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A review by sam_bizar_wilcox
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
4.0
This novel is one that forces us to scrutinize the moments of social pause and discomfort. It is a reflection on bourgeois cruelty, on teenage girlhood, and the sanctity of one's private thoughts. By holding a magnifying glass over each of these ideas, Bowen shows just how fraught, and how fragile, our psyches - all our psyches - can be. The novel is unlike Woolf's (at times associated with Bowen, and writing just a generation before). The narration doesn't work to expose the inner truths and inner lives, but rather uses materials, dialogue, and the richness of things to give friction between the interior and exterior selves. If Woolf is transparent, Bowen is intentionally opaque. Rather than Woolf, Bowen echoes Austen, consulting the language of materialism and the comedy of manners. Yet, unlike Austen, Bowen's free indirect discourse and narrative voice is not a clearly moralizing force - we are not laughing with the speaker, admiring our heroine's strength of character and intellectual growth. We are instead pitying: before us is a tragedy so quiet as to be inscrutable from a distance, but given Bowen's keen attention we see it for what it is: the death of the heart.
My relationship with Bowen is admittedly complex. The narration itself is defensive, often inscrutable (Bowen is not interested in writing as the smart, biting critic of Austen; the difficulty of the text is why she might so often be compared to Woolf). Yet the function is remarkable. The form of the novel perfectly mirrors the subject of the text. A wall is built between the reader, just as a wall is built between the characters, just as walls crop up around them in social, economic, and physical space. The novel is a puzzle, the act of deciphering it, much like the journey embarked by the young Portia, reveals the truth: cruelty abounds - everywhere.
The mind and emotions of a teenage girl are treated with brilliant literary sophistication. Here, being a adolescent is as tragically heroic as the great classical plays. The journey to uncover knowledge is Oedipal, Bacchic, Oresteian. Remarkably, the hero here is an awkward young writer, who pours herself into her diary, and becomes the plaything of the world around her.
My relationship with Bowen is admittedly complex. The narration itself is defensive, often inscrutable (Bowen is not interested in writing as the smart, biting critic of Austen; the difficulty of the text is why she might so often be compared to Woolf). Yet the function is remarkable. The form of the novel perfectly mirrors the subject of the text. A wall is built between the reader, just as a wall is built between the characters, just as walls crop up around them in social, economic, and physical space. The novel is a puzzle, the act of deciphering it, much like the journey embarked by the young Portia, reveals the truth: cruelty abounds - everywhere.
The mind and emotions of a teenage girl are treated with brilliant literary sophistication. Here, being a adolescent is as tragically heroic as the great classical plays. The journey to uncover knowledge is Oedipal, Bacchic, Oresteian. Remarkably, the hero here is an awkward young writer, who pours herself into her diary, and becomes the plaything of the world around her.