modernist and ecocritical terms, two modes of scholarship that have increasingly overlapped. Style has been an important aspect in reading Bowen as a modernist writer, especially, as Doug Battersby notes, in the way she deploys techniques of indirect discourse and interior monologue (Battersby 2024). Nonetheless, the most significant influence on reading Bowen as a modernist has been to move away from interiority, something which parallels similar movements in modernist studies more generally. As Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy argues, a shift towards the external and material conditions of the world evinces ‘modernism as a discourse of diagnosis and protest, an artistic response to a social problem.’ (McCarthy 2015, p. 4). Bowen has been read as a writer of ‘things,’ especially technologies, which provide cyphers for thinking about the disruption of history and temporality, as can be seen in Zan Cammack’s examination of the gramophone in Bowen’s novel The Last September (1929) or in Emily Bloom’s study of Bowen’s radio work with the BBC (See Cammack 2021; Bloom 2016). Susan Stanford Friedman drew out the essential connection between this external and material turn in modernist studies to the ecological and the planetary; for Friedman, modernism often provides a radical upending of Enlightenment views of dominion, as the scale of the natural and the planetary cannot fit within existing socio-political orders of control, extraction, and dominance (Friedman 2015, pp. 2–3). Or, as Peter Adkins puts it, the canon of modernist literature, from James Joyce to Virginia Woolf to Djuna Barnes, consistently reveals the degree to which writers were preoccupied ‘with the relationship between the human and the nonhuman more broadly conceived and often on a planetary scale.’ (Adkins 2022, p. 4). Attending to the ecological descriptions within short stories like ‘Summer Night’ and ‘Human Habitation’ indicates that Bowen very much belongs within these ecological considerations of modernism.

Although Bowen has often been seen as writer of the built world, Sinead Sturgeon has argued against reading her ‘as a writer chiefly fascinated by the great indoors.’ (Sturgeon 2020). If ecology is defined by relationality, between living organisms and environments, then Bowen’s descriptions of that relationship have often been askew. One of the ways that James Wurtz positions Bowen as a modernist writer is through the way that Ireland becomes a kind of invading force into English territory in her writing. For Wurtz, Bowen’s modernism is bound up with her ‘preoccupation with internal and external ghosts [and therefore] is centrally tied to her reinvention of the Gothic conventions.’ (Wurtz 2010). Those conventions, according to Wurtz, evoke Ireland and the history of Ireland as a colonised nation—colonised in part by Bowen’s own ancestors. Sturgeon ties Wurtz’ argument explicitly to Bowen’s ecological attentions; Ireland, in Sturgeon’s reading of the short story collection The Demon Lover (1945), looms as a spectral presence, even in those narratives set entirely within England, through ‘the intersection of domestic space and what might be described as a “gothicized nature”—a natural world imbued with supernatural agency and inimically disposed to its human occupiers—[which] allows Bowen to critique gothic convention as well as to pose fundamental questions about the ontology of the nonhuman and humanity’s complex relation to the otherness of the natural world.’ (Sturgeon 2020). A story like ‘Green Holly,’ for example, seems to invoke the history of British colonial rule in Ireland through its central, English setting of Mopsam Grange, which, the narrator reveals, is neither old nor especially new, but instead exists as a replacement for ‘a house on this site which had been burned down.’ (Bowen 1999c, p. 812). Although Mopsam Grange is firmly set in England, the image of an estate being burned down is hard to disentangle from the fates of many Anglo-Irish Big House estates during the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, even if Bowen’s own family home, Bowen’s Court, was spared from those particular embers. Repositioning Bowen’s ecologies of estrangement against national ecologies broadly speaking, this essay seeks to show how that national influence is neither total nor unilateral.

In many ways, Sturgeon’s argument presents a modernist estrangement wrought from an anxiety about nationality. Her argument takes up a similar position to Eve Patten’s work that demonstrates the influence of the Troubles in Ireland on the English modernist imagination, which ‘found textual expression in a kind of transnational montage, and in the literary recruitment of proximate Irish imagery—from the dead body of MacSwiney to the shattered streetscapes of Dublin—as a means of foreshadowing what seemed to lie ahead on the domestic horizon.’ (Patten 2022, p. 8). The seemingly unilateral direction of this anxiety, from Ireland onto England, perhaps unintentionally reproduces a certain hierarchy and ordering of the world that I argue Bowen’s short fiction can often challenge. The ruins that populate so much of Bowen’s writing about Ireland, for example, are usually read in the context of history in the way that Kreilkamp configures.2 Yet so many of these ruins, such as that of the mill upon which Marda Norton and Lois Farquar stumble in The Last September, might also be tied to the positioning of modernism at the end of a nineteenth century because these ruins are defined by what Elizabeth Carolyn Miller argues are the diminished worlds of ‘extraction ecologies’ that informed the imperial demand which led to the kinds of infrastructural decline found outside Anglo-Irish demesnes, yes, but also, as will be seen in ‘Human Habitation,’ throughout Britain (Miller 2021, pp. 2–3). In Bowen’s writing, national ecologies must always contend with the remnants of historical failure, the presence of which often dislodges her characters from developing attachment to their environs.

2. The Road Was in Ireland

As one of Bowen’s most prolonged ecological descriptions in her short fiction, the opening paragraphs of ‘Summer Night’ exemplify estrangement from a ‘national imprint.’ One way to get at this estrangement is to ask of the opening passage of the story the same question that Bowen would pose to her own students at Vassar:

As the sun set its light slowly melted the landscape, till everything was made of fire and glass. Released from the glare of noon, the haycocks now seemed to float on the aftergrass: their freshness penetrated the air. In the not far distance hills with woods up their flanks lay in light like hills in another world—it would be a pleasure of heaven to stand up there, where no foot ever seemed to have trodden, on the spaces between the woods soft as powder dusted over with gold. Against those hills, the burning red rambler roses in cottage gardens along the roadside looked earthy—they were too near the eye.

(Bowen 1999f, p. 653)

Where is the story set? Nothing in the opening paragraph unambiguously belongs to either of Bowen’s two major national settings for her stories. The haycocks, rambler roses, and wooded hills are just as likely to be found in Shropshire or Dorset as in north Co. Cork. The story is, nonetheless, quick to answer this question: the beginning of the second paragraph denotes that ‘the road was in Ireland.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 653). While the declarative nature of that phrase might appear counterintuitive to the argument of this essay, another way of interpreting this declaration of national setting is to note the necessity of defining it at all, an interpretation bolstered by the fact that the story was written and set during the Second World War. Nothing should be so different as neutral Ireland in this context, yet neutrality itself brought about an existential, and ecological problem, for the independent Irish state. Geographically and geologically speaking, Britain and Ireland share as many similarities as differences (Woodcock and Strachan 2012, p. 19), a reality, as Anna Teekell also notes, made evident by the fact that ‘in 1942 and 1943, the government of Ireland commissioned eighty-five stone markers at eighty-two Look Out Posts (LOPs) along its coastline. These markers, clearly stating “eire” in whitewashed stones, served as signals to World War II airmen, alerting them to the fact that they were flying over neutral territory.’ (Teekell 2018). Like wayward airmen, readers enter into ‘Summer Night’ from a view that cannot distinguish neutral Ireland from Allied Britain until the narration presents its own Look Out Post at the beginning of the second paragraph.

From an ecological perspective, then, the opening of ‘Summer Night’ upends certain expectations of national understanding. Since ecologies are about relationality, national ecologies tend to be predicated on an exception often built out of romantic ideals of dominion over a landscape. The unique qualities of that domain—its topography, its estuaries, rivers, lakes, flora, fauna—take on the symbolic compass of the Edenic nation. Hence the establishing of national birds, national flowers, national parks, and so on. Irish nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, for example, had its own iteration on this ecology, which Justin Dolan Stover argues was rooted in ‘nostalgic portrayals of Ireland’s natural beauty and perceived bounty’ because the historic experiences of dispossession and famine under British rule ‘fed an unavoidable eco-nationalism that was critical of materialism, colonial subjugation, and government mismanagement.’ (Stover 2022, pp. 134, 138). Literature and theatre, especially during the Revival, played an important role in fostering this ecological imaginary; the plight of the Old Woman in W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Caithleen Ni Houlihan is that strangers (i.e., the British) have cast her out of her ‘four beautiful green fields,’ which represent the four provinces of Ireland (Yeats and Gregory 2001, p. 7). Wurtz’s and Sturgeon’s reading of Ireland as an uncanny or gothic anxiety in Bowen’s fiction is in some ways buoyed by this imaginary; green, for instance, is everywhere in her short stories, from the titular bird in ‘The Parrot,’ (Bowen 1999i, p. 114) to the ‘green-and-gold frame’ that encases a number of portraits in ‘The Visitor,’ (Bowen 1999j, p. 129) to ‘that expressive green’ hat which instantiates the beguiling qualities of Ann Lee’s shop (Bowen 1999a, p. 103). But the explication that the road was in Ireland at the beginning of ‘Summer Night,’ much like the need for the environmental imprints of ‘eire’ signs during the war, presents a very different kind of anxiety—the ecological imaginary of the nation is in fact not a clear reflection of an actual experience in the modern world.

‘Summer Night’ is ultimately a story about detachment and estrangement from the imagination of a national ecology. Of course, a substantive influence on this estrangement pertains to the position of its characters as members of an Anglo-Irish class who exist primarily as nearly forgotten remainders in a post-independent Ireland that does not see them privy to the future of the nation. More rudimentarily, ‘Summer Night’ is the story of an affair, or at least the hope of an affair. Emma, the woman driving through the countryside in the opening paragraphs of the story, is travelling to Bellevue, the home of Robinson, who in turn awaits her arrival while hosting a well-to-do brother and sister from the county town, Justin and Queenie. Back at her rundown estate, Emma leaves behind her husband the Major, her disaffected daughters Vivie and Di, and the trepidatious Aunt Fran. Everyone is miserable in the story and in search of some kind of meaning, fulfilment, or even just a way to pass time. One way of framing the story, then, is as another exploration of Anglo-Irish disinheritance from Ireland, not unlike The Last September or Bowen’s later return to the Big House, A World of Love (1955). Aunt Fran, for example, constantly frets about the possibility of a raid on the estate and the memories of her neighbours being burned out make her feel ‘stranded…like some object on the bed of a pool that has run dry.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 666). Dry because, in many respects, the demesnes of the Big House estate had become, as Kelly Sullivan argues, an ecological symbol for Anglo-Irish decline and failure (Sullivan 2022, p. 175). But also dry because belated—Aunt Fran is not representative of the broader story because instead of IRA soldiers there is ‘silence for miles around this obscure country house.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 666). Something other than Anglo-Irish decline is at play in the estrangement of the characters in ‘Summer Night.’ If the story was about the triumph of one imaginary about the Irish national ecology over another, then surely the rest of the landscape would not appear so absent of human life.

Reading ‘Summer Night’ as a modernist story brings out the degree to which estrangement is not simply a matter of connecting or disconnecting from official histories of the Irish nation. Attending to Bowen’s descriptions of landscapes and environments elevates the uneasy feeling evoked from the opening paragraph of the story and casts it as a premonition for all sentiments explored therewithin—as much as the imagery of a hillside in the golden hour ought to be splendorous, the effect is one of detachment because everything is ‘too near the eye.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 653). Time and again in the story, Bowen’s descriptions of landscapes and environments, built or natural, border on the bucolic or the idyllic without ever achieving a sense of tranquillity or attachment. Mostly these scenes evoke an uncanny sense of impersonality or uninhabitability—even beginning with the fact that Emma is only introduced as the driver several pages into ‘Summer Night.’ As a result the car she drives drifts through the countryside as if collaged onto a postcard; when Emma approaches her first stop, ‘people in modern building estate gardens let the car in a hurry through their unseeing look.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 654). The ecological estrangement evoked by the description of the distant hills in the opening paragraph of the story mirrors the estrangement that Emma experiences motoring into the ‘refreshed town’ where its ‘streets and stones threw off a grey-pink glare, sultry lasting ghost of the high noon.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 654). Bowen orients this estrangement to an existential state by aligning Emma’s driving with her agency and autonomy: ‘her existence was in her hands on the wheel and in the sole of the foot in which she felt through the sandal, the throbbing pressure of the accelerator.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 654). In a different scenario this image of the car could be construed as liberatory—the escape of the lover away from her stifled domestic life, bounding through the countryside. The uninterested and modern building estates undermine that feeling and reinforce the estranging qualities of the setting. All of Ireland seems devoid of life, as Emma’s first stop is at an inn looking for a telephone; the whole town, it seems, has gone to the races and, not noticing any receptionist, Emma asks ‘is there nobody there?’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 655). Bowen’s favoured turn to negation emphasises the degree to which the ecological estrangement of the opening paragraphs throws into relief an entire world of detachment and unbelonging.3

Another way of framing ‘Summer Night’ as a modernist story, then, is to highlight the failure of romance as a quest for fulfilment, attachment, and belonging. After all, Emma’s sojourn to her affair with Robinson takes on the structure of a failed romantic quest—a kind of adult iteration of Joyce’s ‘Araby.’ This romanticised vision for her tryst is tellingly established through ecological description; she imagines her arrival into Robinson’s arms as taking place on ‘cytherean terrain—the leaf-drowned castle ruin, the lake.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 678). Alluding to Venus and Aphrodite lends Emma’s fantasy an imagery out of Romantic ecologies, in which, Michael Cronin argues, landscapes are a ‘largely visual trigger for strong emotion.’ (Cronin 2022, p. 21). Bowen swiftly strips Emma’s affair of these higher ideals as she almost immediately recoils from ‘Robinson’s stern, experienced delicacy for love’ upon her arrival at Bellevue (Bowen 1999f, p. 678). Venus gives way to something far more earthly, ‘a sort of tactile wisdom [which] came from the firmness, lawn, under their feet.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 679). Denuded of the freedom and excitement Robinson was meant to engender, Emma’s wisdom is represented in her oblique image as a ‘drunken woman sobbing against the telegraphy pole,’ whom Justin passes on his way to deliver his ineffectual final letter to Robinson (Bowen 1999f, p. 681). Emma exits the story as she entered it, unnamed and set detachedly against an uncaring backdrop, a fate that was already foretold by the environs of Bellevue. On approach to Robinson’s home, ‘the tingling phase of darkness had settled down…the west sky had gradually drunk its yellow and the ridged heights that towered over her right hand became immobile cataracts, sensed not seen.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 675). Only the indifferent ‘green lamp-eyes’ of the ‘animals rising out of the ditches’ witnesses the end of Emma’s journey: in place of dominion is the annihilation of romantic sentiment (Bowen 1999f, p. 675).

As much as the Big House estates take on their own symbolism of decline and decay in much of Bowen’s writing, Robinson’s Bellevue is a cypher not so much for Anglo-Irish profligacy or exigency as it is for modernist estrangement. In addition to denying Emma her cytherean terrain, the house also stages Justin’s earlier, long-winded sermon about rejecting the old orders and breaking through to ‘find a new form.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 660). As a young man in neutral Ireland, Justin feels ‘every single pang of annihilation’ brought about by the war from a debilitating distance; estranged from the rest of Ireland but also those in Britain, Justin relies on abstraction to discover this new form: ‘that’s the whole of what I want to embrace. On the far side of the nothing—my new form. Scrap “me”; scrap my wretched identity and you’ll bring to the open some bud of life. I not “I”—I’d be the world.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 662). Justin’s modernist rejection of the Enlightenment ‘I’ in the face of being neutral during total war nevertheless parallels Emma’s own fate in that it leads only to failure. Unable to convince Robinson of his vision, Justin, who also appears to be in love with Robinson, can only make recourse to writing a letter where he admits that his ‘wish that [Robinson] should know [him] has been, from the first, ill found.’ (Bowen 1999f, p. 680). Justin might recognise and articulate his feelings of estrangement in way that Emma cannot, but both end up in the same the place, suspended from any form of meaning and belonging.

Bowen again prefigures these failures through an ecological description which makes clear that Bellevue cannot provide the ‘new forms’ sought, in different ways, by both Justin and Emma. Referred to as ‘Bluebeard’s castle’ by the local women, and a ‘china house’ by Justin’s deaf sister Queenie (Bowen 1999f, pp. 660, 673), Bellevue is in many respects another example of how, as Allan Hepburn argues, architecture in Bowen’s writing can reflect external values (Hepburn 2013, p. 112). But in ‘Summer Night’ that architectural presence is chiefly described through an ecological relationship to the surrounding environment:

On its knoll over the main road, just outside the town, Bellevue did look like china up on a mantlepiece—it was a compact, stucco house with mouldings, recently painted a light blue. From the lawn set with pampas and crescent-shaped flower-beds the hum of Robinson’s motor mower passed in summer over the sleepy town. And when winter denuded the trees round them the polished windows, glass porch and empty conservatory sent out, on mornings of frosty sunshine, a rather mischievous and uncaring flash. The almost sensuous cleanness of his dwelling was reproduced in the person of Robinson.

(Bowen 1999f, p. 660)

Everything about Bellevue is set off from the surrounding environment, not unlike Emma’s car moving through the hills of the countryside. The precise, manicured lawn is marked with pampas grass, a plant native to South America and therefore one which intimates a history of colonialism through the Columbia exchange. Yet the stucco house is compact and accompanied by the accoutrements of modernity; the motor mower sticks out in the small Irish town for the ostentatiousness of its noise and gestures to convenience. Its conservatory, empty of plant life, instead reflects a coldness against the leafless trees in the wintertime. Bellevue’s relationship to its environs, and indeed to its own flora, is peculiarly out of place and almost like Mopsam Grange in ‘Green Holly’—not quite modern nor historic. Bowen emphasises this estrangement by immediately following the description of Robinson’s home with the introduction of Justin’s failed modernist exegesis.

Attending to an ecological reading of ‘Summer Night’ reveals the depths of estrangement that each of the characters experience throughout the story. When the romantic ecology of the nation is built around dominion, belonging should be felt in familiarity with the land itself, something which is a priori denied from the opening paragraph of Bowen’s story. Of course, much of the scholarship that speaks to Bowen’s relationship to nationality will have accounted for the kind of detachment experienced by the Anglo-Irish characters in ‘Summer Night.’ However, part of the impetus to begin my analysis of the story by referring to the ambiguity of setting in the opening paragraph, prior to the declaration that ‘the road was in Ireland,’ is to trouble any easy excision of ‘Summer Night,’ or Bowen’s Irish stories more generally, from the rest of her oeuvre.

3. The Road Was in England

Because the feelings of estrangement expressed in stories of Ireland are just as readily found in Bowen’s stories set in Britain. Londoners, for example, are invaded by ‘an atavistic fear of the woods’ in ‘A Walk in the Woods.’ (Bowen 1999b, p. 544). Ivy growth on the steps of a Southstone manner during the war in ‘Ivy Gripped the Steps’ is a ‘process of strangulation’ that signifies a ‘decline dated from the exodus of the summer of 1940.’ (Bowen 1999e, pp. 772–73). If Ireland is absent from these stories, perhaps the real precipitating factor, then, is what Paul Saint-Amour notes to be the dread anticipation attending the promise of total war (Saint-Amour 2015, p. 10). Yet stories written prior to the Second World War also regularly feature these ecologies of estrangement. In ‘The Jungle,’ young Rachel finds a new world of discovery ‘over the wall at the bottom edge of the kitchen garden, where it began to be out of bounds.’ (Bowen 1999h, p. 251). Out in this ‘jungle’ world, Rachel experiences new territories of herself, at once exhilarating and terrifying: ‘The first time Rachel came here, alone, she squeezed along the dog-paths with her heart in her mouth and a cold and horrible feeling she was going to find a dead cat.’ (Bowen 1999h, p. 251). A space that is initially meant to represent a zone of discovery for Rachel becomes, by the end of the story, a symbol for lost connections to one’s own imagination, as ‘the Jungle, settling down into silence, contracted a little round them, then stretched to a great deep ring of unrealness and loneliness.’ (Bowen 1999h, p. 263). In ‘The Disinherited,’ the image of a ‘genteel hill’ and an ‘old village frosted inside its ring of elm trees’ nevertheless makes Davina feel as though ‘in this countryside she was a stranger.’ (Bowen 1999g, p. 416). From Sturgeon’s or Wurtz’s argument, these anxieties about space and the natural world are haunted by Ireland; my suggestion is that these anxieties can similarly be placed onto Bowen’s relationship with the ‘Anglo’ dimension of that hyphenated identity. These stories all share a modernist scepticism about national ecologies that see belonging as a mode of connection and dominion over a particular environmental imaginary. While ‘Summer Night’ is most usually associated with Bowen’s other Irish stories, such as ‘Her Table Spread,’ it has as just as much in common with ‘The Disinherited’ or even another story of the 1930s, ‘Human Habitation.’

In fact, perhaps the closest proximity to the estrangement experienced by the likes of Emma, Justin, and Robinson, can be found in the figures of Jameson and Jefferies. ‘Human Habitation’ is, like ‘Summer Night,’ a story that begins in transit; in place of Emma’s drive through the countryside, Jameson and Jefferies are two students who have decided to go on a walking tour for their summer holidays from university back in London. On a dark and rainy evening, the pair find themselves lost in search of the road to Middlehampton before stumbling upon a rustic cottage where they are greeted with hostility by a young woman named Annie who is in turn expecting the arrival of her feckless husband, Willy. After some hesitation, Annie invites the two young men in so they can have tea and get their bearings; Jameson and Jefferies, however, suddenly find themselves amidst a gothic scene: an unseen baby sleeps in another room while the two students slowly learn about Annie’s unhappy domestic life. Annie’s older relation, Auntie, is thrilled with the arrival of these two young bachelors, seemingly hoping that one of them will whisk her niece away from a life under the yoke of the looming, hauntingly absent Willy. Much like the failed romance plot underpinning ‘Summer Night,’ ‘Human Habitation’ plays on popular narrative conventions of the nineteenth century, in particular the melodrama, before denying the conclusion of that trajectory—Jameson and Jefferies eventually leave after a brief discussion about socialism with Auntie, stumbling unceremoniously ‘forward in the dark with tingling minds.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 169).

If nationality and national belonging are unspoken dynamics at work in ‘Summer Night,’ they are foundational to the plot of ‘Human Habitation.’ Jameson initially proposes the walking tour with Jefferies because he ‘said one should get to know the English Country as more than a poetic abstraction and its people as more than a political entity, and Jeffries agreed that this was very true.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 155). Not satisfied with merely reading the Lyrical Ballads, Jameson and Jefferies must become Wordsworth and Coleridge. They even debate amongst themselves about the most proper version of the ‘English Country’ in order to fulfil their imagined duties to the nation. They eventually decide upon the Midlands for what they perceive to be its authenticity: ‘One reads a lot of poetry and stuff against the Midlands, but personally I think they’re fine. And from our point of view, entirely undiscovered. Now if you go down West in the summer, or even into the Home Counties—and of course Wales is hopeless, besides costing such a lot to get there—you find the whole place simply crammed with rich smart people swishing about in cars.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 155). Rather than being haunted by the spectre of Ireland, ‘Human Habitation’ instead presents a somewhat farcical inversion of the ‘Irish Question’ in that the prevailing attitude of the English nation becomes a subject of unknowability. The irony of imagining the countryside around Birmingham through the colonial discourse of terra nullius—perhaps a very London thing to do—underscores the degree to which feelings of estrangement and uncertainty are just as prevalent in Bowen’s writing about England as it is in her writing about Ireland.

Viewing the midlands through a colonial ecological gaze positions Jameson and Jefferies at a fundamental remove from an environment that was meant to provide a deeper understanding of the nation and their place within it. Far from a colonial outpost, the midlands are supposed to represent the endeavour of British industrial might; their sojourn largely follows ‘the canals of middle England’ that connect the urban metropolis with the kind of brick fields upon which the two students stumble (Bowen 1999d, p. 155). Yet the brickyard, which Jameson believes must be ‘jolly big…to have an arm of the canal all to itself’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 158), takes on the qualities of a gothic sublime through its sheer size and vastness in the rainy dusk—it symbolises the moment that the two men know they have become lost on the road to Middlehampton. These centres of ‘exhausted extraction,’ to return to Miller’s formulation, and their attending transportation arteries do not provide easy navigability and instead highlight a modernist failure of dominion and order as they become monuments to overthrown senses in the relentless magnitude of the natural world. For three days straight Jameson and Jefferies try to navigate their way through the rain that ‘stung their faces to stiffness’ and made ‘their minds [grow] numb.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 156). Pauses in the torrents give glimpses of ‘a church spire pricking through a blur of trees,’ yet the promised village on the map never materialises (Bowen 1999d, p. 156). An ecology of estrangement, much like the distant hills that open ‘Summer Night,’ immediately places the two students outside the bounds of belonging. Despite their machinations of an authentic connection to the English countryside and its people, the weather renders Jameson and Jefferies’ first encounter with another living person, a man riding a cart horse along the road, disorienting for its immediacy and unpredictability: ‘Though it seemed as if for the whole afternoon they had been imminent, the dusk so suddenly disgorged them that Jameson and Jefferies had to spring into the hedge under the very nose of the horse with a violence that sent them sprawling among the prickly branches, to escape the towrope that would have mown them from their legs.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 157). Accentuated by the discomfort of the ‘prickly branches,’ the two men survive the encounter with the relatively unhelpful driver, but they themselves seem to come unmoored.

‘Human Habitation’ is in many ways a story that links good citizenship, ideas of belonging, and national fellow feeling with the very contours of identity, only to then interrogate the viability of those characteristics. The more lost that Jameson and Jeffries become spatially, the more lost they in turn become existentially, to the point that ‘[Jefferies] had begun to believe vaguely—the thing took form in his brain nebulously without any very definite mental process—that they had stepped unnoticingly over a threshold into some dead and empty hulk of a world…there was a canal there, but were there not canals in the moon—or was it Mars?’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 159). In a line that will later be echoed in the wartime story ‘Mysterious Kôr’ to describe the eerie safety brought to London by a full moon during the Blitz, Bowen takes the very landscape initially idealised for its authenticity and strips it of any semblance of understanding for the two students. Within this estranging ecology, Jefferies proceeds to lose even his own identity in a comedic circulation of thought: ‘There was once a man called Jameson, who asked a man called Jefferies to walk with him for years and years along a canal, and—they walked and walked till Jefferies forgot himself and forgot what he had ever been.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 157). Disgorged as they are from the evening, the two men are primed by their environments for the further estranging encounter they have when they finally arrive at the cottage hoping for a welcome of tea and directional aid. When Annie comes to the door, she is expecting her husband and when she cries his name her certainty ‘momentarily unconvinced Jefferies and Jameson of their own identities.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 160). If a national ecology is meant to give shape to identity by instilling ideas of belonging to the unique natural qualities of the nation, ‘Human Habitation’ denies that form of relationality—the environment loosens Jameson and Jefferies’ grip over themselves and their sense of place.

Some aspects of this displacement and estrangement in ‘Human Habitation’ might in turn be read in the fashion that Bowen herself applies to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas: as an Irish story transposed to English soil. Annie and Auntie do have characteristics that could be read through parallels to the ways that English and Anglo-Irish writers have historically framed Ireland. Their cottage is situated where ‘there’s no village or anything, just a crossroads,’ yet in this ‘lonely place’ Auntie is ‘the soul of hospitality.’ (Bowen 1999d, pp. 161–62). That hospitality takes on a gothic dimension as Jameson and Jefferies begin to recognise a tension building from Auntie’s disapproval of Annie’s marriage to Willy. As Auntie increasingly foists modes of hospitality upon the two men, they understand that she hopes they will rescue her niece from this domestic scene, which Jefferies feels as a horrible pang, as if ‘something was being violated.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 165). Spectral Ireland, to return to Wurtz’ formulation, might be seen in the miniature reincorporation of similar dynamics found in the nineteenth century Anglo-Irish Big House novel. Even green makes another appearance—when Annie first answers the door she informs Jameson and Jefferies that the cottage is not a public house and that ‘the Green Man’s beyond the brickyard.’ (Bowen 1999d, p. 160). Of course, the Green Man, another symbol of ecological estrangement, is part of English folklore, just as ‘Human Habitation’ is a thoroughly English story. Yet Bowen is a writer who often invites these modes of national transgression and traversal, given her knowledge of how ‘hospitality’ as a term has been used in British and Anglo-Irish conceptions of Ireland. The point is not whether ‘Human Habitation’ ought to be read as an Irish story set in England, but that it can be read as such while also being read as an English story about the gulf of understanding between metropolitan London and the midlands outside a ‘second city’ like Birmingham. The simultaneity of these interpretations only further concentrates those underlying feelings of estrangement.

4. Conclusions

Bowen does not ultimately retreat from the possibility of the nation, of national belonging, of good citizenship, as is evident across her writing. ‘Summer Night’ and ‘Human Habitation’ nevertheless exemplify a quality of Bowen’s short fiction that allows her to test the extent that national ecologies can help explain the experiences of a modern world, especially one where nationalisms have caused much destruction and estrangement from that world. These stories offer through their environmental descriptions momentary slippages from the authority of national ecologies to determine modes of attachment. The road was in Ireland, but it briefly might have been somewhere else; the road was in England, but briefly it might have been on the moon or on Mars. Co. Cork and the British midlands are equally capable of estranging Bowen’s characters and, if only temporarily, disabusing them of any romantic sentiment of national cohesion and belonging. While this scepticism tends to dissolve in Bowen’s novels through the resolution of plot—the burning of Danielstown at the end of The Last September provides clear definition—the characters of her short fiction can only exist in this perpetual estrangement. Emma will always be left drunken and tearful at the telegraphy pole and Jameson and Jefferies, minds tingly, can only go on unpoetically, having not, as the Wordsworthian poet might, found ‘man and nature as essentially adapted to each other.’ (Wordsworth 1998, p. 309).