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The Demon Lover Essay

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A person can be very manipulative. This can cause somebody to believe that another person’s actions are always good, when in reality they are not at all. In Elizabeth Bowen’s short story called The Demon Lover, a woman’s long lost lover tracks her down and leaves her a letter. In the letter he asks her to keep her vow and spend her life with him. After getting scared the woman tries to run away by getting into a taxi.. Another situation quite similar to this happens in an anonymous poem also titled, The Demon Lover, but the woman in the poem agrees to leave with the man and ends up getting killed by him. Although Bowen’s story portrays the man as an ex-fiance coming back for his long lost promise, there is an abundance of textual evidence …show more content…

This shows that he was never going to take her where he told her. After he says “O yon is the mountain of hell/Where you and I will go” the reader can assume that he is the Devil (The Demon Lover 55). It is well known that hell symbolizes the Devil. If he was taking her there, then he had to have supernatural powers and be the Devil. This helps explain how Mrs. Drover’s ex-fiance knew where she would be. It is because he has supernatural powers. Those type of powers only belong to certain things and/or people ; one of those being the Devil.
Throughout the story, Mrs. Drover talks a lot of her ex-fiance not being kind to her. The first time is when she is reminiscing on a flashback of when they were saying their goodbyes to one another. Mrs.Drover explains how “without very much kindness, and painfully” her ex-fiance would press her hand “onto one of the breast buttons of his uniform” (Bowen 1408). Him doing this did not make her want him to stay, but “only wish him already gone” (Bowen 1408). Although Mrs. Drover loved her ex-fiance, she knew that he was not normal and she did not like the way he hurt her. If he really loved her and was not the Devil, why would he do things to hurt her? Mrs. Drover explains that “she imagined spectral glitters in the place of his eyes” after being looked at for so long (Bowen 1408). This also shows that his normal eyes were mean like the Devil’s so she had to imagine something nice in place of them. If Mrs.

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