Sexual "non-occurrence": celibacy in Elizabeth Bowen's interwar

Abstract

This article examines the structuring tension between the occurrence and non-occurrence of sexual events in Elizabeth Bowen's novels Friends and Relations (1931) and The House in Paris (1935), arguing that the conflict between sex and celibacy operates as a central narrative motor in her interwar fiction. Reframing this dynamic through the related distinction between occurrence, non-occurrence, and event, I suggest that Bowen's novels are organized not simply around sexual acts or their absence, but around the question of whether sexual possibility is allowed to consolidate into narrative event or withheld within a structure of suspension. In Friends and Relations, sexual possibility remains imminent yet is repeatedly deferred, producing a narrative governed by a "non-occurrence" rather than event. In The House in Paris, by contrast, sexual occurrence is permitted but emerges as catastrophe, consequence, and irreversible temporal rupture. This opposition is represented through Janet (Friends and Relations) and Karen (The House in Paris), who embody two regimes of narrative temporality: one in which sexual possibility is withheld from event, and one in which it becomes an irreversible event. Across both novels, celibacy and sexuality are interdependent forces determining the passage, or refusal of passage, from occurrence to event.