Time Doesn't Exist—Only Clocks Do

Marian Kelly, in her article “The Power of the Past: Structural Nostalgia in Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and The Little Girls, argues that Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris, is centered largely around the notion of nostalgia. The intense sense of stasis is essentially the life-blood of the story; it is not only reflected in its three part structure—the present, the past, and the present, respectively—but also in its characters and their development (or the lack thereof). Kelly states that “the function that the middle of a narrative usually serves . . . [is] to move the narrative forward inexorably toward the ending, where final meaning is located” (Kelly). Bowen effectively subverts this traditional mode of storytelling in her employing of the imagined history that is the middle section of the novel, the past, which seems to disrupt the momentum of the plot. As readers, we are unable to imagine the character development outside of the novel’s canon due to the fact that none of the character progress at all—whether it be physically or psychologically. As an example, the main characters, Leopold and Henrietta, never reach their anticipated destinations, which ultimately leads to Leopold’s fantasy of his mother prior to having him and serves as the essence of the novel’s middle section.

As we discussed in class, Kelly claim that “nostalgia is instead a situation” rather than “a longing for the conditions of a past age” exemplifies the idea of liminal space. Like a doorway, each character stands on the precipice of growth, yet never quite cross the threshold; even Kelly states that Karen “functions like a ghost in the novel as a whole, and because she does not appear in either present section, she remains, like many ghosts, eternally young,” despite the fact that “we get a strong and full-bodied sense of Karen in the central section” (Kelly). Thinking about this novel in terms of liminality is interesting because the term liminality in itself suggests that crossing the threshold is a rite of passage, which are typically instances of birth, puberty, marriage, and death—all ideas which appear in Bowen’s story. It is arguable, then, that Leopold and Karen may be the only characters in the novel with an imaginable sense of motion, however tiny they may be, as Karen birthed Leopold. Mme Fisher, on the other hand, is physically and mentally tethered to the present moment due to her illness and the idea that she refuses to sell her house until she dies.