‘We’re going north’: Motion and Destination in Elizabeth Bowen’s To the North
This paper examines Elizabeth Bowen’s textual development of the ‘north’ in her 1935 novel To the North. I begin by delineating the historical, cultural and literary perceptions of ‘northerness’ in Western imagination to highlight the meanings implicated in Bowen’s use of the north as a metaphor for...
সংরক্ষণ করুন:
| প্রকাশিত: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| প্রধান লেখক: | |
| বিন্যাস: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| ভাষা: | Anglais |
| প্রকাশিত: |
Études britanniques contemporaines
2024
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| বিষয়গুলি: | |
| অনলাইন ব্যবহার করুন: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| সংক্ষিপ্ত: | This paper examines Elizabeth Bowen’s textual development of the ‘north’ in her 1935 novel To the North. I begin by delineating the historical, cultural and literary perceptions of ‘northerness’ in Western imagination to highlight the meanings implicated in Bowen’s use of the north as a metaphor for movement. I demonstrate how ‘north’ for Bowen has personal, individual and domestic implications, considering its entanglement with the context of British and Irish socio-political relations in the early twentieth century. In this view, it remains crucial to consider the importance of these ideas for Bowen’s writing at large, even in novels divorced from the Irish and Anglo-Irish contexts. Finally, I address Bowen’s offer of the north as a constantly receding horizon by which the novel’s titular car-ride ‘to the north’ remains open-ended and undefined. Specifically, I read Cecilia’s and Emmeline’s journeys as examples of how Bowen’s characters negotiate between a condition of stillness and a state of perpetual motion by affirming Bowen’s mobilisation of narrative registers that depict an uncharted and deathly ‘north’ as a physical and figurative site towards which the entire novel must move. |
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