Moving through places: Trauma and dislocation in Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris

Abstract

In The House in Paris, Elizabeth Bowen presents the traumatic spatial experience of dislocation and homelessness of a number of characters centered around an upper‐middle‐class woman, Karen Michaelis, who defies the spatial confinement imposed by the dominant ideology regarding women in the interwar period, but ultimately becomes traumatized due to her failed quest for a place of identity, of belonging. The existing scholarship on The House in Paris tends to read the motifs of trauma and place separately. Those critics exploring place mainly concentrate on the Parisian house and tend to regard it as a symbol of the past and entrapment (Kershner, 1986, 407; Lytovka, 2016, 40), while those studying trauma mainly center on the psychological aspects of trauma, investigating either the structure and effects of psychic trauma or the effects of trauma on the narration of the novel (Bennett & Royle, 1995, 43; Gildersleeve, 2014, 50). This essay argues that a fuller understanding of Bowen's writing of women's trauma in the interwar period in The House in Paris must examine how their trauma is related to spatial experience. Linking the temporal experience of trauma—especially forgetting and repetition—with the spatial experience of Karen and the characters around her unfolds the historical and social contexts behind trauma, that is, it is impossible for women to rebel against the national ideology of womanhood embodied by her family home and to find a place of dwelling. For Bowen the voyage of the subjectivity of women in the interwar period merely renders her protagonists traumatized rather than enabling them to find an attachment to place. So detrimental is the effect that it is impossible for them to “work through” their trauma.