Unveiling the Architecture of Fear: A Digital Analysis of Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover

Abstract

The Demon Lover, a 1945 short tale by Elizabeth Bowen, is a classic of contemporary Gothic literature, known for its uncanny atmosphere and psychological ambiguity set against the backdrop of a war-torn London. Although themes of trauma, the uncanny, and identity dissolution have been successfully examined by traditional criticism, this study uses digital literary analysis to reveal patterns that have been hidden and provide quantitative support for preexisting literary claims. This study uses close reading and computational text analysis in a mixed-methods approach.It is a very incisive and systematic interpretation of Bowen’s work. With a sentiment-driven time-series analysis and a KWIC (Key Word in Context) based semantic mapping, one already gets to see the emotional trajectory of the story reflected through the words used to describe the most critical objects: the ‘hall’, ‘door’, ‘letter’, and ‘airless’. Syntactic dependency graphs reveal the structure of the relation between the restricted lexicon and the discourse in general. The present research aims to use a dependency parser, a natural language processing unit, to extract subject-verb-object triples depicting important nouns. Drawing them in a network graph would establish the novelty and repetition of Bowen's entrapment strategy by comparing it to other texts in the genre of domestic horror. Using a DependencyParser would further involve establishing a syntactic relationship between the words used by Bowen in the sentences of the story. Last but not least, a computational comparison between the opening and closing sections of the story makes the correlation between the first and last sections of the story conclusive, as the language has a big difference and generates the symbolic justification to say that the break is resolved when one arrives at the end of the break. This is not the digital probe meant to replace the subtle literary analysis, but to supplement it with a data-based framework that reveals the specific literary instruments that Bowen uses to build her spooky story of unresolved pain and the haunting afterlife.