UCDavis Connection Between Shutter Island & Demon Lover Discussion & PPT write the connectione of the movie Shutter island and the articleand it is a prese

UCDavis Connection Between Shutter Island & Demon Lover Discussion & PPT write the connectione of the movie Shutter island and the articleand it is a presentationcan I have the slides as well?2 slides THE PENGUIN BOOK OF
MODERN FANTASY
BY WOMEN
EDITED BY A. SUSAN WILLIAMS
AND RICHARD GLYN JONES
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOANNA RUSS
VIKING
The Demon Lover
(1941)
ELIZABETH BOWEN
Towards the end of her day in London Mrs Drover went round to
her shut-up house to look for several things she wanted to take
-away. Some belonged to herself, some to her family, who were by
now used to their country life. It was late August; it had been a
steamy, showery day: at the moment the trees down the pavement
glittered in an escape of humid yellow afternoon sun. Against the
next batch of clouds, already piling up ink-dark, broken chimneys
and parapets stood out. In bee once familiar street, as in any
unused channel, an unfamiliar queerness had silted up; a cat wove
itself in and out of railings, but no human eye watched Mrs
Drover’s return. Shifting some parcels under her arm, she slowly
forced .round her latchkey in an unwilliog lock, then gave the
door, which had warped, a push with her knee. Dead air came out
to meet her as she went in.
The staircase window having been boarded up, no light came
down into the hall. But one door, she could just see, stood ajar, so
she went quickly through into the room and unshuttered the big
window in there. Now the prosaic woman, looking about her, was
.t:nore perplexed than she knew by everything that she saw, by
.traces of her long former habit· of life – the yellow smoke-stain up
the white marble mantelpiece, the ring left by a vase on the top of
the escritoire; the bruise in the wallpaper where, on the door being
·,thrown open widely, the china handle had always hit the wall. The
piano, having gone away to be stored, had left what looked like
�aw-marks on its part of the parquet. Though not much dust had
seeped in, each object wore a film of another kind; and the only
ventilation being the chimney, the whole drawing-room smelled
of the cold hearth. Mrs Drover put down her parcels on the
escritoire and left the room to proceed upstairs; the things she
:wanted were in a bedroom chest.
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Demon Lover
She had been anxious to see how the house was – the part-time
caretaker she shared with some neighbours was away this week on
his holiday, known to be not yet back. At the best of times he did
not look in often, and she was never sure that she trusted him.
There were some cracks in the structure, left by the last bombing,
on which she was anxious to keep an eye. Not that one could do
anythingA shaft of refracted daylight now lay across the hall. She
stopped dead and stared at the hall table – on this lay a letter
addressed to her.
She thought first – then the caretaker must be back. All the
same, who, seeing the house shuttered, would have dropped a
letter in at the box? It was not a circular, it was not a bill_. And the
post office redirected, to the address in the country, everything for
her that came through the post. The caretaker (even if he were
back) did not know she was due in London today:…. her call here
had been planned to be a surprise – so his negligence in the _
manner of this letter, leaving it to wait in the dusk and the dust,
annoyed her. Annoyed, she picked up the letter, which bore no
stamp. But it cannot be important, or they would know … She
took the letter rapidly upstairs with her, without a stop to look at
the writing till she reached what had been her bedroom, where she
let in light. The room looked over the garden and other gardens:
the sun had gone in; as the clouds sharpened and lowered, the
trees and rank lawns seemed already to smoke with dark. Her
reluctance to look again at the letter came from the fact that she
felt intruded upon :_ and by someone contemptuous of her ways.
However, in the tenseness preceding the fall of rain she read it: it
was a few lines.
again – her lips, beneath the remains of lipstick, beginning to go
white. She felt so much the change. in her own face that she went
to rhe mirror, polished a clear patch in it and looked at once
urgently and stealthily in. She was confronted by a woman of
forty-foUI, with eyes starting out under a hat-brim that had been
rather carelessly pulled down. She had not put on any more
powder since she left the shop where she ate her solitary tea. The
pearls her husband had given her on their marriage hung loose
round her now rather thinner throat, slipping in the V of the pink
wool jumper her sister knitted last autumn as they sat round the
fire. Mrs Drover’s most oo.rmal expression was one of controlled
worry, but of assent. Since the birth of the thi.rd of he+ little boys,
attended by a quite serious illness, she had had an intermittent
muscular flicker to the left of her mouth, but in spire of this she
could always sustain a manner that was at once energetic and calm.
Turning from her own face as precipitacely as she had gone to
meet it, she went to the chest where the things were, unlocked it,
threw up the lid and knelt to search. But as rain began to come
crashing down she could not keep from looking over her shoulder
at the stripped bed on which the letter. lay. Behind the blanket of
rain the clock of the church thac still stood struck si.x – with
rapidly heightening apprehension she counted each of the slow
strokes. ‘The hour arranged … My God,’ she said, ‘what hour?
How should I …? After twenty-five years …’
2
Dear Kathleen: You will not have forgotten that today is our anniversary,
and the day we said. The years have gone by at once slowly and fast.In
view of the fact that nothing has changed, I shall rely upon you to keep
your promise. I was sorry to see you leave London, but was satisfied
that you would be back in time. You may expect me, therefore, at the
hour arranged. Until then … K.
Mrs Drover looked for the date: it was today’s. She dropped the
letter on to the bed-springs, then picked it up to see the writing
The young girl talking to the soldier in the garden had not ever
completely seen his face. It was dar:k; they were saying goodbye
under a tree. Now and then – for it felt, from not seeing him at
this intense moment, as though she had never seen him at all – she
verified his presence for these few moments longer by putting out
a hand, which he each time pressed, without very much kindness,
and painfully, on to one of the breast buttons of his unJfo:rm. Thar
cut of the button on the palm of her hand was, principally, what
she was to carry away. This was so near the end of a leave from
France that she could only wish him already gone. It was August
1916. Being not kissed, being drawn away from and looked at
intimidated Kathleen till she imagined spectral glitters in the place
of his eyes. Turning away and looking back up the lawn she saw,
4
ELIZABETH BOWEN
through branches of trees, the drawing-room window alight: she
caught a breath for the moment when she could go running back
there into the safe arms of her mother and sister, and cry: ‘What
shall I do, what shall I do? He has gone.’
Hearing her catch her breath, her fiance said, without feeling:
‘Cold?’
‘You’re going away such a long way.’
‘Not so far as you think.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t have to,’ he said. ‘You will. You know what we
said.’
‘But that was – suppose you – I mean, suppose.’
‘I shall be with you,’ he said, ‘sooner or later. You won’t forget
that. You need do nothing but wait.’
Only a little more than a minute later she was free to run up the
silent lawn. Looking in through the window at her mother and
sister, who did not for the moment perceive her, she already felt
that unnatural promise drive down between her and the rest of all
human kind. No other way of having given herself could have
made her feel so apart, lost and foresworn. She could not have
plighted a more sinister troth.
Kathleen behaved well when, some months later, her fiance was
reported missing, presumed killed. Her family not only supported
her but were able to praise her courage without stint because they
could not regret, as a husband for her, the man they knew almost
nothing about. They hoped she would, in a year or two, console
herself – and had it been only a question of consolation things
might have gone much straighter ahead. But her trouble, behind
just a little grief, was a complete dislocation from everything. She
did not reject other lovers, for these failed to appear: for years she
failed to attract men – and with the approach of her thirties she
became natural enough to share her family’s anxiousness on this
score. She began to put herself out, to wonder; and at thirty-two
she was very greatly relieved to find herself being courted by
William Drover. She married him, and the two of them settled
down in this quiet, arboreal part of Kensington: in this house the
years piled up, her children were born and they all lived till they
were driven out by the bombs of the next war. Her movements as
The Demon Lover
Mrs Drover were circumscribed, and she dismissed any idea that
they were still watched.
As things were – dead or living the letter-wricer sent her only a
threat. Unable, for some minutes, to go on kneeling with her back
exposed co the empty room, :Mrs. Drover rose from the chest to sit
on an upright chair whose back was firmly against the wall. The
desuetude of her former bedroom, her married London home’s
whole air of being a cracked cup from which memory, with its
reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away, made a
crisis – and at just this crisis the lettet-writer had, knowledgeably,
struck. The hollowness of the house this evening cancelled years
on years of voices, habits and steps. Through the shut windows
she only heard rain fall on the roofs around. To rally herself, she
said she was in a mood – and, for two or three seconds shutting
her eyes, told herself that she had imagined the letter. But she
opened them – there it lay on the bed.
On the supernatural side of the letter’s entran ce she was not
permitting her mind to dwell. Who, in London, knew she meant
to call at the house today? Evidently, however, this had been
known. The· caretaker, had he come back, had had no cause to
expect her: he would have taken the letter in his pocket, to
forward it, at his own time, through the post. There was no other
sign that the caretaker had been in – but, if not? Letters dropped
in at doors of deserted houses do not fly or walk to tables in halls.
They do not sit on the dust of empty tables with the air of
cert:µnty that they will be found. There is needed some human
han d – but nobody but the caretaker had a key. Under circum­
stances she did not care to consider, a house can be entered
without a key. It was possible that she was not alone now. She
might be being waited for, downstairs. Waited for – until when?
Until ‘the hour arranged’. At least that was not six o’clock: six has
struck.
She rose from the chair and went over and locked the door.
The thing was, to get out. To fly? No, not that: she had to
catch her train. As a woman whose utter dependability was the
keystone of her family life she was not willing to return to the
counrry, to her husband, her little boys and her sister, without the
objects she had come up to fetch. Resuming work at the chest she
6
ELIZABETH BOWEN
The Demon Lover
set about making up a number of parcels in a rapid, fumbling­
decisive way. These, with her shopping parcels, would be too
much to carry; these meant a taxi – at the thought of the taxi her
heart went up and her normal breathing resumed. I will ring up
the taxi now; the taxi cannot come too soon: I shall hear the taxi
out there running its engine, till I walk calmly down to it through
the hall. I’ll ring up – But no: the telephone is cut off . . . She
tugged at a knot she had tied wrong.
The idea of flight … He was never kind to me, not really. I
don’t remember him kind at all. Mother said he never considered
me. He was set on me, that was what it was – not love. Not love,
not meaning a person well. What did he do, to make me promise
like that? I can’t remember – but she found that she could.
She remembered with such dreadful acuteness that the twenty­
five years since then dissolved like smoke and she instinctively
looked for the weal left by the button on the palm of her hand.
She remembered not only all that he said and did but the complete
suspension of her existence during that August week. I was not
myself – they all told me so at the time. She remembered – but
with one white burning blank as where acid has dropped on a
photograph: under no conditions could she remember his face.
So, wherever he may be waiting, I shall not know him. You
have no time to run from a face you do not expect.
The thing was to get to the taxi before any clock struck what
could be the hour. She would slip down the street and round the
side of the square to where the square gave on the main road. She
would return in the taxi, safe, to her own door, and bring the
solid driver into the house with her to pick up the parcels from
room to room. The idea of the taxi driver made her decisive, bold:
she unlocked her door, went to the top of the staircase and
listened down.
She heard nothing – but while she was hearing nothing the passe
air of the staircase was disturbed by a draught that travelled up to
her face. It emanated from the basement: down there a door or
window was being opened by someone who chose this moment to
leave the house.
The rain had stopped; the pavements steamily shone as Mrs
Drover let herself out by inches from her own front door into the
empty street. The unoccupied houses opposite continued to meet
her look with their damaged stare. Making towards the thorough­
fare and the taxi, she tried not to keep looking behind. Indeed, the
silence was so intense – one of those creeks of London silence
exaggerated this summer by the damage of war – that n:o tread
could have gained on hers unheard. Where her street debouched
on the square where people went on living, she grew conscious of,
and checked, her unnatural pace. Across the open end of the
square two buses impassively passed each other: women, a peram­
bulator, cyclists, a man wheeling a barrow signalized, once again,
the ordinary flow of life. At the square’s most populous corner
should be – and was – the short taxi rank. This evening, only one
taxi – but this, although it presented its blank rump, appeared
already to be alertly waiting for her. Indeed, without looking
round the driver started his engine as she panted up from behind
and put her hand on the door. As she did so, the clock struck
seven. The taxi faced the main road: to make the trip back to her
house it would have to turn – she had settled back on the seat and
the taxi had turned before she, surprised by its knowing movement,
recollected that she had not ‘said where’. She leaned forward to
scratch at the glass panel that divided the driver’s head from her
own.
The driver braked to what was almost a stop, turned round and
slid the glass panel back: the jolt of this flung Mrs Drover forward
till her face was almost into the glass.Through the aperture driver
and passenger, not six inches between them, remained for an
eternity eye to eye, Mrs Drover’s mouth hung open for some
seconds before· she could issue her first scream. After that she
continued to scream freely and to beat with her gloved hands on
the glass all round as the taxi, accelerating without mercy, made
off with her into the hinterland of deserted streets.
7
f
Dr«cu�u’i
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
In the i¾Jmb: Animals
(companion to a National Geographic Channel series)
The Penguin Book
of Gaslight Crime (editor)
Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination
ueit
A Connoisseur’s Collection
of Victorian Vampire Stories
Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief (editor)
The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel (editor)
Edited by
Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History
of the Human Form
MICHAEL SIMS
Darwin’s Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature
in History and the Arts
BL O O M S
B U
R Y
LONDON • BERLIN • NEW YORK
24
DRACULA ‘s GUEST
They opened the graves of those who had been dead six weeks.
When they came to that of the old man, they found him with his
eyes open, having a fine color, with natural respiration, neverthe­
less motionless as the dead; whence they concluded that he was
most evidently a vampire. The executioner drove a stake into his
heart; they then raised a pile and reduced the corpse to ashes. No
mark of vampirism was found either on the corpse of the son or
on the others.
Thanks be to God, we are by no means credulous. We avow that
all the light which physics can throw on this fact discovers none of
the causes of it. Nevertheless, we cannot refuse to believe that to be
true which is juridically attested, and by persons of probity.
$
Antoine Augustin Calmet
(1672-1757)
BORN IN 1672, THE French monk Antoine Augustin Calmet had
the scholarly good fortune to live during the frenzy of vampire
encounters reported during the early part of the eighteenth cen­
tury. What we now read as quaint folklore was breaking news to
him. Educated by Benedictines in Breuil, he joined their order in
1689 and was ordained a few years later, after which he taught the­
ology and philosophy. Slowly he assembled a massive two-part,
forty-nine-volume study of the Bible.
Although that popular anthology’s characters include resurrected
corpses, a talking donkey, and demon-haunted pigs, apparently
these wonders were not enough to satisfy Dom Augustin’s appetite.
He enters our story because, late in life, he wrote a different kind
of book that became something of a surprise bestseller when pub­
lished in 1746. Originally burdened with the exhausting title Dis­
sertations sur /es apparitions des anges, des demons et des esprits, et sur les
revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohme, de Moravie, et de Silesie, it
was translated into English in 1850 by the British scholar Henry
Christmas, under the evocative title The Phantom World.
This fascinating and outrageous volume-basically a compila­
tion of ghost stories and theological commentary upon them-asks
such questions as “Can a man really dead appear in his own body?”
Calmet ranges from vampires in Moravia to ghosts in Peru. One
25
26
DRACULA’S GUEST
moment he is cheerfully citing the eyewitness accounts of learned
Christians and the next skeptically analyzing the words of peasant
or pagan. Calmet solemnly recounts stories of bodies being ejected
during the night from their consecrated graves, coughed up by the
earth itself, because during life the individuals had been excom­
municated. He also narrates in detail several alleged accounts of
vampire attacks.
Calmet speculated that perhaps a belief in vampires
_
resulted from a lack of nutrition, leading to blood poisoning that
prompts the imagination to turn morbid.
Some of Calmet’s accounts appear here, following excerpts
from his preface and his introduction to Part Two, “Dissertation
on the Ghosts Who Return to Earth Bodily, the Excommuni­
cated, the Oupires or Vampires, Vroucolacas, Etc.” (The latter word
is the Greek name for vampires and related to the Russian word
vourdalak, both of which we will encounter later.)
In the following montage of excerpts, line spaces indicate more
sizable deletions than those noted by the standard ellipsis.
Dead Persons in Hungary
Preface
MY AIM IS NOT to foment superstition, nor to feed the vain curi­
osity of visionaries, and those who believe without examina­
tion everything that is related to them as soon as they find therein
anything marvelous and supernatural. I write only for reasonable
and unprejudiced minds, which examine things seriously and coolly;
I speak only for those who assent even to known truth but after
mature reflection, who know how to doubt of what is uncertain,
to suspend their judgment on what is doubtful, and to deny what is
manifestly false.
I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN much struck with what was related of the
vampires or ghosts of Hungary, Moravi…
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