The Non-human, Haunting and the question of ‘Excess’ in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’

Abstract

Engaging with the new materialist views on death and life beyond anthropocentric views of self, this paper examines the ambiguities of conceptualizing the boundaries and relations between the human and the non-human. The non-human agency, by going beyond the limited cultural notions of subjectivity and ‘self,’ shows the possibility of an ‘other’ that though is entangled with the human self also offers an agentic capacity of its own. Therefore, by focusing on Rosi Braidotti’s views on new ways of conceptualizing death, of the necessity of accepting death as the pre-condition of our existence and part of the cycles of ‘becoming,’ the intra-actions between the human and the non-human, the self and the other, animate and the inanimate, the paper analyses how such an approach further opens up greater collaborative possibilities of thinking ‘life’. Exploring the entangled conceptual relations of human and non-human within a literary narrative and the ambiguities it poses concerning determining their boundaries, this paper will investigate the idea of haunting, the usage of memory and history, and the interconnectedness between the self and the other in Elizabeth Bowen’s well-known short story, ‘The Demon Lover’. In doing so, the paper shows how Bowen’s use of literary language itself generates the new materialistic concerns of the mesh of human-nonhuman entanglements. A close new materialist reading of the text, along with a thorough examination of the usage of excess, therefore illuminates not only newer ways of reading Bowen but also for examining the entanglements of human self and non-human other.

Keywords

• non-human
• haunting
• excess
• selfhood
• death
• memory