The Death of the Heart Summary & Analysis

Summary About the Death of the Heart 

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Elizabeth Bowen

(MASTERPIECES OF WORLD LITERATURE, CRITICAL EDITION)

Portia Quayne is the sixteen-year-old heroine of The Death of the Heart, which begins soon after she arrives in London. Her father and mother having died within a few years of each other, Portia must now live with her father’s son, Thomas Quayne, and his wife Anna. Thomas is a middle-aged, successful, reserved businessman who is unable to form close personal relationships with anyone, although he does love his wife in his own aloof and undemonstrative way. Anna is a stylish, elegant woman whose principal interest is making herself and her house beautiful. She entertains frequently, but she, too, has no close relationships, though she appears to have a certain cool, impersonal attachment to her husband. Both are embarrassed and uncomfortable at the appearance of Portia, the child of the elder Quayne’s disgrace and second marriage.

Into this house comes Portia, who does everything that she can to please the Quaynes, being obedient, well-mannered, and quiet. She observes them minutely and records in a diary her thoughts about them, as well as the uninteresting events of her life, which consist primarily of attending an expensive, exclusive establishment where French lessons, lectures, and excursions are offered to a small group of girls. Portia does not know that Anna has discovered her diary. Worse, Anna discusses the diary with St. Quentin, a novelist and one of her several bachelor friends. Anna is upset by Portia’s insights and candid observations, but she is too resentful of the slight disruption caused by Portia’s presence to feel any real pity or concern for her.

Portia is bewildered by the lack of open, shared feeling in this household. She believes that she is the only one who does not understand what is beneath the genteel, snobbish surface of the Quaynes’ lives. Two other characters add to Portia’s puzzlement. One is Matchett, the housekeeper, a woman who worked for the first Mrs. Quayne and who knows a considerable amount about the family but who reveals only as much as she chooses to reveal in response to Portia’s attempts to make a connection with the only family left to her. Matchett is a perfect servant—conscientious, discreet, authoritarian, and snobbish. Her principal interest is the house and maintaining it in perfect order as she has always done. Like the Quaynes, she does not open herself to receive the affection of the lonely, seeking girl. The other character who is important to Portia, and who also disappoints her by being too self-centered and manipulative, is Eddie. At twenty-three, he recognizes Portia’s innocence but is unmoved by her need for love; he has too many needs of his own.

Portia encounters a very different household when she is sent to Seale-on-Sea to stay with Anna’s former governess while Thomas and Anna escape to Capri. Mrs. Heccomb is kind and her two stepchildren, young adults Dickie and Daphne, are as cool and self-centered as the Quaynes and Eddie are, but at Waikiki life is full of events, and Portia is allowed to participate in the activities of the family. She shops and goes to church with Mrs. Heccomb; she goes walking, dancing, and to the films with the two young people. When Eddie comes, quite surprisingly, to visit Portia at Waikiki, he is immediately accepted by the others, but Portia is still just an observer. Just as she is imagining that her love for Eddie is reciprocated, she observes him holding hands with Daphne at the movies. Disillusioned, she returns to London, where she is further betrayed by learning that Anna has not only read her diary but also discussed it with St. Quentin; in fact, it is he who tells Portia about this duplicity.

The betrayals by Eddie and Anna push Portia to run away from the Quaynes. She goes to the hotel of Major Brutt, another bachelor friend of Anna; he is an honorable, sensible, responsible man and convinces her that he must let the Quaynes know where she is. Whether or not she will return to them, she says, depends on what they do. They send Matchett in a cab to retrieve her, and the book ends as Matchett arrives at the door of the hotel.

The reader is not told what Portia decides, but one can assume that she will return because she has nowhere else to go. The question of what will eventually become of Portia is also left unanswered. The real point of the story is that Portia’s ignorance of the world—her innocence—has ended. It remains only for the reader to discover the meaning of the novel’s ambiguous title. One can be fairly sure that Portia’s heart is not “dead,” for her sense of hurt and disillusionment is too intense to suggest that she no longer yearns for understanding and love. On the other hand, one can easily see that the adults around her have undergone a “death of the heart.” Each one has shut himself or herself off from others, has refused to acknowledge the deep needs of others, is self-protective and deceitful. These people—Thomas, Anna, Eddie, St. Quentin, and Matchett—have all played a part in what happens to Portia, and one can only speculate on whether the damage that they have done to her through their lack of real concern and caring will result in Portia becoming like them.

Analysis

The Death of the Heart offers a penetrating view of English upper-class society between the two World Wars. Though she creates an entertaining comedy of manners, Irish-born Elizabeth Bowen issues a moral indictment of the class as a whole for its material values, exclusivity, and callous indifference to others. The Quaynes of 2 Windsor Terrace are affluent and emotionally repressed, contemptuous of anyone whom they deem vulgar. Their ward, the inexperienced Portia, arrives as a rootless transient who knows nothing of polite society. Thomas and Anna Quayne react to her as an “animal,” while she is thrust into a life of bourgeois privilege and snobbery—the right clothes, school, friends, and behavior.

A favored theme of Bowen’s fiction is that of an unwelcome child, forlornly surrounded by luxuries in a great house. The childlike Portia is on the verge of young womanhood, an astute observer who records Thomas’ and Anna’s weaknesses in her diary. It is Anna’s angry, furtive reading of Portia’s diary that betrays Portia. A childless woman and a motherless girl, Anna and Portia need each other. This unfulfilled need and the pervasive mother-daughter theme give The Death of the Heart its feminist focus.

The book’s three divisions are subtitled “The World,” “The Flesh,” and “The Devil,” corresponding to the action that unfolds from winter to spring. Attention to the seasons parallels the characters’ experiences. The story opens on a frozen January day. The ice on the lake in Regent’s Park has cracked, allowing a swan to glide through the water, much as the cold Quayne household has splintered open to let in Portia. The image recurs of Portia as a bird—vulnerable, in transit, or trapped.

“The World” describes Portia’s adjustment to the Quaynes’ formal lifestyle in the midst of costly furnishings, which Anna—once an interior decorator—has arranged and which are lovingly tended as human beings are not. Suspicions and conflicts arise, the chief of which results from Anna’s reading the diary, unknown to Portia. Portia avidly seeks friends. Major Eric Brutt sends her complicated jigsaw puzzles, emblems of her puzzling...

(CRITICAL GUIDE TO SETTINGS AND PLACES IN LITERATURE)

*London. Capital and largest city of Great Britain. As one of the novel’s characters walks through Covent Garden during the evening, the narrator describes a feeling of desolation, which is representative of a city “full of such deserts, of such moments, at which the mirage of one’s own keyed-up existence suddenly fails.” In this instance, the keyed-up character is Eddie, a dashing young man who has attracted sixteen-year-old Portia, the novel’s protagonist. She wants to believe that he represents an antidote to the cold, staid life she encounters in her brother Tom’s home near Regent’s Park.

Portia has come to stay in London after her father’s death. She is a love child, born of her father’s liaison with a woman outside his marriage. His legitimate son Tom has honored his father’s desire to have Portia come to live with him for a year in London. Neither Tom nor his wife Anna, who dislikes Portia and invades her privacy by reading her diary, really wants to make a place for her in their lives.

*Regent’s Park

*Regent’s Park. Large public park in London. The whole Regent’s Park area is described in terms that enclose Portia in a dehumanizing vacuum. The novel opens with a description of the Regency buildings at dusk: “colourless silhouettes, insipidly ornate, brittle and cold.” These very words might be used to describe Tom and Anna, who never take a warm or colorful interest in Portia’s feelings or experiences.

The Death of the Heart earned commercial and critical success when it first appeared. Earlier admirers focused on Bowen’s sparkling social satire, and the theme of childhood innocence confronting adult experience. Feminist readings find Bowen alert to questions of gender and to the mother-daughter bond that scholars such as Ellen Moers and coauthors Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert have examined among traditional women novelists.

Female wards and orphans were commonplace in nineteenth century fiction. The dependent state of Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park(1814), the heroine’s orphanhood in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and that of Dorethea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872) compelled—or liberated—the single woman to forge her way unencumbered, whether as a poor relation or as an heiress. A living mother might be an awkward role model, like Mrs. Bennet in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813). The harsh stepmother, typified by Mrs. Reed in Jane Eyre, could drive the orphan to find salvation outside the home.

Approaching the tradition afresh, Bowen gives her protagonist an array of mother surrogates. The sisterly biological mother dies without poignance, unlike Mrs. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse(1927). Bowen steers clear of the obvious pitfall of the stereotypical vicious stepmother, a folk motif form Cinderella and Snow White. Interestingly, she reverses gender expectations by endowing her male characters with the tenderest emotions—vulnerability, tears, an excess of passionate loving. Romance does not prove a viable route for the heroine, however, since there is no suitable man, the most heroic being the sad, solitary Major Brutt. The story touches on the heroine’s flight from her guardians to marriage, another feature of the Bildungsroman, but rejects the solution.

Bowen proposes that a young woman may have a greater chance to develop in a family whose members are imperfect but well meaning than as an alienated wanderer with a single parent who is loving but socially unconnected. Not irrelevant is the novel’s fairy-tale element that the orphan is a beneficiary of her brother’s fortune. Home is salvation. The adolescent’s need of a loving home, where she can express herself and where family members respect one another, ranks high with Bowen.