The Demon Lover

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1945

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Literary Devices

Point of View

Content Warning: This section mentions wartime violence, relationship abuse, sexuality, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and demon possession.

“The Demon Lover” is written in a close third-person perspective attached to Mrs. Drover’s experience. Close third person is a she/he/they narration that keeps the reader attuned to a single character’s feelings while providing contextual details that allow the reader to judge that character’s reliability. In this case, it facilitates empathy with Mrs. Drover as she fears her home might be in jeopardy and recalls her former fiancé and his possible death.

For example, Mrs. Drover doesn’t know who sent her the letter, and her speculations about how it got into her closed house encourage the reader to consider various possibilities: whether the caretaker put it there (perhaps after writing it), whether the demon lover made it magically appear, whether Mrs. Drover wrote the letter herself, etc. These questions aim to draw readers closer to the narrative and engage them in its mystery. Because Mrs. Drover feels its delivery is “intru[sive]” or even “a threat,” the reader is encouraged to consider this possibility. Mrs. Drover’s rising fear and her anxious observations allow readers to engage in the narrative and try to solve a crime that (assuming Mrs. Drover is imagining things) objective narration might suggest never even occurred.

Ambiguity

“The Demon Lover” is deliberately ambiguous, offering a multiplicity of readings as to whether the letter writer is death, a demon lover, or a figment of Mrs. Drover’s traumatized imagination. Bowen allows room for readers to come up with interpretations of their own, beginning with the decision not to clarify what Mrs. Drover has come to retrieve in her house. Bowen states that she is gathering family items, as well as some of her own, but doesn’t specify what they are. However, even after the shock of the letter, Mrs. Drover still is determined to take the items home and delays her departure to get them. This both shows that she wants to serve her family and implies that there are items Mrs. Drover can’t admit she wants; perhaps the letter on the table is a projection of what Mrs. Drover hopes to find.

Second, the information readers get about Kathleen’s fiancé is deliberately ambiguous. It is unclear whether he is a young man simply anxious to secure his betrothal before his potential death or a malevolent force determined to tie Kathleen’s fate to his. It’s hard to know his intent because even Kathleen can’t recall his facial features. The story generally depicts him as unlikeable because Kathleen tells us that when she “[put] out a hand […] he each time pressed [it], without very much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his uniform” (663). She also remarks on the “spectral glitters in the place of his eyes” and that he speaks to her “without feeling” (663). She feels he coerces her into a “sinister troth” (664), but his seeming callousness could simply reflect his own wartime trauma.

The lack of clarity regarding who the letter writer is or what he wants drives the final act of the story. As Mrs. Drover reaches the taxi and the hour strikes, readers may think the danger is passed, only for the identity of the driver to strike the final terrifying note. Even then, however, the situation is unclear: The driver could be an innocent taximan, death personified, the supernatural demon lover, or the living lover coming back to see revenge. The lack of clear answers makes all these readings possible, which gives the story layers. Because of its ambiguity, it functions simultaneously as a modern folktale, a realistic story about stalking, and a story about trauma.

Flashback

Flashbacks usually take the reader into a past incident that comments on the present situation—in particular, why a character is behaving the way they are.

“The Demon Lover” features a significant flashback to 1916 that illuminates Mrs. Drover’s conflict in 1941. Since Mrs. Drover is essentially alone in the house, the flashback draws in additional settings and characters, thus populating a scenario that centers on one person. The reader learns that the war, which previously seemed to be the main source of Mrs. Drover’s anxiety, is only part of it.

In the flashback, Kathleen talks in a dark garden with a young man who is about to go back to battle after a week’s leave. While the couple doesn’t seem particularly loving or even close, they agree to marry. Mrs. Drover sees her fiancé as dangerous and cruel as he repeatedly “presse[s] [her hand], without very much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his uniform” (663). This—plus the fact that “[b]eing not kissed, being drawn away from and looked at intimidate[s] Kathleen till she imagine[s] spectral glitters in the place of his eyes” (663)—adds an otherworldly element to the story. Kathleen might have made a deal with the devil or been traumatized by a less than kind lover. Either way, this trauma creates and informs the traumas in her present—in particular, why the fiancé’s return might frighten her further. The power of Mrs. Drover’s fear of both physical and emotional obliteration only becomes clear with the past and present working in tandem.

Atmosphere

Bowen’s use of atmosphere is multifaceted. Her descriptions of bombed-out London suggest damage and menace, but Bowen also evokes a sense of emptiness and erasure to suggest that Mrs. Drover feels isolated and unseen.

Emptiness is inherent to the story’s setting: Mrs. Drover’s neighborhood and house are not currently occupied, as most residents have moved their families to the country for safety. Her street is now an “unused channel” in which the “unoccupied houses opposite [continue] to meet her look with their damaged stare” (161, 665). This sense of void intensifies as she enters her home and “[d]ead air [comes] out to meet her” (661). The rooms inside have been abandoned or fallen into disuse. The drawing room downstairs only has “traces of her long former habit of life” (661). A “yellow smoke stain” (661) is the only thing left of a fire in the fireplace (661), and a “ring” is all that remains of where a vase stood. The piano has been stored and the bed upstairs has been “stripped” (663). The Drovers’ bedroom is described as “former” (664), “hollow” (664), and “empty” (665).

All of this reminds Mrs. Drover of things that she has figuratively boarded up, like her memories of 1916. After the unexpected letter, a key memory comes flooding back, but the scene of Kathleen’s first engagement is also one of isolation and erasure. Twice she notes that she cannot make out her fiancé’s face, likening it to “one white burning blank as where acid has dropped on a photograph” (665). Nor can she remember it in retrospect; “[it] felt, from not seeing him at this intense moment, as though she had never seen him at all” (663). This inability to feel, see, and connect also applies to Kathleen. She remembers “the complete suspension of her existence during that August week” (665), when she felt that her vow to the fiancé was an “unnatural promise drive[n] down between her and the rest of all humankind” (663). In the wake of what should be a happy occasion, her betrothal, she was “apart, lost, and forsworn” (663).

There is a lack of closure even when the betrothal is broken, as the fiancé is missing and merely “presumed” to have died in combat. This sends Kathleen into a “complete dislocation from everything” (664), which heightens the loneliness she feels. Her marriage to William temporarily alleviates this emptiness, but the damage of the war makes her feel that the “years on years” of peace have been erased (664). Mrs. Drover’s life has become a “cracked cup” in which “memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away” (664).

This atmosphere of emptiness, both within and without Mrs. Drover’s mind, combines with images of damage and lurking threats to help to make the story not just about fear or stress, but loss as well.