The Demon Lover

“The Demon Lover” devotes significant attention to Mrs. Drover’s London home even before she enters it. The lock on the Drovers’ front door is “unwilling” and must be forced. Further, the door itself has “warped,” and there are “cracks in the structure, left by the bombing” (661). While all of this is realistic, given the blitz, descriptions such as these also symbolize the shakiness of Mrs. Drover’s life and happiness while also implying a violent presence.

As she opens the door, Mrs. Drover encounters “dead air” and a feeling of confusion (661). The descriptions here are of damage. There’s a “yellow smoke stain up the white marble mantelpiece” and a “bruise in the wallpaper where […] the china handle had always hit the wall” (661). Further, the piano seems to have left “claw marks on […] the parquet” (661). Even the garden outside the window seems to “smoke with dark” as the clouds “sharp[en] and low[er]” (662). These harsh descriptions set the audience up for the violent memory of the fiancé, his death in the war, and his possible return.

As she contends with the contents of the mysterious letter and the memories it inspires, Mrs. Drover feels her “married London home’s whole air of being a cracked cup from which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away, made a crisis” (664). She is struck by “the hollowness of the house” and feels that “years on years of voices, habits, and steps” are “cancelled” (664). This suggests that there is a brokenness both within and without that cannot be fixed.

Mrs. Drover notes early that she feels the letter is intrusive, and this becomes literal as she imagines a “supernatural” entity placing it in the house: “[U]nder circumstances she did not care to consider, a house can be entered without a key” (665). She determines to quickly pack up the items she came for and go to the train station via taxi, but she then remembers the “telephone is cut off” (665)—an echo of Mrs. Drover’s isolation in the wake of her fiancé’s presumed death. The idea causes panic again until she determines to have the taxi driver help her with her parcels. This allows her to unlock the door and step away from the damaged house.

As she goes, however, “the air of the staircase [is] disturbed by a draft that travel[s] up to her face” (665). Mrs. Drover takes this to “emanat[e] from the basement […] where a door or window was being opened by someone who chose this moment to leave the house” (665). The reader never sees if there is or is not an intruder but the mere suggestion creates an atmosphere of foreboding while also raising the possibility that Mrs. Drover is imagining things. Without symbolic descriptions of the house’s foundation, walls, floors, and its general feeling of emptiness, neither the threat of the intrusive demon lover nor Mrs. Drover’s paranoia would come through as soundly.