ABSTRACT
"The Shadowy Third" appeared in Elizabeth Bowen's first short story collection Encounters, a grouping of tales that, like much of her writing in the 1920s, focuses on ordinary social interactions and everyday conversation. "The Shadowy Third" is akin to nineteenth-century narratives of domestic entrapment such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. It reactivates some of the stock tropes of the fantastic: the genre of domestic Gothic, the theme of entrapment in marriage, and the character of the villain who holds the key to a mysterious locked chest in a cold, damp house. The story opens precisely as Martin, the husband in the couple, is on his way back home. As a dominant and domineering character within the plot, his point of view filters the story; as a husband, he exerts control over two other protagonists: his current wife as well as his previous one, a shadowy presence from the past who keeps reappearing in various forms in the story.
