The Relationship between Woman and House in Elizabeth Bowen's "The New House" and The Last September

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  • Elizabeth Bowenの描く家と女性-"The New House"とThe Last Septemberを読む
  • Elizabeth Bowen ノ エガク イエ ト ジョセイ The New House ト The Last September オ ヨム

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between woman and house in Elizabeth Bowen's early works, "The New House" (1923) and The Last September (1929). Bowen is a descendant of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and also the last heiress of the Bowen's Court, the typical Irish Big House, though she spent most of her life in England. The Last September is her autobiographical Big House novel, in which she depicts the life of the Ascendancy in the time of the Troubles. Meanwhile, "The New House" is considered to be one of her many "English" short stories. In these two works, she is fully aware of the tradition of the nineteenth-century women writers who represent house as a symbol of women's imprisonment and write about their attempt to escape from it. She adapts this tradition for the modern Anglo-Irish stories that deal with the end of the Ascendancy and subjective independence of women. Although houses are depicted as a prison in both stories, they are not stable any more. This reflects the fact that the Ascendancy was losing their Big Houses and their old aristocratic life-style in 1920s. At the same time, houses are transformed from the symbol of imprisonment into that of women themselves who leave the world of old values and begin to live in the present. Recording the last moment of the Ascendancy, Bowen sees the world beyond it where women can search new human relationships.

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