ジェンダー研究

第11号

2008

Fears of the Demon Lover:Female Paranoia in the Demon Lover Stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jackson
Chiho NAKAGAWA

This paper examines the concept of paranoia found in two short stories basedon the same folk ballad of the demon lover. Some critics read Jacksonʼs “The
Daemon Lover” and Elizabeth Bowenʼs “The Demon Lover” as stories of paranoia,
suggesting the strong connection between the fears of demon lovers and the typicalparanoiac delusions. However, a close examination of the concept of “female
paranoia,” referring to psychoanalytic studies as well as clinical literature, reveals
the issues of interpretations involved not only in the diagnosing stage but also in the
alleged patientʼs thinking process. “Female paranoia” manifests its symptoms when
the alternative interpretations of their loversʼ behaviors emerge, forcing the female
characters to question heterosexual romance scenarios. I argue that the demon loverstories, a variation of erotomanic delusions, express a critique of the patriarchal
society that exposes women to perpetual threats that are represented ambiguously inthe form of demon lovers. Jacksonʼs story in particular shows that fears of the demon
lover, however supernatural he may appear to be, are in fact of this world. The
seemingly strange world to which the demon lover takes the protagonist, the world ofconspiracy, is nothing but her own everyday realities.

Key Words：Female Paranoia, The Demon Lover, Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Bowen, folk ballads

Introduction
Shirley Jackson wrote a short story titled “The Daemon Lover” (1948), which has beentaken as a little quirky story Jackson was an expert in. Across the Atlantic, less than ten years
earlier, Elizabeth Bowen wrote a story also titled “The Demon Lover” (1941), based on the same
traditional folk ballad as Jackson used, and today both stories are read by some critics as stories ofparanoia. Although the extents of faithfulness to the original ballad diﬀer, these readings suggestthat the demon lover story represents a typical pattern of paranoiac fantasies, thus, a universal
horror story for women. I will discuss Bowenʼs “The Demon Lover” and Jacksonʼs “The Daemon
Lover,” which is even more twisted and vicious than the original, to explore the ﬁgures of demon
lovers as representing one of the essential fears of women in patriarchy to cause paranoiac
reactions̶or, it is safer to say that the demon lover embodies such fundamental fears that they
can be easily dismissed as “paranoia.” Particularly in Jackson, the fears and threats of the demon

55

Chiho NAKAGAWA Fears of the Demon Lover:Female Paranoia in the Demon Lover Stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jacksonlover present themselves in a developed form that illuminates systematic controls of women. I
will argue that those stories show a critique of the system in which women are exposed to theperpetual threats embodied by demon lovers.
Literary critics have often focused on paranoia in ﬁction, yet paranoia has been tied more often with certain ﬁction by male writers, as easily understood in the popular association of paranoia
with men.1 The most inﬂuential argument still today in understanding paranoid male writings is
Sigmund Freudʼs study on Daniel Paul Schreber, which argues that paranoia is a defense against
homosexuality. This paper, however, focuses on Freudʼs study on a nameless female paranoid
patient to help understand the demon lover stories. In order to deepen the understanding onparanoia, I will also look into(DSM)

published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), so that clinical and objective views canbalance the traditionally inﬂuential view of paranoia. Yet my ﬁnal goal is, not a reexamination of
the particular mental disorder itself, but to see the signiﬁcance of the paranoid theme of the demon
lover stories.
Paranoia and the Demon Lover Ballad

In one of the most comprehensive and recent studies on paranoia, Stanley Bone and John
M. Oldham deplore the lack of theoretical development of paranoia and speculate that the reason
is the pessimism about eﬀectiveness of treatment (3). Naturally this ﬁeld is still haunted by Freudʼs
theory with the (uncanny) repetition of one old theme, an entangled drama of the Oedipal complex.2 In‑[Dementia

Paranoides], Freud interprets Schreberʼs delusions of persecution about his psychiatrist, in which
his psychiatrist is his “soul murderer,” as Schreber reacting against his love for the psychiatrist̶“I love him because I hate him.” This struggle with the powerful male, normally the father̶his
psychiatrist in Schreberʼs case̶is the familiar scenario of the Oedipal complex. Freudʼs theory ofparanoia̶defense against repressed homosexuality̶has circulated in psychoanalysis and in otherpsychological studies.
Wide applications of Freudʼs study in literary criticism are a reasonable consequence considering the fact that Freud analyzed and “interpreted” Schreberʼs text. In reexamining his theory, I
will not join “Freud bashers” to simply repudiate his homosexuality‑paranoia theory. The fact that
his study itself is originally an interpretation of a text suggests his “interpretation” can even beinterpreted, thus, his “interpretation” of the unnamed female paranoid can be reinterpreted. And
his homosexuality‑paranoia theory is not entirely without a merit. As Ronald K. Siegel points out,
the stronger taboo on homosexuality in the Victorian attitudes triggered the paranoid mode in men(16) more easily back in Freudʼs time, and still does to a certain extent today, as frequent use of
the clinical entity termed as “homosexual panic” indicates.3 Repressed homosexuality may lie atthe bottom of some, if not all, paranoid cases.
The construction of Freudʼs theory of paranoia through interpretation of the text reﬂects one

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of the characteristics of paranoia itself. This characteristic of the paranoid̶picking up pieces of
information to interpret and to form a story̶is now the primal feature in one of the two disordersthat belong to popular non‑clinical ideas of paranoia, “paranoid personality disorder,” one of thepersonality disorders, in the. The paranoid believes that there are “no accidents̶that

everything is connected, intended, and meaningful,” as Timothy Melley puts it. Therefore, Melleyargues, a paranoid theory is similar to a brilliant theory, the only diﬀerence being the extent of
its explanatory power (19). Siegel calls paranoia a “way of perceiving and feeling the world,”
and thus, Freud oﬀers a way to “perceive” the world of Schreber and the female paranoid. The
paranoid resembles a theoretician who tries hard to understand the world with logic, as Freudhimself reads the hidden meanings in Schreberʼs text to understand his homosexuality.4
Another disorder in thethat falls in the popular category of paranoia is “delusional dis-order” (which with the publication of‑loses its denomination as “paranoid"). Delusional

disorder belongs to the group of “Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders,” which is marked
with psychotic symptoms. The

lists ﬁve types of typical delusions: erotomanic (“loved at a

distance”), grandiose (“unrecognized talent”), jealous (“unchaste spouse”), persecutory ( conspired
5

against”), and somatic (“dysfunctional body part”). Although scholars argue variously about theessential trait of paranoid ideations, I consider it to be the patientʼs sense of being mistreated, or ofbeing the target of someone elseʼs malicious plots; in short, persecutions.
Deviated from this central idea of paranoia is the ﬁrst one in the list, the erotomanic type,which I see as the basic pattern of the demon lover stories. While all the other delusions imagine
hostile environments, the erotomanic delusion, on the other hand, leads a person to believe that heor she is loved by someone with whom he or she normally does not have a direct interaction. In
a sense, the erotomanic delusional imagines a possibly better world than the one that really exists.
In fact, as Harold P. Blum insists, “erotomania is the inverse of paranoia, in which erotic seduction
defends against hate and rage” (108). However, the erotomanic plots can also lead to fears. Being
loved by someone can be a nightmare when that particular someone forces his or her will onto
him or her, or that particular someoneʼs aﬀection takes an unwelcome turn.
The scenario of the lover turned sour ﬁts the basic plot of the folk ballad of the demon lover.
The demon lover ballad has numerous variations in Scotland, England, and also in North America,
but according to Toni Reed in‑, its origin isfound in the Scottish Border region. Although several variations exist, the basic plot of the popularballads that are collected in Francis James Childʼsisthe same: an old lover comes back to take revenge on his unfaithful lover. In most versions, thedemon lover is a sailor, whose delayed return has caused irreparable damage to his relationshipwith his lover: his lover believes him dead and has married another man. One day the demon
lover returns unexpectedly and seduces her to come with him, leaving behind her children andhusband, to sail away with him to the land of wealth. When, away from the shore, she ﬁnds that
he has cloven feet, the demon lover sinks his ship, revealing his intention of revenge. According57

Chiho NAKAGAWA Fears of the Demon Lover:Female Paranoia in the Demon Lover Stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jackson

to Reed, “the ballad is a distilled version of a Gothic romance about obsessive love and hate, for
the woman in the ballad is just as controlled, just as victimized as the terriﬁed women” in Gothic
novels (56). In the Gothic, the demon lover ﬁgure appears as the hero‑villain, variously called as
the descendant of Miltonʼs Satan, Byronic hero,6 or “homme fatal,”7 as a character who drives thestory as a thriller as well as a romance.
Reed suggests two reasons for the proliferation of this demon lover story: one is peopleʼsuniversal curiosity about the “danger of joining forces with the power of evil” and another is an incentive to have a “subtle means to control women” and to warn against transgressing the “accepted
norms of society” (116). Reedʼs interpretation locates the danger and lure of the demon lover
outside the social norm; the demon lover must be avoided at all costs if one wants to lead a safeand normal life. However, the Gothic novels do not necessarily expel the villain out of this world.
Heroines, especially of modern Gothic romances, cope with them not only by running away fromthem, but sometimes by reconciling with, or just understanding them. The demon lover is not
one‑dimensional pure evil.
Janice Radway, Tania Modleski and Joanna Russ analyze modern Gothic8 in order to understand this inexplicable attraction of the hero‑villain. Russ, who calls the demon lover character
the Super‑Male (32), regards the heroineʼs central action as consisting in her attempts at “reading”
his expressions, and Radway, in her study that focuses on the ways in which female readers readmodern romances, explains the reason why the heroine needs to “read” male characters. According to her, ﬁrst, in patriarchal society, a woman has to attach herself to a male, who, unlike her,is allowed entry to the public realm. Second, because of their social condition, Radway argues
that women encounter difficulty in reading and understanding men, who consciously express
themselves in an unfeminine mode (or do not express themselves at all) (139).9 The principles
of patriarchal society render the womanʼs attempts at reading menʼs behavior almost impossible
but necessary because the man holds the key to the knowledge in the world and a woman needs
access to it through him in order to survive. Thus, in romances, in order to reconcile with the factthat the heroine accepts the possibly dangerous demon lover, she deploys the strategies to tamehis fearful sides by understanding supposedly the “true” nature of him. However, this “revelation”
seems more like a rhetorical manipulation, because it consists of the heroineʼs change of perception. The demon lover turns from a fearful lover to an aﬀectionate one, just because the heroineﬁnds his alleged “true” inner nature.
This argument on the signiﬁcance of the demon lover ties this character with paranoia on theissue of interpretation. The demon lover has to be read and reread. As Modleski points out, thedemon lover reﬂects the diﬃculty of reading for a woman, the diﬃculty of reading menʼs “true”
nature because of the diﬀerent social codes men and women follow. However, the demon lover
also hints at one curious and highly disturbing message: fearfulness in men, or even violence inmen, may present itself attractive to women, which also means that his desirability for a woman
may inherently involve unwanted aggressiveness. This demon lover story, especially in the original58

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plot and in many modern romances, at least connects the loverʼs attractiveness with his economic
power, indicating his mysterious charm can simply be translated into financial stability. The
demon lover involves so many ambivalences and ambiguities that reﬂect sociopolitical elementsthat women have to negotiate under the guise of romance. Therefore, the heroine has to face
him like a paranoid, gathering pieces of information to understand the demon lover to form a lovestory after complicated negotiations and compromises. When she cannot, she is destined to follow
either the fate of the protagonist in Bowenʼs story, or the one in Jacksonʼs.
Bowenʼs “The Demon Lover”

The demon lover stories by Bowen and Jackson, although they both draw on the folk ballad ofJames Harris, are not normally read as cautionary tales, like the original folk ballad, partly because
one cannot ﬁnd fault with the protagonists. Instead, critics point out the possible paranoia of themain characters. Bowenʼs version of “The Demon Lover” follows the original plot more faithfully,
except the setting, which is changed into London during WWII at the time of the Blitz. In the
opening of the story, Mrs. Kathleen Drover checks around her house in London and ﬁnds the trace
of intrusion before returning to her temporary house in the countryside, where she lives with herfamily. In the deserted house she ﬁnds a letter from her long lost lover, whom everybody believes
to be dead in the last war. He writes that he will come and see her as he promised long timeago. When Kathleen gets in a cab to leave this ominous house, she ﬁnds him behind the wheel.
He emerges as was promised, taking her away in a taxicab and “accelerating without mercy” tothe “hinterland of deserted streets” (666). Many critics argue that the demon lover is a symbolic
representation of war, because he comes back to haunt Kathleen during the wartime. 10 Bowenuses the demon lover ﬁgure to depict the violent and changed atmospheres of London.
Although the overall tenor does not diﬀer from other critics, Douglas A. Hughes claims that
Mrs. Drover is paranoid delusional. His view is not the only or most accepted reading, but still
Hughes confidently calls the reading of the story as a ghost story “misreading” and describes
this short story as a “masterful dramatization of acute psychological delusion, of the culminationof paranoia in a time of war” (411). Hughes reads the sign of Kathleenʼs derangement in her
memory of the soldier lover, whom she remembers as detached and unpleasant. He takes it as anindication that she has blocked the true memory when Kathleen cannot remember her old loverʼsface, arguing that the lack of memory stems from her trauma of losing her lover in the last war.
He even mentions in his note that Kathleenʼs negative memory of her lover comes out of her present state of mind, which is severely diseased.
However, Kathleenʼs memory does not give us any clue that suggests her falsiﬁcation of thetruth, although his delusional theory is worth examining. In the last meeting, her lover made thepromise to be always with her and to come back to her, the promise that Hughes believes to be“common among young lovers” (412). Yet his promise left Kathleen confused and anxious because
she was not convinced with his aﬀection. She remembers:

59Chiho NAKAGAWA Fears of the Demon Lover:Female Paranoia in the Demon Lover Stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jackson…He was never kind to me, not really. I donʼt remember him kind at all. Mother said he neverconsidered me. He was set on me, that was what it was̶not love. Not love, not meaning aperson well. What did he do, to make me promise like that? (665)
Though Hughes reads the “cold, ominous ﬁgure” as the result of her “diseased imagination,”
this passage does not impress the reader that her trauma of the Great War has aﬀected so muchthat she remembers her lover completely a diﬀerent person. Kathleen describes an undeniably
obsessive and persistent stalker, who somehow has succeeded in winning her over as his ﬁancée.
She does not remember his face but she remembers her fears. She sensed his obsession with her
so strongly that she keeps feeling his eyes everywhere she goes, on the face that she cannot evenremember. Or, maybe she does not remember his face because she did not think that she wasseeing his true face, vaguely sensing his hidden malice.
If her lover was in fact as evil as she remembers, Kathleen is not entirely paranoid for her
concern about him. Yet this anxiety about oneʼs own lover can easily be termed as “female
paranoia,” ̶thus, dismissed̶as Hughesʼ firm denial in accepting Kathleenʼs unpleasant memoryof her lover indicates. Melley, examining Diane Johnsonʼs
Atwoodʼsandand Margaret, argues that the heroinesʼ sense of being stalked

or being loved by someone unknowingly suggests their paranoia, resulting from social control ofwomen by way of internalized surveillance (107‑32). He deﬁnes the delusion and fear of being
stalked and watched as “female paranoia” and claims it as one major theme of modern female
Gothic. Judith Halberstam also argues “female paranoia” in a similar vein, claiming the heroinesof modern horror movies show cases of female paranoia. In her understanding of “female
paranoia,” a womanʼs fear that someone is trying to harm her is a legitimate reaction to her
environment. She claims:
We will note that while male paranoia seems to produce a fantastic tale very similar to theGothic narratives we have been examining, the female paranoiac tells a rather ordinary story
about an all too realistic persecution that bears a great resemblance to some contemporary
horror ﬁlm with its insistence upon the terror produced by the unwanted monstrous gaze at
the speciﬁcally female body. ()

Jonathan Markovitz even suggests female paranoia in the horror movie is a “reasonable response
to a world that is hostile to women” and thus, the movies can oﬀer “important critiques of existing
power relationships” (219).
The critics of “female paranoia” in modern Gothic or horror ﬁlms indeed argue that “female
paranoia” is not paranoia. The alleged paranoid heroines of modern Gothic or horror ﬁlms do notclaim themselves to be victims without foundations: there do exist serial killers or monsters that
try to kill the protagonists. The central plot of those stories revolves around how one character
survives through repeated assaults and attacks. Therefore, Markovitz sees “female paranoia” inhorror movies as a “survival skill.” Halberstam and Markovitz see that “female paranoia” in the60

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movies is the expression of the legitimate fears of the existing violence against women, and thus,
not at all pathological. Joanna Russ, too, in discussing modern Gothic, claims that those novels
describe “justiﬁed paranoia” (45). A woman develops the paranoiac sensibility to defend herself
in the society in which she is immersed in the controlling gazes of men. These characters are
not delusional to believe that someone is stalking them.11 Kathleen Drover may be experiencing
a psychotic break when she ﬁnds herself alone with her old lover in the taxicab, but she may not.
As a work of ﬁction, the nightmarish ending is naturally understood as a closure of a surreal story,
because, as in many paranoid themed stories, delusional plotlines come true in ﬁctional realities;
in her case, she may be encountering her nightmare in her realities̶to come face to face with her
stalker.
“Female paranoia” stems from the fear of being loved in an undesirably way, or even, the fearof being desired but not loved. The true terror does not emerge until a woman starts rereadinghim. Kathleen Drover could not, and still cannot, trust her old ﬁancéʼs love; she sensed something
cold in him, yet she forced herself to believe him. She has been unsure about the old soldierʼs
love; she now looks back and reinterprets his attitude. If the fears that accompany her reinterpretation cause her paranoiac delusions about the demon loverʼs resurgence, the demon lover, whose
true face is hard to see, is the trigger for paranoia. “Female paranoia” starts to show its symptoms
when a woman ﬁnds hidden signs that warn her of her unconscious self‑deceit in love and hate.
Jacksonʼs “The Daemon Lover”

Jacksonʼs protagonist is not threatened by the demon loverʼs visit or his menacing presence.
James Harris in “The Daemon Lover” is demonic in his disappearance. At ﬁrst glance, Jacksonʼs shortstory seems to be telling the part that is missing from the folk ballad as a prequel. The story starts
with the thirty‑four‑year‑old woman waiting for James Harris, her lover, to come to her apartment at the appointed time on their wedding day. She waits and waits, and ﬁnally she wanders
into town looking for him. When she starts her search, the reader learns that she barely knows
him. She has never called him on the phone because he (allegedly) does not have a telephone, or
she has never been to his apartment. The unnamed heroine asks people on the street questions
about his whereabouts, enduring the embarrassment of disclosing her unstable relationship with
her alleged ﬁancé. Finally when she arrives at an apartment with the pieces of information she
has gathered, she hears some voice inside the room but nobody comes to the door. She comesback to the apartment again and again, just to knock on the door and wait. James Harris seems toappear and disappear at will, true to the name of the demon lover. He comes out to this world justto give her a temporary bliss so that he can bring her enduring agony and humiliation. She has tosee herself self‑consciously as a woman of thirty‑four‑year‑old in an unﬁttingly girly dress, whois desperately chasing a man. The protagonist feels the cold and curious eyes that brand her as a
failure and has to continue to live in the world full of cold strangers.
A paranoid reading of this story ﬁnds its most compelling evidence in the protagonistʼs acute61

Chiho NAKAGAWA Fears of the Demon Lover:Female Paranoia in the Demon Lover Stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jackson

sensibility of the eye on her and her persistent visits to his apartment. T.S. Joshi and Darryl Hattenhauer both imply that the woman suspects the people on the street are conspiring against her
and giving her false information just to laugh at her, even though they know nothing about James
Harris. The protagonist arguably shows an advanced case of “female paranoia,” which renders her
hypersensitive to other peopleʼs eyes.
The disappearance of the demon lover coincides with her realization of the unfriendly gazes ofpeople around her on the street. When she cannot ﬁnd him at the address she has thought as his,she stands on the sidewalk for so long, not knowing what to do next, that she hears some woman
calling another person to “see” her (19). The delicatessen owner “inspect[s]” her with his eyes
“narrow” (19). She cannot help but become conscious of othersʼ gazes, after the disappearanceof the demon lover. She wonders how James Harris will like her dress or whether the print dress
with the wide swinging skirt is appropriate for a woman in her thirties. When she gradually
begins to think that he is not coming back to fulﬁll his promise to marry her, she becomes more
conscious about peopleʼs eyes on her. This is a story in which a woman witnesses her erotomanicplot gradually disintegrating.
In a close analysis, the unnamed heroine bears a striking resemblance to Freudʼs female
paranoid patient in his analysis, “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho‑Analytic
Theory of the Disease.” She was a thirty‑year‑old woman in a relationship with a man whom
she could not trust. Freud believes that Schreberʼs homosexual attachment caused his paranoiddelusions, so he managed to ﬁnd the same pattern in the case in which the patient seemed “to be
defending herself against love for a man by directly transforming the lover into a persecutor” (SE
14: 265). The patient believed that she had heard the noise of a camera when they were lying
on his bed together, suspecting that he had arranged someone to take pictures of them together.
Freud first wondered about the lack of the influence of a woman in this patientʼs case, but hediscovered one later. The patient told him that she was worried that her lover, who worked at
the same oﬃce, might have told her female superior about their aﬀair. According to Freud, thefemale superior was a substitute for her mother, and here is the familiar scenario: the paranoidtries to free herself from her attachment to her mother, who becomes the “hostile and malevolent
watcher and persecutor” (SE 14: 268). What puzzled Freud ﬁrst is that a “woman should protect
herself against loving a man,” and thus, he theorized her “homosexual” attachment to her motheras her motive to deny her love for the man. The process of Freudʼs reading is, without a doubt, a“reduction of the atypical female exception to the proto‑typical masculine rule” and “normalization”
of female sexuality to conform to the masculine model, as Naomi Schor claims (205). However,
he mentions earlier that the patient, a thirty‑year‑old woman who lived with her mother and helda responsible post at her oﬃce, had at ﬁrst refused the manʼs advances because they could notmarry for some unspeciﬁed “external reason.” The man did not give up but pursued her, insistingthat they should not avoid what they both “longed for” and had an “indisputable right to enjoy”(SE 14: 264). Freudʼs paper does not tell what exactly prevented them from marrying, but it is62ジェンダー研究

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not diﬃcult to imagine that she had enough reason to suspect his sincerity and to worry about her
reputation at the oﬃce as a woman in the early twentieth century. She gave in to his hedonistic
way of life, which, we can guess, had not been precisely hers. This patient defended herself fromloving the man not because of her “homosexual attachment” but because of the vulnerable position
she was in. She had to protect herself from being humiliated and/or taken advantage of. All theepisodes she told indicate her distrust in her lover, which she seemed not to notice herself. She
defended herself from misinterpreting the manʼs contempt or hatred for her as love. Her strong
fear of degradation may have caused her to hear the sounds that did not exist. Her lover was ademon lover, to whom she was attracted but in whom she detected disingenuousness.
Freudʼs reading of her case is normalization indeed; at the bottom of Freudʼs reading is thesame assumption as that of her frivolous lover that a woman appreciates a manʼs sexual attention
regardless of other obstacles. Freud ignores the patientʼs legitimate concern that caused her
hypersensitivity. In his reading, the patient “must” love the libertine without reserve, and when
she does not, she “must” be hiding her homosexual tendency like Schreber was. His theoryof paranoia presupposes a womanʼs unquestioned participation in a patriarchal‑heterosexualromance; otherwise she has hidden desires.
Unlike Freudʼs patient, the protagonist of Jacksonʼs story is a willing participant in a heterosexual romance, yet like Freudʼs patient, peopleʼs eyes and words conﬁrm her exclusion from thescenario. The townspeople she questions offer baseless reassurance about her lover, although
her descriptions of James Harris throughout the story remain vague̶she always describes him
as a “rather tall man” in a blue suit: no mention of the color of his eyes or hair, or speciﬁc height,
similar in the manner in which Kathleen cannot remember her demon loverʼs face. The reader
suspects that their responses are malicious, when one realizes that people answer with increased
confidence as they speak. The florist the protagonist asks hesitates to answer first, then hebecomes “almost certain,” then “sure,” and ﬁnally “absolutely” conﬁdent that James Harris bought
one dozen chrysanthemums from him. The shoeshine man testiﬁes that he saw a man on the way
to see his girlfriend. Peopleʼs testimonies lead her to a certain house, as if they plotted in advance.
With mounting expectation and anxieties, the protagonist asks a woman with a boy nearby, trying
to identify the house her demon lover has gone in, and receives an ominous answer from theboy. The boy, again like all the other people she meets on the street, is conﬁdent that the man
he saw is James Harris, and poses a question innocently, “You gonna divorce him?” (26). Before
the protagonist says the words “I do,” or she even ﬁnds him, her ﬁancé turns into an unfaithfulhusband, ending the protagonistʼs dream of becoming a bride.
This story can certainly be read as a delusion of the female protagonist, though one cannot determine where her delusion starts and where it ends. Unlike Hughes on Kathleenʼs state of mind,
Joshi ends his criticism with a suggestion that they might be an inexplicable conspiracy around theunnamed heroine: all the people just lie to torment her. This prospect is, according to Joshi, “morefrightening” than the prospect that the whole story is the protagonistʼs delusion. Joshi indicates63

Chiho NAKAGAWA Fears of the Demon Lover:Female Paranoia in the Demon Lover Stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jacksonthat peopleʼs enigmatic yet undeniable malice deserves more attention than a lonely thirty‑
four‑year‑old womanʼs seemingly harmless fantasy, because one can only ﬁnd pure evil in theirmotivation to lie. I would also like to add one point to support the reading that there exists James
Harris: her worries are ampliﬁed from the notion that he left her as soon as he had sex with her.
In the morning she tries to “avoid thinking consciously of why she [is] changing the sheets” (10),suggesting their sexual encounter before the day he promised to marry her. As Freudʼs patient
became hypersensitive in her loverʼs bedroom, their sexual relationship raises her sensitivity level.
After all, delusions are hard to detect because most delusions follow likely scenarios that reallydo happen,12 and this delusion/story is, as Halberstam describes the story of female paranoia,
categorized as a “rather ordinary story about an all too realistic persecution,” except for the demon
loverʼs almost supernatural disappearance.
Peopleʼs collective evil, or mob psychology, is one of Jacksonʼs most known themes. Jacksonʼsshort story, “The Lottery,” for which most people remember her name, depicts an inexplicable evilof the villagers, who yearly draw the lottery to ﬁnd a sacriﬁce who will be stoned to death. Thisannual event can be a random process to ﬁnd a scapegoat to let oﬀ steam to keep the peace in thecommunity, yet some critic also ﬁnds particular reasons why Tessie, the victim, is chosen.13 Tessie
may not be a random sacriﬁce but a carefully selected target.
The people that come in contact with the unnamed heroine may also have reasons, if notlegitimate, for their malicious lies. The unnamed protagonist senses the mocking air of the people
who talk to her. They change their responses and attitudes as conversations progress. Those
people sense, mirror, and stir up the protagonistʼs anxieties. This also parallels Freudʼs patientʼs
symptoms. Freudʼs patient projected her anxieties about her lover onto a hidden camera; theprotagonist finds the confirmation of her loverʼs insincerity in peopleʼs eyes and words. As
the uncertainty of her loverʼs sincerity causes great anxieties in Freudʼs patient, the unnamed
protagonistʼs anxiety level rises as she searches for her ﬁancé all over the town and learns that her
alleged ﬁancé leaves his old address without an advanced notice and goes to a new apartment withan armful of ﬂowers with smile.
Like the woman in Freudʼs case, the unnamed heroineʼs uneasiness about how she is perceived by others mirrors her worries about the sincerity of her demon lover.14 James Harrisʼsattention (or the lack thereof) makes the protagonist nervous, because his failure to fulfill his
promise (the morning after she has fulﬁlled his desire) indicates the nature of his attention: ﬂeeting and insincere. The doubts and fears that both the unnamed heroine and Freudʼs patient haveof the othersʼ gazes come from their doubts and fears of their loversʼ attention. As a result, what
she thinks of the manʼs attention̶her primary concern̶infects what she thinks of the othersʼ
perspective on her and they reﬂect her anxieties back on her with their attitudes. The unnamed
heroine tries to deny the new realization about her demon lover, but she cannot. She even starts
wondering how to act if she sees him after all the trouble she goes through looking for him,
because she becomes more and more unsure about who or what he is. As she comes to this dark64

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realization about her demon lover, she becomes conscious of how others perceive her. If there isan inexplicable malice, it ﬂoats in the air as a general consensus about a slighted woman.
Her search for her demon lover turns itself into a journey to learn how she is seen in theworld. The gap between how the protagonist is seen and what she thinks she is widens, and shelearns of the gap as she searches for her lost lover. She is eager to ﬁll the gap, of course, although
she can only do so by ﬁnding her demon lover. The unnamed heroine simulates in her mind what
happens when she reports the demon lover missing to the police, and imagines how she would
respond to policemenʼs silent but mocking attitudes:“Yes, it looks silly, doesnʼt it, me all dressed up and trying to find the young man who
promised to marry me, but what about all of it you donʼt know? I have more than this, morethan you can see: talent, perhaps, and humor of a sort, and Iʼm a lady and I have pride andaﬀection and delicacy and a certain clear view of life that might make a man satisﬁed andproductive and happy; thereʼs more than you think when you look at me.” (23)These words suggest what she reads in othersʼ eyes and what she fears. What others see inher, the unnamed heroine believes, does not represent what she really is. She is conscious of what
the others see: a deranged and desperate woman who has an imaginary lover. She even tries toinsist her value in domestic terms as a potential ideal wife. Met with cruel eyes, the unnamed
heroine feels the urge to reaﬃrm herself by attempting to exhibit her capacity as a functioning andhelpful woman. However, the demon lover deﬁnes her as a failure with his disappearance. As
Joshi and Hattenhauer argue, she may be imagining everything in her mind̶her demon lover andthe promise of marriage̶just to remind herself of her place in society, or how she is seen, “failure.”
The demon lover story, essentially an erotomanic scenario, revolves around the fluctuating
evaluations of a man. As I have argued above, the modern Gothic heroines succeed in ignoring
the demonity of their lovers by almost purposely misinterpreting the loversʼ behaviors. The
protagonist in Jacksonʼs “The Daemon Lover,” however, does not have that freedom. No matter
how hard she tries to “read” his behavior, she fails to produce any positive meaning from his
sudden and unexpected disappearance. Unlike other demon lovers, whose presences could be
misinterpreted as signs of their strong attachment, his absence does not allow any space forinterpretation.

When even a stranger, to whom she asks his whereabouts, tells her that she “gotthe wrong guy” (15), she has to confront her former misinterpretation of the demon loverʼs attention in his absence. Because she has misinterpreted her demon lover, she does not understand theworld anymore, as if the demon lover represented the whole world. She is thrown in to a vortex
of fears once she sees her misinterpretation of the erotomanic scenario.
The cruelest part of this story lies in that the heroineʼs agony does not end with the dissolutionof her erotomanic delusion. It continues, or rather starts with it. Her paranoiac world continues
forever after her demon loverʼs malicious jilting. The forever absent demon lover, James Harris,turns everywhere she goes into a strange world. The streets are not the same. People look at
her diﬀerently with knowing grin. She says to herself, “everyone thinks itʼs so funny,” and when65

Chiho NAKAGAWA Fears of the Demon Lover:Female Paranoia in the Demon Lover Stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jackson

she is “suddenly horribly aware of her over‑young print dress,” she pulls “her coat tighter aroundher neck,” so that she can hide her girly dress even more (23). She has to hide the trace of her
expectation, the expectation to become someone diﬀerent from what people see in her̶an old
maid. She is in the world in which she can no longer feel comfortable and safe. She is now in theworld of conspiracy, in which people accuse her of failure, of being unloved. Like Kathleen Drover
who senses danger everywhere as soon as the demon lover announces his arrival in the letter, theunnamed heroine in Jacksonʼs story starts sensing dangers and coldness upon his disappearance.
That is why the protagonist has to come back to that mysterious apartment every evening, withexpectations to get out of this world by going in, just to learn that she cannot enter the room. She
stands in front of the boundaries that she can never go beyond. She comes back repeatedly in themornings and in the evenings, before and after work, or on her way to dinner alone. The demon
lover leaves her forever in the world of conspiracy, in the tedious repetition of routines, in which
she is perpetually persecuted as a woman of thirty‑four‑year‑old, unmarried, foolishly having
dreamed of being loved.
As she walks down the street, the unnamed heroine of Jacksonʼs story steps further into a
web of paranoiac fears. The demon lover triggers female paranoia, a process in which a woman
recognizes fears of patriarchy. In the traditional demon lover story, the demon lover himself
threatens a woman as a force of patriarchy: a possessive and vindictive force that binds the
freedom of women. Thus, her paranoia projects him everywhere around her and he becomes theeye to watch her to limit her freedom. On the other hand, in Jacksonʼs story, the demon lover
guides the protagonist into a strange place, where he leaves her behind. The erotomanic story, alove story, is a crafty lie that he makes her believe. At the dissolution of her delusion, people point
ﬁnger at her naïve gullibility. They make her feel that she is “too old,” she is too embarrassing,she is just not wanted, except for othersʼ malicious entertainment.

Her nightmare is not a pure

imagination, but a mere projection of the cruel realities. Once she realizes how she is vulnerable
to othersʼ perception, she can never ﬂee from the demon loverʼs enduring persecution. The unnamed protagonist of “The Daemon Lover” stands in front of the closed door forever with longing,in a world of conspiracy.
Conclusion

The demon lover stories by Bowen and Jackson both share the same scenario of the erotomanic delusion, whether the protagonists are delusional or not. Using the term “female paranoia”
involves a problem, because calling it “paranoia,” thus dismissing it as an unfounded crazy story,
discredits a womanʼs anxiety in the demon lover story. It could be even another layer of the manipulation in the society in which women are bound by complicated codes of behavior that force
them to participate in heterosexual romances. The demon lover stories, as well as Freudʼs study offemale paranoia, show that when a woman is aware of a possible trap and is trying to avoid it, sherisks being called a paranoid.

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Examining these demon lover stories illuminates one of the prevailing fears of women. The
demon lover is simply a harmful yet attractive man, but his danger and charm may both comefrom his desirability in patriarchal society: his economic or other powers that credit him as a “man,”
which also allows his violence and arrogance. Although the demon lover story is a variation oflove stories̶sugarcoated ideology, which teach and circulate womenʼs codes of behavior andwomenʼs proper desires̶, it also allows a writer to express a womanʼs fears and anxiety about
the system itself, in which the demon lovers can disguise themselves̶or can be accepted̶aslegitimate “masculine” objects of love. The demon lover story brings attention to these ambiguitiesof the love object.
One reason that the demon lover stories invite “paranoid” reading is that the primary issue
involves interpretations of the ambiguous character. The word “interpretation” suggests that there
are alternate interpretations and that the protagonists waver between conflicted views of thedemon lovers. Female paranoid characters are showing diﬀerent perceptions about realities thanpeople around her. Kathleen Droverʼs lover may have been a passionate man who simply diedtragically in the war. James Harris may not have existed at all, because the unnamed heroine is
not the type of person to have a ﬁancé. Paranoiac fears overwhelm the protagonists when thedivergences of their interpretations from the popular ones surface.
The erotomanic scenario qualifies the protagonists as paranoid, although both demon loverstories suggest the prevalence of the erotomanic scenario in womenʼs lives. Freudʼs theory ofparanoid as a defense against homosexuality has some relevance in understanding the intensity offears involved. The women with the demon lovers have strong enough fears and anxieties about
their loversʼ sincerity. They may not only exhibit their symptoms as the delusional individuals
only when they hear sounds that do not exist or see things that are not there. They suggest that
mistaking her loverʼs sincerity bring the same extent of humiliation as that of being known aboutoneʼs homosexuality for the Victorian men. These female characters may or may not be imagining
the existence of their demon lovers, but they are delusional when they see love where it does notexist.
Two diﬀerent endings of the demon lover stories by Jackson and Bowen show the two diﬀerent endings to the erotomanic plot. Bowenʼs demon lover takes her away; he ultimately possesses
her. Jacksonʼs demon lover leaves her alone; he ultimately abandons her. The men these women
have believed loved them in fact do not, to the point that he physically hurts her, or to the pointthat he leaves her. These female characters at ﬁrst both misunderstand their demon lovers, whoturn out to be diﬀerent from what the women have believed to be. The demon lover takes his
love object, or his victim, to a faraway place. Each woman lives in a world where her own life isno more. The demon lover changes her world with his resurgence or his disappearance.
Jacksonʼs “The Daemon Lover” points to the source of fears̶the system which puts a woman
under strict surveillance to control her̶more clearly by showing that the strange place the demon
lover takes is in fact the place she has always been̶the same town, the same streets, the same67

Chiho NAKAGAWA Fears of the Demon Lover:Female Paranoia in the Demon Lover Stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Shirley Jacksonapartment, just looking diﬀerent. Her very environment, ordinary and realistic, becomes the worldof conspiracy. Jacksonʼs demon lover shows that the changed world has been always there andthat her paranoiac fears are not of extraordinary or supernatural nature: they are of her own world
into which she was born. Regardless of seeming freedom she has, Jacksonʼs protagonist is trappedin a situation with no escape. She wanders around the town, goes to work and comes back home,
and, leaving behind the delusion of being loved, feels the eye of persecution. She cannot run
away from it unless the demon lover opens up the door for her. Until the demon lover lets her
into his apartment, the protagonist has to suﬀer from her mistake in interpretation, and she will
suﬀer forever. The demon lover comes out just to make her realize the world that persecutes her.
Thus, this demon lover seems to possess supernatural powers in his ability to disappear completely
and to haunt her forever, yet he could be just an ordinary man, who plays with the heart of thethirty‑four‑year‑old woman in a girly dress. And he succeeds in throwing her into the world ofparanoiac fears. James Harris terrorizes the unnamed heroine in his absence and controls her life
with the web of fears that surround her, just by making her realize what kind of world she lives in.
(Chiho Nakagawa, Lecturer, Language Center, Ochanomizu University.)
Approved on December 12, 2007
Notes
１

Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon are often cited as the most important examples ofwriters who show paranoid tendencies in their ﬁction. Ronald K. Siegel also suggests Chekhovʼs, Gogolʼs “The Diary of Madman,” Shakespeareʼs

as ﬁction of paranoia (13). See also,

for example, Steffen Hantkeʼs
Melleyʼs, Timothy, and Patrick OʼDonnellʼs Latent Destinies, and Mike Davisʼ

. Also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coined the term “Paranoid Gothic” to refer to certain
male Gothic novels in
２:.

One may wonder the lack of Lacanʼs name here. He rereads Schreberʼs case extensively inof the seminar and puts it as the foundation of his argument on psychoses. Lacan divides mental disorders
into three categories̶neurosis, perversion, and psychosis̶characterized by their diﬀerent relationships
to the symbolic order. However, I will not discuss his theory here because the introduction of his theory,
thus, of his terminology, only complicates my argument without beneﬁts. My argument boils down towhether the demon lover “delusion” is in reality a mere delusion or not, as I argue in the text, so Lacanʼsargument, based on Freudʼs paper, focusing on the successful negation of the object of desire (Schreberʼshomosexual desire), does not hold relevance here.

３

As for the concept of “homosexual panic,” see Martin Kantor,
122. This “condition” is often used as a legal defense; one of therecent high proﬁle cases in which the defendant used “homosexual panic” is the case of the murder ofMatthew Shepherd, in Laramie, Wyoming.

４

Kantor insists that this characteristic is so common that people with a “touch of paranoia” are seen
everywhere. Interestingly, he includes literary critics among those who are in the gray area (71‑72).

５This name does not suggest the meanings popularly associated with the word, such as madness ormelancholy caused by passionate love. On the contrary, the patients with this type have delusions of being68

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the object of the otherʼs desire and attention.
６

As early as in 1930, Mario Praz spent one chapter ( “The Metamorphosis of Satan” ) discussing theorigin and the applications of this character in the Gothic and Byron in. J.M.S.
‑Tompkins also points out in her 1932ʼs bookthat the roots ofRadcliﬀeʼs villains, such as Montoni and Schedoni, can be traced back to Miltonʼs Satan (285).
Anne Williams rephrased Mario Prazʼ naming of the hero‑villain, the Fatal Man, and uses the “homme

７

fatal,” so that the parallel to the femme fatal becomes clearer in
８.

It should be noted in the research by Radway that female readers mostly do not like the novels in which

the heroes show violent traits, especially sexual violence.
９

Modleski sees at the bottom of the relationship between the heroine and the demon lover “womenʼs fearof and confusion about masculine behavior in a world in which men learn to devalue women” (60).
10

For example, Robert L. Calder provides a reading of this story as an allegory in which the demon lover

appears as the metaphor of war violence in “ʻA More Sinister Trothʼ:Elizabeth Bowenʼs ʻThe Demon Loverʼ
as Allegory.” Heather Bryant Jordan claims “war is personiﬁed as a powerful masculine ﬁgure capable ofabducting the innocent woman made captive by memory and desire.” Other readings also exist. Daniel V.
Fraustino insists that the demon lover is a psychotic killer ( “Elizabeth Bowenʼs ʻThe Demon Loverʼ: Psychosis or Seduction?” ); and John Coates insists that this story is an “oblique but eﬀective critiqueof English middle‑class failure” from the 1920s to WWII ( “The Moral Argument of Elizabeth Bowenʼs
Ghost Stories” ).
11

Clinical literature also shows that stalkers are more likely to be (heterosexual) men; thus, victims

are more likely to be women. According to the‑‑, individuals with erotomanic delusions,“particularly males, come into conﬂict with the law in their eﬀorts to pursue the object of their delusion”(324‑25). On the other hand, more women are diagnosed as the erotomanic delusional in clinical settings,
according to the. This suggests, despite the numbers of female suﬀerers of the erotomanic delusions,less women tend to act out their delusions. Interestingly, Siegel introduces as a case of the erotomanic
delusion, a story of a female patient, who killed her object of love̶who rejected her seduction after all the“signs” she picked because he was gay (113‑139).
12

The

‑

deﬁnes that delusional disorders are characterized by “non‑bizarre” delusions, whichmeans delusions with the contents that could happen in daily lives, while “bizarre” delusions, entirely
implausible stories, are found in schizophrenic patients.
13

One of the readings that suggest this lottery is in fact set up, or in other words, an election process,is presented in Peter Kosenkoʼs “A Reading of Shirley Jacksonʼs ʻThe Lottery.ʼ” Some other critics alsosuggest similar interpretations.
14

Lacan argues that the “other addressed in erotomania” is “such a neutralized other that he is inﬂated to

the very dimensions of the world, since the universal interest attached to the adventure” (41‑42). One canalso argue that in Lacanʼs theory, the object of the erotomanic fantasy represents the whole world to thedeluder. Although this argument ﬁts the relationship between the unnamed heroine and James Harris in
one sense, I am questioning here the possibility of the reversal: not the erotomanic object̶the other̶as aprojection of the whole world, but the whole world as a projection of the demon lover.

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