Created spaces: Domestic myth-making in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen.

摘要

Twentieth-century author, Elizabeth Bowen writes often of children in her various works, yet her novels and short stories could hardly be considered for the consumption or pleasure of a young audience. Nevertheless, there exists an exception within her oeuvre---The Good Tiger, a colorful and charming story with illustrations by M. Nebel detailing what happens, "when a not-so-ferocious tiger leaves the zoo". Written and published in 1965, Bowen's sole "children's story" succeeds at speaking not only of but to the adolescent figures of which she so often depicts. While the prose may be simpler, the style less dramatic, the tone and underlying message of Bowen's book resonates with and perhaps encompasses a profound theme found in the rest of her work. After a day of tea party crashing and convertible cruising, the storybook tiger finds himself in a forest, "not the forest of his dreams. There was no hot sunshine, and the trees were dark because of the rain" (23). "But I do not care", the tiger says, "This is where my home is...This is the forest!" and then he thought, "They were good to me back there in the zoo. That was a nice house they gave me, a pretty blue house. But I don't want a house! Especially a house near those quarrelsome lions. Maybe, though, Sarah will ask me to her house again. Houses are all right" (23). For Bowen, houses are more than "all right", they are the foundational element with and around which she structures much of her fictional work.;As an Anglo-Irish modern writer, born in Dublin in 1899 to parents of English ancestry and heritage, Bowen lived her life moving between England and Ireland. "This is where my home is" the tiger muses in Bowen's storybook. For the tiger, the problem seems to be solved, yet it is a matter understood and deliberated upon with less certainty among Bowen's other fictional characters. These figures are instead typified by the equivocation that follows the tiger's resolute definition, raising questions such as, who constructs this space ("they", we, I?), who owns the home, how does it appear aesthetically, and what are the resulting benefits or drawbacks of such a place. These questions are those which Bowen's canon posits and with my thesis I discuss Bowen's ability to provide shape and structure to modernity through these created spaces. Bowen balances the tension arising from such queries with the productive act of building and construction, both literally, in the act of creating through writing and textually through the spaces which her figures come to inhabit.