This essay will explore the ways in which various representations of the Demon-Lover challenge traditional conceptions of this ballad type through a comparative analysis of three English Romantic ballads: Anne Bannerman’s The Dark Ladie, Matthew Lewis’s The Water-King, and William Taylor’s Ellenore. While this intrusion implies the violent and problematic sexual dynamics of the Demon-Lover Motif, Shields’s statement also speaks to how writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries capitalized on the popularity of Gothic conventions such as horror and the grotesque supernatural to imperfectly resurrect the declining literary traditions of folklore and oral narrative. The violent and uncomfortable poetic climax of The Water-King structurally parallels a significant theme of the Demon-Lover Motif in English Gothic ballad tradition, which Hugh Shields defines as a “supernatural intrusion into a narrative which is of this world” (p.107). By deliberately breaking the rhythmic pattern of the ballad in the final lines of this verse, Lewis’s utilization of cacophony overwhelms and unsettles the reader. Screaming maidens, laughing demons, and the turbulent sea: this chorus of hysteria Matthew Lewis conducts in his 1796 ballad The Water-King aurally represents the tale’s climactic action, during which an innocent Maiden is drowned by her cruel, demonic lover. She shrieks, but shrieks in vain for high However, that which is dead cannot return to life unharmed while it may carry traces of its former self, it is unnatural and arguably horrific.
I contend that it is more significant to understand this ballad type as symbolic of victimization and power, not exclusively in a gendered way, but as a representation of the Romantic Gothic impulse to revive older forms of narrative. This article explores the ways in which various representations of the Demon-Lover challenge traditional conceptions of this ballad type through a comparison of three English Romantic ballads: Anne Bannerman’s The Dark Ladie, Matthew Lewis’s The Water-King, and William Taylor’s Ellenore. The Demon-Lover functions as a significant motif in English Gothic ballad tradition, which scholar Hugh Shields articulates as a “supernatural intrusion into a narrative which is of this world” (Shields p.
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