The Demon Lover - Key Quotes Flashcards
1
Q
“in her once familiar street, as in any unused channel, an
unfamiliar queerness had silted up”
A
- the effect of war has created a realm of the uncanny
(uncanny valley) - connection of the street as suspended in a chasm of time - preserved but also still existing and mutating, accumulating increased unfamiliarity as the distance becomes greater - but paradoxically it also raises the potential for it also to become closer because it becomes absorbed into the realm of the unconscious and has the potential for its existence in a relationship of the uncanny
- if we say that the house is a symbol of her memory or a part of her psyche then it is “unused” - perhaps unvisited and repressed, becomes a part of herself that is alienated from her identity (parts of the minds themselves become heterotopias)
- “silted” - suggests an accumulation - becomes the barrier that she has to cross, the discomfort of “queerness”
- both intimately familiar and unfamiliar with her own mind, she has been expelled from herself
2
Q
“I can’t remember- but she found that she could”
A
- narrative interruption
- invasion of her private thoughts just as the letter invades her life
- exposure of her as living a facade
- tries to deny the consistency of her memory which (as according to the Lockean conception of personal identity) would identify her contemporary self with her past self
- memories and past self becomes disturbed and dissolves into sediment that drifts and intermingles with her present self
3
Q
“Dead air came out to meet her as she went in”
A
- war has ruptured but it has also preserved
- also a psychological barrier - she is crossing into her memory and thus crossing the barrier into traumatic memory - memory is what keeps her tethered to her past self, meaning she cannot escape/ progress
- also stepping back into a repressed part of her own psyche
- passive voice, she has surrendered to this - maintains a transactional quality - contrast of prepositions “out” and “in” (inevitability of the experiencing of disquieting or uncomfortable memory when returning)
- “dead” - part of herself has truly been repressed and has figuratively ‘died’ with the period of war and is now undergoing painful resurrection
4
Q
“traces of her long former habit of life”
A
- haunted by her past actions
- confronts the physical reminders of who she used to be which become present for her again, memory becomes so powerful that its familiarity is closer than the physical items around her
- she has also fragmented
- attempts to externalise the part of herself that existed before/ during the war - tries to deny the continuation of her identity
- is not only a huge public chasm but impacts the timeline of each individual too
5
Q
“each object wore a film of another kind”
A
- takes on a film of different thoughts
- the layering of the items original form/ purpose which has now been overlayed with its perspective as a memory
6
Q
“she felt intruded upon”
A
(in reference to the letter)
- she is haunted by herself (ie. the former version)
- connects to the penetrative connotations of her entering the house - faces not only a barrier but actually active resistance - the memories and the former version of herself gain their own form of “film”, mutate into a form that is potentially threatening
7
Q
(letter)
“the years have gone by at once slowly and fast”
A
- from the letter of the fiance - he has clearly been preserved the by the chasm of war - he exists out of temporal linearity which means that time as experienced objectively and his experience of it subjectively are very different (Bergson’s ‘Duration’)
8
Q
“she dropped the letter on the bed-springs”
“beginning to go white”
A
- physiological responses - not just surprise but actually palpable fear
- remembrance of her sexual past
- raises the question of what impact this will have on her experience of the present (ie. who does she belong to?)
9
Q
“she was confronted by a woman of forty-four”
A
- where her fiance might be preserved in the chasm that the war created, she exists in temporal linearity and has moved on - meaning she does not pay attention to time as something other than a progressive process
- feels alienated from herself because she’s experiencing the uncanny - has not experienced the requirement of her to exist both in the present and also the past
- also now has to exist in conditionality ie. her past lover is now both alive and dead
- she feels so reconnected to the past that to exist in the present produces a feeling of the uncanny
- when she is in her old home/ repressed psyche - she should exist outside temporal linearity ie. she has regressed, becomes a shock when she recognises physical evidence of her progress
10
Q
“the cut of the button on the palm of her hand”
“which he each time pressed, without very much kindness, and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his uniform”
“the cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally, what she was to carry away”
A
- eroticism of the sadistic act suggests she has been branded and scarred in a ritual that she views as punishment, a reminder of the shameful part of herself that indulged in sexual desire
- letter makes symbolic reference back to this scar - just as the physical letter has been sealed and opened, it symbolically reopens the shameful wound of the past
- but then also provokes a trauma response, triggering what is potentially a psychotic break - the letter is the trigger as an object connecting her to the trauma of war
- clearly also trauma that has been unresolved - not necessarily well repressed because it is shallow enough to become quickly problematic - but she has not decided her relationship to his fiance (reflected in the surface level scarring, skin is reconnected but warped)
- also because of the uncanny - close to Romantic cliche but ultimately also worryingly close to sexual violence (unresolved for a reader as well as Mrs Drover - something we both recognise and don’t)
- identifies her as his, and if this is the case then she is also preserved in her role to wait for him
11
Q
“I shall be with you…sooner or later you won’t forget that. You need do nothing but wait”
A
- has to adopt a new role ie. she is required to wait for her fiance
- “won’t” - modal verb, decides her fate and tethers her to the past even as she temporally progresses
- “won’t” - uncomfortable, contraction means it is both familiar but also threatening (not just from the past but actually into the future)
- fiance is preserved in the past - “they shall not grow old” (Laurence Binyon) - possible early signs of what would come to be termed survivor guilt (identified in the 1960s)
12
Q
the taxi “presented its blank rump, appeared already to be alertly waiting for her”
she “panted up from behind”
and it “accelerating without mercy, made off with her into the hinter-land of deserted streets”
A
- unearths previously unacknowledged aspects of the self
liberation of female sexuality offered by the wartime loosening of social strictures - what begins to feverishly permeate the syntax is the sexual language that was once repressed
- drives her deeper into her unconsciousness - winding paths of the recesses of her brain (possibly the complex scars of emotion that become unfulfilled after war)
13
Q
“scream freely”
“Mrs Drover’s mouth hung open for some seconds before she could issue her first scream”
A
- experiences a psychotic break
- instinctive bodily response before her neurological response is able to react
- disassociation of her body and mind (any attempt to retain control over either body or mind are surrendered)
14
Q
initially the barrier is an “unwilling lock, then gave the door, which had warped, a push with her knee”
whereas by the end it is a “glass panel”
“she leaned forward to scratch at the glass panel that divided the driver’s head from her own”
“slid the glass panel back”
A
- “warped” - like the skin making the scar
- almost like a second rupture that she goes through - she also experiences the “driver” in the same way as the war - ie. surreal, supernatural
- her present experiences potentially colour her feelings towards the past
- fiance becomes the physical representation of her experience of war as a whole
- means the trauma subsumes her again into an uncanny valley and she is metaphorically driven deeper into her unconsciousness by the taxi
- “glass” suggests that it was always something she knew but it has taken a rupture to bring it to her attention
- potentially saying she always had the power to make that rupture but she required a catalyst (letter)
- once she has ruptured that liminality then it is no longer the “door” but has been transformed into “glass”
- parallel imagery of liminality
15
Q
Analepsis into her memory “My God… what hour? How should I…? After twenty-five years…”
A
- ellipsis involuntary resurgence of her traumatic memory
- the analepsis answers her question - she should remember because she has been taken possession of
- her life becomes controlled again by ‘war-time’ ie. waiting and then an element of catastrophe
