Gothic Abjection, Intertextuality, and Disloyalty in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover"

In "The Demon Lover," Elizabeth Bowen creates an intertextual web challenging conventional matrimony, spectatorship, and loyalty through allusions to Francis James Child's ballad "The Daemon Lover," the 1916 documentary The Battle of the Somme , and Irish patriot Roger Casement's execution. The narrative reenacts how discourses of courtship, visuality, and patriotism become unstable when national survival is threatened; long-accepted settings, characters, and actions appear as simultaneously normative and unnatural. The story's intertextuality emphasizes its ethical components, with its conclusion leading to the long-delayed recognition that the consequences of total war may be deferred but never erased.