The Demon Lover Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 44 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Demon Lover.

The Demon Lover Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 44 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Demon Lover.
This section contains 2,125 words
(approx. 6 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Demon Lover Study Guide

In the following essay, Fraustino disputes the argument that Mrs. Drover is insane, stating that the story is a murder mystery.

In a major article on Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover," Douglass A. Hughes dismisses the popular ghost-story interpretation and advances his own psychological one. The story, he says, is "a masterful dramatization of acute psychological delusion, of the culmination of paranoia in a time of war.... War, not a vengeful lover, is the demon that overwhelms this rueful woman" [Studies in Short Fiction, 10 (1973)]. To support his argument, Hughes maintains that "the narrator subtly but clearly indicates why the forty-four year-old woman suddenly loses her tenuous hold on reality . . . and succumbs to madness." His argument rests on three major premises: that as a young girl Mrs. Drover suffered a "severe nervous breakdown" from which she never fully recovered; that her visit to her war-ravaged home occasions a...

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This section contains 2,125 words
(approx. 6 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy The Demon Lover Study Guide
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