Seeing History in the Baroque Ruins of Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September: An Indictment of Cosmopolitan Modernity

Elizabeth Bowen’s 1929 novel, The Last September, can be read as a ruin. More specifically, the discourse of the novel performs Anglo-Irish “hospitality” as an aesthetic of failed intimacy, an aesthetic bound up with the colonial history of Anglo-Ireland and which, after the Treaty of 1921, can only be encountered as a ruin. Considering Walter Benjamin’s theory of ruins as instantiation of baroque allegory, as well as Bowen’s own comments on her novel’s backward-looking perspective, the text configures the failures of the Anglo-Irish colonial relationship as persisting in both the ruins that remain on the Irish landscape and in the cosmopolitan discourse of “unintimacy.” In other words, Bowen’s text exposes the links between cosmopolitan modernism and Anglo-Irish hospitality rather than a break and calls attention to the failure of the form (hospitality) to mitigate an ethical dilemma of inequality and suspended hostility. The dilemma, that is, of a cosmopolitan modernity.