The Death of the Heart - Not a Laughing Matter

Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart is a quiet novel. Taking place largely in the upper-class home of Anna and Thomas Quayne, the story plays out like a novel of manners, with guests coming and going and people being rather polite to each other. Or at least they seem to be polite to each other, and it is in that seeming that Bowen's story finds its strength. This two-faced behavior is commonplace enough and shouldn't surprise anyone. But the lies told, the secrets kept, and secrets revealed in confidence take on new depth and import when seen through the eyes of Portia Quayne, the sixteen-year-old girl at the center of the novel.

Portia is above all an observer. The love child of an upper-class man who longs for his old life and a common woman forced to live an uprooted life by her shamed husband, Portia is the quintessential outsider. She grew up in hotels, traveling from one to another, watching the fellow guest come in and out of her life. After her father's death, Portia and her mother are an isolated pair with no ties. And when her mother passes, Portia goes to live with her father's son, Thomas, and his wife, Anna, in London.

Portia keeps her observations in a diary. At the opening of the novel, we learn that Anna, who does not care for her quiet guest, has found Portia's diary and read it through. Anna is upset that Portia is watching her and making notes. She does not complain about what Portia has said, and there is no evidence that Portia is mean spirited in her writings, but she feels violated on behalf of everyone who has been watched. Anna seems disproportionately upset by her discovery, and that is our first indication about Bowen's plan for this novel. There is power in observation and in the silent passing of judgment. Anna feels that Portia is laughing at her behind her back, and this practically unhinges Anna.

Characters throughout the novel are obsessed with being watched, being exposed, and being in the public eye. As long as you are the one laughing at others, feeling superior to others, you are in the position of power. But to be laughed seems to be a fate worse than death; at least it is an equal fate, as the very title of the novel suggests.

The titular heart is Portia's. The novel is a coming of age story for Portia, and her final entrance into adulthood is not love, or sex, or independence. The thing that hurtles her irreversibly into adulthood is having her heart broken by the betrayal of her boyfriend, Eddie. Eddie's betrayal is not that he loves another. While Portia is upset that Eddie held hands with Daphne in the movie theater, Portia accepts his odd explanation and moves on. In fact, Portia is maddeningly indifferent to Eddie's awful behavior, seemingly willing to tolerate any kind of mistreatment. But the one thing she cannot tolerate is the knowledge that Eddie knew that Anna read Portia's diary regularly, and that Anna knew that Eddie knew but Portia knew none of this. Eddie and Anna, in other words, had a secret and excluded Portia. "You have laughed at me. You've laughed at me with them," says Portia to Eddie, shattered. Later she tells Major Brutt, "It, it isn't all right there [at Anna's house] any more: we feel ashamed with each other. You see, she has read my diary and found something out. She does not like that, but she laughs about it with Eddie; they laugh about him an me."

This betrayal is worse than if Eddie and Anna had had an affair: "Oh, he's not her lover; it's something worse than that."

Meanwhile, at the Quayne house, politeness fall apart (even as they continue to act politely to each other) as Anna and St. Quentin reveal their subversive acts to each other.

This much more plot summary than I am usually comfortable with in these posts, but the meanings of the novel are woven so tightly into the plot that I have a hard time grabbing the individual threads. The novel was intense and driving even as nothing of any seeming import happened. All the characters' interactions with each other and themselves are ripe with subtext and potential energy on the brink of becoming kinetic. It is in the end a rather dark novel about relationships and the unavoidable power relations between all people, power that unbalances everything and makes a simple union an impossibility. I have seen many films try to tackle this same subject and have never found them satisfactory. The reason Bowen succeeds where others have failed, I think, lies in her ability to plunge into the hearts and minds of the characters and let us linger in the wet dark of their thoughts. We are the additional layer in this power relationship as we, as readers, sit in judgment, in the know. We are the ultimate diary readers, the ultimate observers. Will we laugh at these creatures and share a joke amongst ourselves at their expense?

Another novel I am glad to have read. I feel like I have read an original thing here, a thing that others have tried to imitate many times and failed.