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Identity In Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover

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Elizabeth Bowen’s short story the Demon Lover is about how paranoia from the past can make a person lose themselves and their identity. As the main character, Mrs. Drover, is at her old childhood home to pick some things up, she “stopped dead and stared at the hall table - on this lay a letter addressed to her” (Bowen 4). This mysterious letter says that some love from her past will come to meet her that day. This causes Mrs. Drover to flashback to the day an old soldier-lover left her, and how her identity changed because how her family thinks of her changed that day. After reading the letter, she promises herself that “the letter’s entrance she was not permitting her mind to dwell” (Bowen 13). However, this is only a lie she tells herself,
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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).

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