Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover

The Demon Lover is a short story by Elizabeth Bowen that has a lot of psychoanalytic aspects maximizes the utilization of a number of different suspense triggering elements. It written to test the reader’s imagination in a way and cause them to debate whether what they are reading is a ghost story or the racing mind of a main character going through a pretty vivid hallucination. The spectacles that the writer is making an endeavor at depicting are not substantiated with enough conceivable thinking for the audience to give any confidence to the cadence of scenes that happen. However, with a decent understanding of the way that Elizabeth Bowen writes her literary content, the reader could definitely make an educated assumption that the story
contains psychological and psychoanalytical connotations rather than supernatural incidences. A vital aspect to deliberate when analyzing the the content of any text is the understanding of the authors purpose. More often than not a protagonists’ mind and intuitions are part of a greater whole, by this I mean, that they can contain aspects of the authors mindset and thinking patterns as well. I say all this to say that the comprehension of the author is basically if not even more significant than that of the protagonist who in this case is Kathleen Drover.
The psychoanalysis of this text and its protagonist must include the psychoanalysis of its author.
If one is to consider this, then it will be much easier to understand that this is written with reactions that potentially have to do with something from the authors own life. It is very fair to say, that she is writing this literary piece about authentic very genuine phobias, not necessarily simply something as trivial as a ghost. It is important to acknowledge the stress that Bowen places on the past of Drover. The fact that a story this short has the deep personal examples and vividness also leads the reader to believe that the author is writing a lot of this from personal experience because stories this short rarely include this deep level of “random” occurrences to the main story line. Furthermore, although the author uses a lot of intense description, its main goal is to add an additional and outside shift from the story’s own text to internal conflicts that the author clearly suffers from. This story is simply what you get when the author uses his or her own protagonist in their writing for escape and description. It’s an example of a type of therapy which is what psychoanalytic method was also commonly called when Sigmund Freud originated the
concept.
The literary piece is thoroughly written as a third person but the author couldn’t help but concurrently add her self into the storyline. This lack of separation between author and the protagonist is the main source for the protagonist’s unpredictable cognizance. These unreasonable fears affect one’s independent understanding of what is actually going on, however the side of things that the author incorporates from her own past that clearly continues to haunt her. Kathleen’s past and mindset are symbolized in the text by the houses “cracks in the structure” with no fix for them. These fears that Kathleen Drover has stem from the pressures of World War II, the fear of death, and the struggles that her own personal responsibility to her self to try and stay sane throughout the post traumatic stress and hallucinations that came from the death of her former lover. Analyzing this psychoanalytically can only lead back to the author and her very own personal experiences and struggles.