Taylor Welsh

Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Van Tuyl, Jocelyn

Keywords

Bowen, Elizabeth, Gender, Postwar, Literature

Area of Concentration

English

Abstract

This thesis examines how two of Elizabeth Bowen’s 1930s novels explore changing conduct conventions through experimental narrative strategies. In To the North (1932) and The House in Paris (1934), Bowen presents baffling new social expectations for women in post-World War One Britain through tropes of legibility and authorship. Her heroines engage with unstable conduct codes and subvert formulaic courtship plots through motifs of textuality that involve “reading” and “writing” their social milieus. Following an introduction that outlines the unclear expectations wrought by rapidly evolving social, economic, and political roles for interwar women, the first chapter examines social legibility as a problem of readership in To the North. This chapter examines how difficulties navigating interwar gender conventions manifest through problems of expression, relation, and articulation on the level of plot. It also demonstrates how illegible social codes are focalized through the characters’ relationships to modern spaces of transit that alternately allow for and constrain narrative and romantic possibility. The second chapter positions social illegibility in The House in Paris as an issue of authorship and voice that surfaces on the level of both plot and structure. It examines textual questions of representation by exploring the novel’s literarily selfconscious style and its presentation of a problematized female subjectivity and narrative voice. Bowen’s interwar fiction is an apt example of literature responding to social changes. Thematic and structural elements of these two novels illustrate a larger dynamic of cultural instability and ambiguity inherent to the plight of British female experience between the world wars.

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