Hallucinations In The Demon Lover

In 1945 Elizabeth Bowen published her short story “The Demon Lover”, in which the main character, Kathleen Drover, returns to her war torn home in London during the midst of World War II and finds a letter supposedly from her ex fiancé who has been presumed dead for 25 years. The story ends with the main characters abduction, presumably by her ex fiancé. Since its publication, “The Demon Lover” has been subject to much debate over the meaning of the events in the story. In his article “Psychosis or Seduction” Daniel V. Fraustino attempts to refute Douglas A. Hughes’s claim that the events in the story are hallucinations, the result of Mrs. Drover having a mental breakdown (Fraustino 483). Instead, Fraustino argues for a much more literal interpretation of the story, calling it “a mystery of high suspense” (483). I disagree with both Fraustino’s murder mystery theory, and Hughes’s argument that it was all a psychotic breakdown. I believe instead that the most convincing evidence can be found in favor of a supernatural explanation for the story. Fraustino spends the beginning of his article examining Hughes’s psychosis interpretation. According to Fraustino, Hughes bases most of his interpretation on the assumptions that Mrs. Drover suffered a severe mental breakdown after the loss

In his analysis, Fraustino tries to explain this by saying that the taxi’s arrival may have been prearranged, since Mrs. Drover said that she intended to call for one (486). However, shortly after she says that, she remembers that the telephone had been cut off (Bowen 163). The most logical explanation for the near impossible knowledge that the fiancé has would be that he did die in the war and has come back as a spirit to make Mrs. Drover keep the “unnatural promise” (Bowen 162) that she made to him by killing her so that she would be with him forever in the