Elizabeth Bowen Essay

“The private life and the emotions are facts like any others, and one cannot understand the public life of action without them.” W.H. Auden, review of Paul Rotha, Documentary Film (1936)

During the latter decades of the modernist literary movement, many artists were fascinated by the interaction between the individual and the world around them. They saw an inextricable relationship in which personal lives were shaped by the state of the public world around them. Two authors who explore this idea in their texts are Elizabeth Bowen in her novel The Heat of the Day and Alain Renais in his film Hiroshima Mon Amour. Both texts affirm Auden’s statement and assert that when individual experiences are viewed in tandem, the typical human experience

Although the novel appropriates conventions of an espionage story, Bowen deliberately gives salience to the domestic realm and its concerns rather than the historical events. This gives Bowen a platform through which she can explore the way that war displaces everyday life. Throughout the novel, Bowen uses a motif of anonymity to underscore the suffering that people underwent collectively in their daily life. As the protagonist Stella walks through the streets of London, she feels that “she had so dissolved herself […] into the thousands of beings of oppressed people.” This image of subsumption abstracts away from Stella’s perspective and encourages the reader to consider her experiences as transcendental of her personal experience as they are shared by millions of others. During Roderick’s visit to Stella, the motif reappears. In the context of a war-torn London, Stella and Roderick feel a “sense of instinctive loss” , a “trouble, had it been theirs only […] But it was more than that; it was a sign, in them, of the impoverishment of the world.” Bowen alludes to the widespread suffering in London to highlight Stella and Roderick’s situation as simply another iteration of civilian life, suggesting that their story was told not because it is unique, but rather because it is devastatingly common. Bowen

In The Heat of the Day, Bowen suggests that national-scale events such as war and political tension in a nation become part of the identity of civilians. This is evident in the characterisations of the central characters in the novel. Stella is a prime example as the progression of her life mirrors events in her historical context. In the scene where she is first introduced, this connection is foregrounded; her age is “younger by a year or two than the century” and she is described as “an instrument of her century.” As her personal affairs become embroiled in Robert’s and Harrison’s, Bowen again draws a parallel between the trajectory of her life and that of England: “The fateful course of her fatalistic century seemed more and more her own: together had she and it arrived at the testing extremities of their noonday.” In this manner, Bowen connects events in the political sphere to Stella’s personal world to highlight how human identity is shaped by its environment. Similarly, Harrison’s identity is also closely tied to the political world. He is represented as an unsavoury character whose motives are opaque and ambiguous—although he is loyal to Britain as a spy in the war, he betrays his nation by using his influence to buy intimacy with Stella. Harrison is an embodiment of the war and intrudes into Stella’s life as the adversities of war are