She simply is what she is, a person with her own limitations and quirks, who has come up against another person whose limitations and quirks are incompatible.

Anna is cold, and manipulative, but she’s not the enemy who must be banished in order for Portia to prevail. If there’s no villain, then who is the hero? If there’s no hero, then where is the story?įor me, this is the genius of the novel. I shudder to think what they would have made of Bowen I think they would have been equally put off by Bowen’s refusal to condemn her characters as they would have been by her refusal to save them. As though the point was to save the characters, to heal them, to fix their nonexistent lives. As though the characters were real people, and as though the point of a story was to present and then solve a psychological problem. More important, she knows that she is a problem no matter how many times she is told the opposite.įor one academic year I taught in an MFA program in California, and I was astonished by the way my students read stories. With both of her parents dead though, she must go somewhere, and so she comes into a house where her very neediness, her sorrow, her inability to grasp the invisible social codes by which the rest of them live makes her a constant irritant. Portia is the inconvenient orphan, the child of her father’s late age, and a continual reminder to Thomas of his family disgrace. It does not do to think of what people feel.”Īnd it is because Portia–the unbearably young, innocent sixteen year old (was anyone ever that young? that innocent?) lives solely in the world of her feelings, and cannot conceive that everyone else does not–that she is set on an inevitable collision course with these bright, quick, unfeeling adults. As Anna exclaims late in the book: “If one thought what everyone felt, one would go mad. They are determined to keep all of their relationships on the surface, to skate quickly over whatever it is they might feel. They resist introspection, reject it even. Quentin, and even poor addled Eddie are known to one another entirely by their actions in the external world.

The adult characters in The Death of the Heart are all external action. This is, the book posits, simply the way things are. Was it the last book I loved, or just one of the ones I come back to again and again, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart? This winter, once again, it was necessary somehow to go back to this book and, as always, I came away breathless with admiration for the way Bowen sets up her characters, allows them to hang themselves on their own flaws, and then refuses to save them from themselves.Ĭould one publish such a book now? A book in which no one is healed, in which everyone is, in fact, injured by contact with one another? A book in which a situation is revealed, a problem is made clear, and yet, there is no solution.

Bowen death of the heart