Elizabeth Bowen’s Uncanny Houses

Abstract

From the first days of war, the Gothic was enacted in home front houses. The blackout transformed even daylight interiors into dark, claustrophobic chambers, and mass evacuations made the city strangely silent. When raids began in 1940, Blitz destruction made houses seem fragile, with three and a half million homes destroyed in London alone (A. Taylor 502): parts of London were reduced to “long vistas, chiselled by destruction” (M. Anderson 24). The Gothic trope of live burial became literal for those trapped in rubble, an experience so traumatic that people who remained aware during the experience were more likely to die than those knocked unconscious (Haslewood 21). Yet the texts of this chapter employ not only Gothic tropes but also Gothic modes of writing, febrile narrative voices that sense uncanny presences in domestic spaces and challenge linear conceptions of time.

“This did not look like home; but it looked like something — possibly a story.”

(Bowen, Heat of the Day 47)