Gender Misrepresentations In Iris Murdoch S The Sea, The Sea And A Fairly Honourable Defeat

I. BIOGRAPHY AND PHILOSOPHY

Murdoch was born in 1919 in Dublin into a Scots–Irish protestant family, and, though she spent no more than a year in Ireland, her Anglo-Irish heritage remained an important part of her identity. Murdoch described herself as Anglo-Irish and when this was questioned she responded, ‘But of course I’m Irish. I’m profoundly Irish and I’ve been conscious of this all my life, and in a mode of being Irish which has produced a lot of very distinguished thinkers and writers’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 27).

Ireland continued to play a large part in her imaginative landscape and two of her novels are overtly set in Ireland, The Unicorn and, famously, The Red and The Green, which recalled the week leading up to the 1916 uprising. Murdoch’s Irishness mattered deeply to her, so much so that a comment from a friend questioning ‘why Miss Murdoch chose to set The Unicorn in Ireland when she so plainly is not at home there’(ibid., p. 460) caused a temporary breach in the friendship . Murdoch’s parents settled in London and, according to all accounts, Murdoch had an unusually happy childhood and good relationships with both her parents.

London remained an important city for Murdoch, to which she returned after her undergraduate degree, and later in life she taught at the Royal College of Art, staying in London two nights a week. Murdoch set many of her novels in London and clearly loved the city. It was not Oxford, her home for most of her life, but London which was the ‘city her fictional world is in love with: no earlier novelists apart from Dickens and Virginia Woolf loved London so well, or celebrated it as memorably as she’ (ibid., p. 585).

Murdoch arrived at Somerville College, Oxford in 1938, initially to read English, although this soon changed to Classics followed by Philosophy, at a time when women in academia were still something of a rarity. Apart from living in London, working at the Treasury during the war years, and a spell working for UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), followed by a year at Newnham College, Cambridge (1947–8), she had her home in Oxford. Her work for UNRRA brought Murdoch into contact with the desperate plight of displaced persons seeking to be rehomed after the war

. Her experience of the relocation camps had a profound effect on Murdoch, both in her political views and also in her affinity with refugees. Her friendships with émigrés are a feature of her personal life, and they often appear in her novels. These experiences also influenced her wish to protect and revere the uniqueness of every individual, both in how she lived her life and in her philosophy. After her stint with UNRRA and a year in Cambridge she returned to St Anne’s College, Oxford to tutor and to begin her life as a professional philosopher, which she continued until 1963, when she returned to London for two nights a week to teach at the RCA.

Murdoch’s interest in politics began at Oxford in her undergraduate years, and it was at this time in her life that she was particularly politically active; later she became less so, noting that ‘politics were . . . “not in her blood”’ (ibid., p. 499).

However, as an undergraduate, she was dedicated to politics and was a committed and vocal member of the Communist Party. She joined the party in her first days at university and her allegiance continued until at least 1942, when she began work at the Treasury and ceased to be on Party lists, although Conradi suggests that her involvement may well have continued longer. Her commitment was clearly robust, and Frank Thompson writes to her as ‘Irushka’, suggesting the depth of her attraction and dedication to the communist vision. Gradually her views changed, in part because of her commitment to the sovereignty of the individual and her recognition that totalitarian regimes become dehumanizing. She became enraged by the Labour Party’s education policy in the 1970s, leading her to vote Conservative in 1983 and 1987, a turn in her thinking that Wilson traces to the influence of her husband, John Bayley. However, she returned to her familiar left-wing stance and voted labour in 1997, although by this point ‘she took almost no day-today interest in politics’ (Wilson, 2003, pp. 100–101). All of which suggests that, although politically motivated and active in her early years, Murdoch was not politically concerned in the ideological sense, and indeed her fear of totalitarian regimes (evident in her philosophy as well as her journals) led her away from the public and towards the private sphere.

The centrality of the individual for Murdoch is revealed in her writing of all types and in the way she lived her life, placing great emphasis on her individual loves andm friendships. Her focus was not ‘the system’ but the individual. Accordinglynshe sought answers to the age-old question of ‘How can I be good?’ and correspondingly ‘How is it that some human beings are morally better than others? What might make a man good . . . even in extreme situations?’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 597). To discover the answers to these questions Murdoch looked to individuals, to her own experience and to those around, seeking in her friends and loves insights into these perennial philosophical questions. She believed that philosophy should directly tackle these questions: ‘Ethics should not be merely an analysis of ordinary mediocre conduct, it should be a hypothesis about good conduct and about how this can be achieved. How can we make ourselves better? is a question moral philosophers should attempt to answer’ (Murdoch, 1970a, p. 78).

Those who have seen the film, Iris, will recall vividly Murdoch’s promiscuity and, in her early life, according to Conradi’s sympathetic telling, Murdoch did fall in love often – something she was ‘absolutely amazed’ at in her later life when looking over her old diaries (Conradi, 2001, p.580). Love was important for Iris and she clearly relished being in love and being loved and, in her journal 20 years later, she recalled, ‘[Leo] loved me, in the days when Frank and Noel Martin loved me too. And indeed I loved them. My God that was a golden time’ (ibid., p. 97). Friendship was just as important to Murdoch as her affairs (although Murdoch had affairs with both sexes and appears to have regarded physical love as a part of the love of friendship). Her friendships and loves informed her work and ‘novel after Iris novel depends upon the convention that a court of characters have been friends since college days’ (ibid., p. 85). Maintaining her friendships was an essential part of her being (in her later years spending hours a day replying to letters) and she suffered when friendships ended: ‘Iris mislaid few friends notably or dramatically, and when losses did happen she brooded over them and counted them significant’ (ibid.). Many of Murdoch’s friendships and loves were begun at Oxford and through the turbulent war years and these relationships were to last for the rest

of her life and be paramount to her self-understanding and to her work.

Included in the long list of lasting friendships formed during her undergraduate days are Mary Scrutton (later Midgely), Philippa Bosanquet (later Foot), Mary Warnock, Frank Thompson, Michael R.D. Foot, Hal Lidderdale, Noel Martin, Leo Pliatzky and David Hicks, all of whose ‘names resonate through the nearly sixty years of her journals’ (ibid.). Murdoch continued to make firm friends and form intimate relationships throughout her life (documented not only in the biographies, but also in the many testimonies from those she befriended).

Friendship was of fundamental importance to Murdoch, so much so that Conradi comments that ‘the joke about the socialite with “a hundred close friends” was no joke in Iris’s case. Unlike the socialite she knew each of them’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 568).

Murdoch had many loves; most notable during the early period of her life is her love for Frank Thompson, who did ask her to marry him before he went into active service, a proposal that Murdoch declined (although later she insisted that they were engaged) (ibid., p. 538). This was a significant relationship which began with Murdoch convincing Frank to join the Communist Party. Murdoch was, to Frank, ‘muse, sole-mate, keeper of his conscience, and she was often capable of the “passionate intensity” Yeats feared’ (ibid., p. 111).

Frank was one of the enduring loves of Murdoch’s life, and one which continued,to be important to her throughout her life and long after his torture and death in Bulgaria in 1944. The growth of this love and its impact on Murdoch is beautifully documented by Conradi, and it is clear that Murdoch was indeed in love with Frank, who, though ‘never her lover, preoccupied her all her life’ (ibid., p. 157). Throughout this time Murdoch continued to have lovers, including Michael Foot, who later married Philippa, which, at times, caused some distance between the best friends. Despite this obstacle Philippa, from first to last, was an almost necessary friend to Murdoch, one whom she valued perhaps above all others throughout her life. In addition to befriending her peers, Murdoch also formed relationships with academics who became mentors and remained important to her, although the friendships did not always survive her own growth as an intellectual and as a person. Most notable are her undergraduate tutors Eduard Fraenkel and Donald MacKinnon, both of whose influence is evident in her later work, both as providing inspiration for characters in her novels and in shaping her intellectual interests.

Many of Murdoch’s affairs affected her work. Her platonic love affair with Frank was the first of a number of relationships which commentators have regarded as influencing the good or ‘saintly’ characters in her novels. A later love affair of this order was with Franz Steiner, whom Murdoch met in the early 1950s. Franz was a Jewish émigré, a poet and an anthropologist, whose family had all fallen victim to the Nazis. Indeed Murdoch thought of him as another of Hitler’s victims when he died in 1952 of a heart condition: a broken

heart, she believed. From their journals we know that Murdoch and Franz affected each other profoundly; in their shared reading and deepening understanding of literature and poetry and in their discussion of religion (one of Murdoch’s primary interests). On his death, ‘Franz joined Frank in Iris’s private pantheon of martyrs. She sanctified both’ (ibid., p. 341). Both of these affairs influenced her novels: ‘Frank helped to inspire her characterization of virtuous soldiers, Franz helped to inspire her scholar saints’ (ibid., p. 342).

Two additional affairs are of interest and have supposedly influenced her ‘demonic’ characters. The first was with Thomas Balogh, with whom she had an unhappy affair while living with Philippa in London; and the second, much later in life, and overlapping with her relationship with John Bayley, with Elias Canetti. Canetti, (introduced to Murdoch by Franz), was alleged to be a cruel, jealous man who was interested in power. Thus he was something of a puppet-master, manipulating the many women who were enthralled by him in violent and humiliating ways, including Murdoch. From him she hid her religious interests and it is probably on his account that she left the Oxford group of theologians, the Metaphysicals, whose interests she shared.

More significantly, given Iris’s promiscuity (she was described by Wallace Robson, to whom she was once engaged, as ‘monumentally unfaithful’) she accepted Canetti’s jealous dictate that she should not sleep with Bayley. Her relationship with Bayley ‘won’ in the end, yet even so the figure of Canetti continued to haunt her. Her underlying fear as she moved towards an almost moral mysticism was that he could perhaps be right and his moral atheism and power-wielding nihiliBayley ‘won’ in the end, yet even so the figure of Canetti continued to haunt her. Her underlying fear as she moved towards an almost moral mysticism was that he could perhaps be right and his moral atheism and power-wielding nihilism could be the correct vision of the world: a fear that is represented by characters such as Julius King, in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Charles Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea and Mischa Fox in The Flight from the

Enchanter.

The fear that Canetti’s vision was correct also haunts her philosophy, in her questioning of her conclusions, a fear which, though real, does nor overcome her, because ultimately she cannot believe the dark picture of the world and the human condition which he presents. Murdoch’s relationships with both Balogh and Canetti, Conradi suggests, increased her awareness of evil: ‘her friend and co-philosopher Patrick Gardiner intuited

that something in Iris’s past had introduced her to the idea of evil’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 373). This awareness of evil (as well as good) is evident in her philosophy as well as her novels.

The other significant relationship which must be mentioned is that with John Bayley, her husband, whom she married in 1956. However, in the light of Bayley’s books and the famous film, to comment on this relationship seems perhaps unnecessary and presumptuous. Although there have been questions about whether Murdoch would have approved of the books and the film, and consequently questions about the marriage, according to the evidence of those who knew the couple it seems that they did have a famously happy marriage. Certainly Murdoch’s journal entries, reported in Conradi’s biography, show Murdoch’s need and appreciation for Bayley and her enjoyment in their

companionship: ‘this partnership was totally necessary for her and John’s memoirs of Iris well evoke its absolute mutual taken-for-grantedness’ (ibid., p. 534). At the very least this was a lasting relationship and Bayley supported and nursed Murdoch until her death in 1999.

Murdoch’s friendships, relationships and loves, those mentioned here and many other important ones, are detailed intimately and movingly in Conradi’s biography of Iris and need not be discussed further here. What is relevant to this work is to note the importance that Murdoch placed on both love and friendship. The high regard in which Murdoch held friendship and love shows in her philosophy, both in her insistence that ‘we need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central’ (Murdoch, 1970a, p. 46) and in the emphasis she puts on seeing other people as they are rather than as we wish them to be.

Murdoch attempted to live this ideal and to respond to the needs of others; she had great belief in the ability of love to ‘cure’ people. Conradi tells us that many of those who knew her considered her ‘a sage (no saint) who gave all her friends unstinting, patient and non-judgemental support, making them feel loved, blessed, accepted, unique’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 552). Perhaps Murdoch achieved something of her vision, attaining at least moral improvement, if not goodness itself; Philippa Foot’s obituary of Iris points to this, when she speaks of ‘Iris’s “magical goodness”’

The focus of this work, however, is not on Murdoch’s life, or her novels, but her philosophy. A work which attempts to capture Murdoch’s moral vision could perhaps be expected to take into account her vision of people and the world which comes through her novels and which she enacted in her life.

However, there are a number of excellent books detailing Murdoch’s novels and detailing how many of her key ideas, such as the primacy of the good, are revealed in her novels. For the inquisitive reader who wishes to pursue Murdoch’s vision further, reading her novels does add to one’s understanding of her moral vision. Her novels, as her philosophy, reveal her perennial preoccupation with goodness and what makes people good and evil, as well as exploring the nature of religion in a secular world. Yet Murdoch declares that she is not a philosophical novelist, in the sense that she does not wish to

make a philosophical point, but rather philosophy is revealed in her novels simply because that is her expertise. Thus seeking Murdoch’s philosophy in her novels is a perilous activity, the more so because she uses her novels to question and explore some of the ideas in her philosophy.

Consequently the vision of life found in her novels is from a different perspective from that of her philosophy. Alasdair MacIntyre comments, ‘Iris Murdoch’s novels are

philosophy but they are philosophy which casts doubt on all philosophy, including her own’ (quoted by Tracy, 1986, p. 69). Her novels present a darker picture of human reality, although full of humour, in which seeking the good and living the good life is almost impossible for most of her illusion-ridden, egotistical characters: ‘if her philosophy is lofty, her best novels are merciless and grim, as well as comical’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 540). In addition there are many books and articles already published on Murdoch’s novels, which document well how she uses the key concepts of her philosophy, including Elizabeth Dipple’s Work for the Spirit and Peter Conradi’s The Saint and the Artist.

Murdoch’s novels at best provide a tangential exploration of her philosophical ideas and although at times they help to provide examples of how Murdoch envisages the good featuring in the reality of individual lives, they also present a very different, even conflicting, picture to that of her philosophy. In the light of this, Murdoch’s novels only rarely appear in this work, and are always treated with a certain amount of suspicion in terms of discovering Murdoch’s philosophical position. However, despite skepticism regarding the use of Murdoch’s novels in reading her philosophy, her status as novelist is not insignificant. Murdoch is far better known as a novelist than as a philosopher, and as a novelist she was prolific, whereas as a philosopher she wrote only four books: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, The Sovereignty of Good, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals.

A collection of her many essays Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature was published in 1997, although the essays it contains are from much earlier in her career. One further work which could perhaps be added to her philosophical canon is Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues. These dialogues, on the subjects of art and religion, stand between her philosophy and her literature. Acastos is only rarely cited in this work and then only when a point seemed so pertinent that it ought to be included. Given the difficulty arising in all dialogue formats of attributing the view of a certain character directly to the author, the information has been included rather circumspectly and it is always noted that the source is Acastos, so that the reader can be aware of the problematic antecedence of the ideas. The relationship of ‘Murdoch the novelist’ and ‘Murdoch the philosopher’ will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6.

The aim of the present book is to provide an outline of Murdoch’s moral philosophy. Murdoch was influential in moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the impact she had on a number of key thinkers in both moral philosophy and theology. Key thinkers that cite her moral philosophy as influential on their own work include Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, John MacDowell and Stanley Hauerwas. Accordingly, Murdoch has been important in at least two major revivals in contemporary moral philosophy.

The first is ‘moral realism’, the position which holds that moral values are discovered rather than made, which was revived in the second half of the twentieth century and upon which Murdoch had ‘decisive influence’ Kerr, 1997, p. 70). The second is ‘virtue ethics’, which is a revival of a pre-Enlightenment view of morality which focuses more broadly on good living and human flourishing, rather than on theories of right action.

Murdoch’s philosophy is very different from the philosophy of the majority of her contemporaries, and indeed she opposes almost all the trends of the philosophies of her time. Her continual criticism is that modern philosophy has become reductionist, and so produced an unrealistic picture of the human being which can no longer account for the varied experiences which constitute the reality of human life. Murdoch judges that this reduction is part of the temper of the time which has encouraged philosophy to move towards scientific models; thus she believes that too often ‘difficult concepts which

cannot easily be explained in simple terms are classified as “emotive” or dismissed as meaningless’ (Murdoch, 1992, p. 236). Murdoch traces this in part to the decline of religion and the philosophical uncertainty of those aspects of human life which cannot be judged to be ‘facts’ in a scientific verificationist model. Murdoch regards this trend towards science as misguided and claims that philosophy has neglected its true work, which is to present an accurate model of the reality of human existence. Therefore she calls on philosophy to return to its roots, and to attempt to describe the wide gamut of

human life, which must include concepts which have become difficult for contemporary philosophy. Moreover, Murdoch denies ‘that moral philosophy should aim at being neutral’ (Murdoch, 1970a, p. 52); rather it should prescribe a way of life. Therefore

Murdoch does not move towards science but rather embraces religion and art, considering that any true account of human being must include the artistic imagination and spirituality, both of which she judges to be basic human capacities. How Murdoch accounts for these characteristics will be unfolded during the course of this book. For now it is enough to note that Murdoch’s intention is to broaden the modern philosophical framework so that again it includes non-scientific concepts.

Such a philosophy, she contends, will re-establish the individual and ‘check the increasing power of science’ (ibid., p. 76). Murdoch’s wish is that philosophy should once again present a picture of the whole of human life and provide succour and insight to all. She suggests that ‘ethical theory has affected society, and has reached as far as to the ordinary man, in the past, and there is no good reason to think that it cannot do so in the future’ (ibid.). She believes that, in the erosion of religion and the elevation of science, something essentially human has been ‘lost’; a phrase we will encounter often as wediscuss her moral vision.

This wish for a broad philosophy led Murdoch to Plato: a very unusual philosophical commitment in the world of philosophy she inhabited, where ‘to “come out” then as a Platonist in morals seemed as bizarre as declaring oneself a Jacobite in politics’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 492). Murdoch’s interest in Plato places her distinctly outside the mainstream of moral philosophy. Murdoch disliked Plato intensely when she first encountered him as an

undergraduate: ‘Iris despised Plato, thinking him reactionary, dishonest, full of cheap dialectical tricks. Reading the Republic left her feeling aggressive, and she opposed Plato, in letters to a friend, directly to Marx’ (ibid., p. 87).

However, she gradually began to see Plato as the philosopher relevant to the modern age, owing to the similarity of the periods, both being times of‘critical breakdown’ (ibid., p. 561). Both periods she regards as times when traditional sources of moral authority have broken down and new sources not yet been found. Therefore, for her, ‘Plato is the philosopher – the religious thinker . . . – to whom we must turn’ (Kerr, 1997, p. 68). As

Tracy comments, ‘there is something both strange and courageous in Iris Murdoch’s decision to develop a form of Platonism in the late twentieth century’ (Tracy, 1996, p. 54). Yet, having considered the available possibilities she found in her contemporaries, eventually Murdoch concluded that only in Plato could she find the varied picture of human being which she sought. Thus she describes Plato as ‘not only the father of our philosophy, he is our best philosopher’ (Murdoch, 1997 [1978], p. 6).

Plato’s influence on Murdoch cannot be overestimated, from her 1970s work, Sovereignty of Good, to her last great work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Like Plato, she is a moral realist with the good at the centre of her philosophical world, and the myth of the Cave, taken from Plato’s Republic, provides the metaphor by which the human condition and the moral life can be understood. At times it has been questioned whether Murdoch’s reading of Plato is accurate, and she did make Plato ‘her own’: ‘Iris and Plato’s voices increasingly become a single indistinguishable composite intellect’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 547). Certainly Murdoch is familiar and ‘at home’ with Plato in a remarkable way, yet she recognizes this and states that ‘I am aware of the danger of inventing my own Plato and extracting a particular pattern from his many-patterned text to reassure myself that, as I see it, good really is good and real is really real’ (Murdoch, 1992, pp. 510–11).

At the very least Murdoch’s use of Plato is selective; she is interested in his moral philosophy alone. Yet, whatever else, she is undoubtedly a Platonist, affected by Plato’s vision, and any criticism concerning her interpretation of Plato derives from her almost complete identification with his vision as she tries to reinterpret it for the twentieth

century. Whatever her failings, she has communicated a vision, and certainly a Platonic vision, as Taylor comments: ‘there are old tracks; they appear on maps which have been handed down to us. But when you get in there, it is hard to find them. So we need people to make new trails. That is, in effect, what Iris Murdoch has done’ (Taylor, 1996)

Yet, despite her major influence which inspired others (now extremely influential thinkers in their own right), Murdoch’s own philosophy is too little known. For example, although thinkers she inspired, such as MacIntyre and Taylor, appear on almost every undergraduate moral philosophy reading list, one rarely finds Murdoch at postgraduate, still less undergraduate, level. There are a number of reasons that help to explain this absence. First, Murdoch was very much outside the mainstream of the philosophies of her contemporaries and, second, her philosophy is not always the easiest to read and interpret. Murdoch’s focus on the good life and her interest in religion and art marked her out as very different from the analytical philosophers which dominated not only Oxford, but philosophy in general at that time.

The individual, the self and the inner life are all concepts which are fundamental to Murdoch’s philosophy, but which are regarded with suspicion in the philosophy of Murdoch’s contemporaries. This in itself separates Murdoch’s philosophy from that of her contemporaries. However, when one considers that Murdoch’s interests broaden from this somewhat dubious starting-point into issues from which post-Enlightenment philosophy has shied away and even denied to be part of philosophy (such as the good life, the concept of the good and religion) it is easy to see why Murdoch has so often been disregarded. She was so frustrated with the narrowness of contemporary philosophy that she was described as being ‘at war with the desiccation, the detailed casuistry, of contemporary philosophy’ (Conradi, 2001, p. 304).

The unusual topics of Murdoch’s philosophy, which many would regard as not ‘proper’ philosophy at all, but moving into areas of theology and even psychology, have meant

that she has been less studied than she would have been if she had focused upon more usual philosophical issues.

In addition, her eclectic style of argument presents problems, as Murdoch’s arguments range over such vast literary and philosophical arenas. She expects the reader to know the works and arguments of philosophers from the pre-Socratics to Derrida, and to be familiar with the canon of Western literature, from Dante to the existentialist novels of her contemporaries, as well as to have some awareness of theology, art and world religions. Moreover, not only does she expect the reader to have a knowledge of these diverse thinkers, books and perspectives, but she also moves between genres and examples, swiftly and without explanation. It is not an exaggeration to say that Murdoch

is quite capable of moving from Plato, to Kant, to Wittgenstein, with references to Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf in the space of a few paragraphs.

All of which makes Murdoch a difficult philosopher to read.

One can ask whether her mystical practices do not derive their own steadily decreasing vitality from the religious symbols and practices from which they derive their original inspiration. One can also ask whether her account of the Good can make sense of her own practice. In a revealing habit, Murdoch moves back and forth between a Platonic notion of the Good as an impersonal power of attraction and a more Augustinian and Psalmist conception of the Good as a personal voice that beckons alluringly. The Good is not just, as Murdoch puts it, a magnetic centre to which we are drawn; it is also a gift, or rather, it is the source of and beyond every gift we receive, the Giver of every good and perfect gift. A Giver of Gifts is not part of Murdoch’s philosophy of the Good. She repudiates the notion that there is some point to the universe independent of it, some transcendent telos that would give meaning to finite, contingent acts and lives. Instead, she acknowledges the sheer pointlessness of virtue. Commenting on Murdoch’s position here, Stanley Hauerwas urges that the Christian task is to “see the contingent as ‘gift’ whose purpose is to praise the creator. Such a task does not mean the otherness of the contingent is obliterated by its place in a larger purpose, but that its contingency can be enjoyed because God so enjoys God’s creation.” This, Hauerwas continues, is a telos of hope that gives us the confidence to believe that we are not fated by our collective or individual pasts. We know that we cannot avoid being creatures of history, but that way of putting the matter presumes we should desire, if possible, an alternative. Such a desire cannot help but appear to the Christian as a sinful attempt to escape our creatureliness. Our only alternative is not a salvation that mystically frees us from history, from our past, but rather an alternative history made possible by a community of people across time who maintain a memory of God’s hope for us and for the world.

An appreciation of the encounter with the Good in and through the contingencies of

temporal life is prominent in Murdoch . The final words, both of the film Iris and of Murdoch’s most ambitious philosophical book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,

reiterate her sense of our need, the human need, for the divine, but without recourse to God or revealed religion. In words that unintentionally expose the weakest point in her philosophy of the good, she concludes:

Whither shall I go from thy spirit, whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I

ascend into heaven, thou art there, if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even

there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

MORALITY IN “THE SEA,THE SEA”

Iris Murdoch, the dame of British fiction, published more than 20 novels between 1954 and 1987. A unique writer who ignored commercial appeal, she created a fictional world completely her own. Masterfully, her works engage our intelligence and imagination, not just our curiosity. She uses intricately developed plots and complex relationships among her characters to examine the emotional, spiritual an intellectual pursuits of well-educated, upper-class Britons. Though her fiction is primarily realistic, many of her novels contain metaphysical events that underscore her ambitious themes. While granting that novels should reflect life, Murdoch believed that life should be like her novels – intellectually adventurous and morally serious.

Added to her remarkable talent for faultless observation of settings and people is her gift for weaving themes of substance into the very texture of her novels. Murdoch’s writing sheds light on the nature of morality; on love in its many guises; on fantasy vs. reality; and on the fallibility of memory. In The Sea, the Sea she illuminates the theme of jealousy. Her novels often feature two main characters who act as foils to each other, the saint and the artist. She consistently offers readers ideas about human power and manipulation as well as about the impossibility of one person ever really knowing another.

The Sea, the Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978, is about a man who never grew up, a man fixated on an adolescent romance. It is the self-told story of Charles Arrowby, a prominent London theater director who at age 63 retires from the limelight and moves to a remote house on the sea called Shruff End. There he attempts to write his memoirs. Murdoch filters the novel through Charles’s consciousness, a device that results in an impressive immediacy. From the start we understand that Charles is an attractive man, worldly, articulate and witty. He is full of theater gossip and London stories, and he never equivocates about his likes and dislikes. And from the start we understand that Charles is a manipulator who busily interferes with the lives of his acquaintances.

As the novel opens in early summer, traces of gothic melodrama help set the tone. Charles is terrified when a mirror in his hall shatters without provocation; when a valuable vase, for no reason, crashes to the floor from its pedestal, splintering into a thousand pieces; and when at different times he sees a sea monster and a dim ghost.

Somewhat arbitrarily, Charles has decided that he would like to resume an affair with ex-actress Lizzie Scherer, one of his countless former mistresses. Charles never married, preferring the magic of assignations and rendezvous and the exciting drama of break-ups to the tedium of marriage. It would not be an exaggeration to label him “sexually promiscuous.” But Lizzie is living happily, if unusually, with Gilbert Opian, an elderly, gay actor who is also a friend of Charles’s. Charles has almost convinced Lizzie to leave Gilbert for him when he discovers that Hartley, his first real love, a woman he had dated for years some 45 years ago, is residing in the tiny village near Shruff End. Promptly forgetting Lizzie, Charles becomes romantically obsessed with Hartley and endeavors to rescue her from her long-standing marriage to Ben Fitch, a retired fire-extinguisher salesman whom Charles perceives as a bully.

In his memoir, which becomes more of a diary, Charles relates that several times he has glimpsed a woman he recognizes as Hartley. He writes: “I saw a stout elderly woman in a shapeless brown tent-like dress, holding a shopping bag and working her way, very slowly…along the street. This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes.” A vision from the past of a “slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs” hovered in his mind. He relates that as soon as he saw her that “old, wicked, possessive urge jumped inside me for joy.”

Indeed, his further physical description of Hartley makes us question his obsession all the more. He tells us that her face is “haggard and curiously soft and dry…There were magisterial horizontal lines upon the forehead and long darkish hairs above the mouth. She was wearing a moist red lipstick and face powder which had caked here and there. Her hair was grey and neat and conventionally waved.”

The contrast between the force of Charles’s love and its object is striking. At first we are led to believe that the frail, unattractive Hartley might still love him, but we gradually understand that she does not, although he arouses other emotions in her – guilt and pity for sure. Hartley is no longer sure exactly why she broke up with Charles, but she does remember that she found him “sort of bossy” and that she did not want her boyfriend mixed up with the theater. Reminiscing, Charles recalls, “I craved glitter, movement, acrobatics, noise.”

As one plot twist prompts another, Hartley’s adopted 18-year-old son, Titus, arrives on Charles’s door step. Titus has not seen Hartley and Ben for two years. By this time there is an assortment of houseguests at Shruff End – all Charles’s former theater associates from London. With this colorful group under his roof, Charles uses the presence of Titus to lure Hartley to Shruff End where, in effect, he holds her hostage in an upstairs windowless room. Now and then Hartley has outbursts of resentment. At times she weeps uncontrollably. “The tears of age,” Murdoch wisely writes, “are not the tears of youth.” Charles unkindly demands, “Stop crying, Hartley. You look like the pig-baby in Alice [andWonderland.]”

Most of the novel’s middle section is devoted to his fruitless attempts to convince the timid and tentative Hartley to leave her husband, of whom Charles is absurdly jealous. He fills his memoir with thoughts about “the raging bitterness of jealousy” that infects him. Murdoch voices her insights on the subject through her protagonist’s memoir: “Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there; like a blackness in the eye it discolors the world.”
Charles hopes that Hartley has married an insignificant little man, “But Fitch,” he admits, “was somehow, I could not think why, not insignificant.”

Another person who shows up unexpectedly at Charles’s seaside home is not from the world of theater. Indeed, he could well be from another planet. It is Charles’s cousin James, Murdoch’s signature saint. Charles is, of course, her artist. James is a recently-retired army general in his 60s who spent many years in Tibet. Murdoch endows James, a practicing Buddhist, with a mysterious, even supernatural aura. At the end of the novel, when James dies alone in his exotic London flat, Charles theatrically (and incorrectly) fantasizes that he is really not dead, that he has gone underground as a British spy in the East. James’s presence calms and cheers not only Charles, but also Titus and the other houseguests. In fact he is for them “a center of magnetic attraction.”

In the hands of any other novelist the character of James Arrowby would be implausible. In Murdoch land, however, he is entirely credible. As Murdoch scholar Peter Conradi points out, James is comically shocked occasionally that his cousin has never heard of gannets, cannot distinguish a shag from a cormorant, and has failed to notice a guillemot-covered rock. James displays throughout a talent for sharp perception, memory and discrimination, for which ornithology stands as an emblem. “Obsession,” Conradi notes succinctly, “narrows Charles’s focus; virtue widens James’s.”

Murdoch has created in James an eccentric character. She drops hints of his supernatural powers. For example, when Charles, on one of his rare trips back to London, unexpectedly spots James at an art gallery, James’s appearance is heralded by a sound resembling the wooden clappers used on the Japanese Noh stage to increase suspense or announce doom. The realistic hammering of nearby workmen quickly snaps Charles out of his fantasy. And James’s rescue of Charles from Minn’s Cauldron, a lethally enclosed deep whirlpool with steep and polished 20 feet sides, is unmistakably metaphysical. James makes use of his two sets of prehensile toes to cling to the chasm. His powers of levitation allow him to counter the centrifugal force as he pulls Charles up and out.

Fittingly for a “saint,” it is James who persuades Charles to return Hartley to her home. With Peregrine, one of Charles’s peculiar, former-actor houseguests and a menacing figure, at the wheel of his white Alpha Romeo, Hartley, accompanied by a stressed and somber Charles, as well as James and Gilbert, is driven back to her tawdry bungalow. Hartley’s release to her husband fails to dampen Charles’s passion for her.

Illustrating Charles’s skewed self-regard is the letter that he writes to Hartley the day after he returns her to Ben Fitch: “My dearest Hartley, my darling, I love you and I want you to come to me…But first there are things which I must tell you, things which I must explain. The chance which has brought you back to me has come like a storm into my life…It may seem to you that I belong to some other world, to some ‘great world’ of which you know nothing, and that I must have in that world many friends, many relationships. It is not so. In many ways my life in the theater now seems like a dream, the old days with you the only reality… Will you not come, will you not escape to me, to be with me inseparably for the years that remain?

He goes on to reassure her that if he thought that she had even a moderately contented life, he would not meddle, but “gaze at you from afar and turn away.”

It takes the Fitchs’ speedy, furtive and dramatic move to Australia to finally squelch Charles’s obsession. Charles writes that Ben is mentally undistinguished, without wit or “spiritual sweetness.” He describes him unfairly as “a shut-in with no sense of the joy of life.” Later he characterizes Ben as “ugly, charmless, brutal and dull.” To be sure, Charles’s perception of Ben is pure fantasy. The reality is that Ben is a man with whom Hartley is content – content enough to emigrate with him.

Two disasters befall him soon after he releases Hartley, disasters that comprise the novel’s climax. Describing the first mishap as “a primal experience of total loss of hope,” Charles portrays the late midsummer evening in which he narrowly escapes death: “I reached the bridge over Minn’s Cauldron and paused there…to look down into the smooth pit where the waves of the incoming tide were lashing themselves in a foaming self-destructive fury…I looked down and it was like looking into a deep, dark-green glass. And then – suddenly – somebody came up behind me and pushed me in.”

Just days after Charles’s near murder Titus drowns in the sea. A group of tourists swimming from the rocks in a bay near Shruff End, seeing his lifeless form being carried out by the waves, swims out and pulls his body ashore.
As the finality of Hartley’s departure sinks in Charles replaces her in his mind with thoughts of a deceased former mistress named Clement Mankin. We are prepared for his reflections because he has referred to Clement affectionately from the outset of his memoir. A celebrity in the London theater world, Clement was twice Charles’s age. Their affair occurred soon after Hartley broke up with him, when Charles was in his twenties and Clement in her forties. In musing about his time with Clement, he decides that his relationship with her was his main achievement in life. Clement suffered from a painful and fatal disease and died in Charles’s arms. He tells us that it was Clement who dominated his life and “about whom this book should be written.”
Following the death of Titus and the vanishing of Hartley, Charles has no stomach for Shruff End. He returns to London, takes up with former acquaintances and seriously contemplates an affair with an 18-year-old girl.

To be sure, on one level Charles is a cad, but undeniably Murdoch has constructed a complex protagonist, one with strong and intelligent aesthetic sensibilities. She writes breathtakingly beautiful seascapes that accurately sketch the look of the sea as it changes moment by moment. By presenting these descriptions through Charles’s perception, she is, of course, endowing him with an appealing aspect. Consequently Murdoch’s descriptive powers contribute to her delineation of character.

Near the end of the novel Charles details his walk along the coast to the nearby Raven Hotel; “It was a warm cloudy day and a little wind was tossing bits of white foam off the many-capped wavelets in Raven Bay. The sea was in a restless fussy mood, dark blue in color, that grim cold northern blue which even in summertime can convey a wintry menace. The sky too had its northern look, a pallid cool blue between compact and very white fast moving clouds. The sunlight came and went as I walked along the familiar road, and the big round boulders of the bay leapt out into a surprising variety of grotesque stony shapes, pitted with shadows and blotched with old seaweed stains and eyes of brilliant yellow lichen, then quietly faded again as the light was dipped.”

On Charles’s final night at Shruff End he sleeps outdoors in his yard, on the wet, dewy ground high above the sea. In the morning as he shakes and folds his blankets he hears a sound coming from the water, “a sudden and quite loud splashing, as if something just below the rock were about to emerge, and crawl out perhaps onto the land.” He writes: “I had a moment of sheer fear as I turned and leaned towards the sea edge. Then I saw below me, their wet doggy faces looking curiously upward, four seals, swimming so close to the rock that I could almost touch them. I looked down at their pointed noses only a few feet below, their dripping whiskers, their bright inquisitive round eyes, and the lithe and glossy grace of their wet backs. They curved and played a while, gulping and gurgling a little, looking up at me all the time. And as I watched their play I could not doubt that they were beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me.”

This was Charles’s first sighting of the seals, although all his houseguests had had the good fortune of seeing them. More conventional novels depict a protagonist’s moral transformation through the operation of the plot and the interactions of the characters. While Charles’s observation of such a pleasant natural occurrence has no moral implications, it marks a transformation of a different kind.

A man basically miserable for the duration of a summer becomes a happy man.

Displaying her penchant for intellectual adventure, Murdoch sprinkles her text with delightful allusions to Helen of Troy and Shakespeare. More importantly, she underpins The Sea, the Sea with a marvelous dramatic irony. From the start readers pick up on the fact that Hartley was never really the defining person in Charles’s life. She was never more than his teen-age sweetheart. Murdoch has created the quintessential solipsistic, and therefore unreliable, narrator. She employs her protagonist’s late-life, jealous delusion as the organizing principle of her novel. Also, impressively underpinning the plot and giving the book unity is the consistent alternation between what happens and how it feels to the characters–action alternating with reaction.
Murdoch wrote seven more novels after The Sea, the Sea, each characteristically preoccupied with the moral realm. None was as good. None sold as well.

Iris Murdoch presents The Sea, the Sea to us in the form of a journal. The author, Charles Arrowby, is one of those lonely, socially upward men that lately J.M. Coetzee has excelled in describing; he is a somewhat famous actor and director who has retired to a creaky old house on a rocky promontory next to the sea. He tells us that he had decided to get away from London life once and for all, and to simply watch what remains of his life unwind before him. (Arrowby’s friends have their doubts that he can do it.)

He also has vague ambitions to write a memoir, but his jottings start out unserious. For about 50 pages he muddles around, discussing his difficulties climbing out of the water and onto the steep, tide-battered rocks, the physical attributes of his new home and its environs, and his mother and father. In this section, Murdoch is admirably true to the journal form that she has selected. Rather than jump into a narrative, she gracefully dangles a few questions before us (most notably, an actress hopelessly in love with Arrowby and some mysterious, idolized love from his youth) while giving her narrator enough room to thrash around and become bored. A lovely example of this comes near the beginning, when Arrowby sets out to describe his new home, but then gets entangled in ramblings on his culinary preferences:

It gradually became clear to me that guzzling large quantities of expensive, pretentious, often mediocre food in public places was not only immoral, unhealthy and unaesthetic, but also unpleasurable. Later my guests were offered simple chez moi. What is more delicious than fresh hot buttered toast, with or without the addition of bloater paste? Or plain boiled onions with a little corned beef if desired? And well-made porridge with brown sugar and cream is a dish fit for a king. Even then some people, so sadly corrupt was their taste, took my intelligent hedonism for an affected eccentricity, a mere gimmick.These unformed, early sections connote the drift of Arrowby’s life and feel true to a retired man who has suddenly found the urge to write about himself. They make clear that Murdoch has done more than simply frame her book as a journal; she is dedicated to miming the look and feel of such an artifact and exploring how the people who write journals interact with them and how the form shapes whatever narratives they contain. Importantly, these early sections present Arrowby to us without the life baggage that we will soon find out about—we are given a chance to get comfortable with Arrowby as a somewhat particular but nonetheless enjoyable man before Murdoch unleashes certain facts that will put him into a much darker light. The passages where he goes on about the virtues of simple cooking are almost cute, as is Arrowby’s awareness that all his friends gently mock him for being so particular. It’s important that Murdoch start out by presenting Arrowby like this, because as The Sea, the Sea progresses our tolerance for Arrowby is significantly tested; in my reading, without this initial getting-to-know-you my tolerance for the narrator would have been broken.

Inevitably (this is, after all, a novel) Arrowby’s journal becomes a chronicle of the new course he sets his life on. It’s not long before he receives a letter from Lizzie, an actress slightly younger than him whom he has been stringing along for some time now. It turns out that at some point before the story begins Arrowby tugged the string a bit with a letter to her. Two important things are revealed when Arrowby gets the letter—first, he is far more interested in seeing it than he’d like us to believe, and secondly, Lizzie’s letter is significant because it offers (after nearly 50 pages) our first view of Arrowby from the outside.

In her letter, Lizzie bares her struggles to silence her love for Arrowby, and we can be quite confident our aging actor disdains her outpouring as gushy and feminine even as his ego is massaged by her clear need for him. Lizzie also says a number of things that Arrowby has never implied about himself; notably, she paints him as a womanizer, at one point declaring “you know you can’t keep your hands off women,” which conflicts sharply with Arrowby’s own claim that he has always treated the other sex fairly and is an “unsexed” individual.

Unreliable narrators are of course to be expected in the first-person and even more so in a book like The Sea, the Sea since it comprises a written account that is subject to whatever Arrowby’s sizable ego and fragile memory can do to muddy the waters. Nonetheless, Lizzie’s letter brings up just how crucial unreliable narration is to the fabric of Murdoch’s story. Up to this point Arrowby has alluded rather romantically and deterministically to a first love named Hartley who he idolizes as his only true love. He tells us that when he lost Hartley, all his future chances at happiness in a loving relationship were destroyed as well. He has a number of other women, but they are all sham relationships compared to the incandescence of his love for Hartley.

Shortly after Lizzie’s letter, Arrowby tells us the full story: after several years of an adolescent relationship, this love ended when, at 18, Arrowby was left by Hartley for no apparent reason. Not long after Arrowby makes this admission, he dramatically discovers that by moving to his present home by the sea, he has unwittingly moved virtually next door to Hartley—and her husband of many years.

What occurs next, and what makes up the bulk of The Sea, the Sea is a protracted, slightly bizarre, attempt by Arrowby to break up the marriage and draw Hartley back. Arrowby’s justification relies in large part on his belief that he has proven that Hartley’s husband is a tyrant who keeps her locked into an abrasive, failed marriage. Once again unreliable narration becomes crucial. Though we only know the marriage based on what Arrowby—who has a well-known weakness for jealousy—chooses to tell us, it is nonetheless necessary that we decide the truth about Hartley’s marriage and determine our sympathy for Arrowby’s subsequent actions. How much of Arrowby’s harassment is permitted by the unhappy marriage justification? Do we believe that Arrowby has included everything he knows in his narrative (which is being written as it unfolds)? Has he accurately represented the marriage? Can he even know the full truth about it? These questions are crucial, as they mean the difference between a protagonist as home-wrecker and one who is somewhat justified, although still on shaky moral ground.

For much of this story, our lack of knowledge is paralleled by Arrowby’s. Jealous egotist that he is, he does at times question whether his manner of stealing Hartley is justified and whether he even knows the truth about Hartley’s marriage. Certainly he is working with limited information: Hartley gives him precious few details about her own life; moreover, she steadfastly (but in a manner that perhaps implies domination by her husband) refuses to leave her marriage.

Here is the crux of The Sea, the Sea: Does Arrowby’s imperfect information plus his pre-existing weakness for leaping to conclusions let us conclude that he’s a fundamentally decent person whom we are seeing at his absolute worst? Or, is Arrowby simply a malignant old man trying to steal someone else’s happiness?

Regardless of where one comes down on this question, it is true that Arrowby will test a reader’s sympathy. He is certainly one of the more disagreeable narrators I’ve read of late, and one of the challenges that Murdoch has as a novelist is staying true to Arrowby in all his distastefulness while leaving enough room for us to like him and keep him on as a narrator. (At one point, despite Murdoch’s lovely prose and engaging plot twists, I was on the brink of putting the book down and forever concluding my relationship with Arrowby.)

There’s also the fact that The Sea, the Sea is more tragedy than comedy. In a burlesque we might simply laugh at Arrowby and not care how scummy he is, but here Arrowby’s life is set as tragic. We have to care enough about him that his suffering is poignant, otherwise Arrowby’s story is simply ugly. I think that in the end Arrowby just barely remains sympathetic through the worst he can show us, and after that nadir he manages to sufficiently redeem himself to let us like him in a certain manner and let Murdoch conclude the novel.

In a way, The Sea, the Sea is simply “about” deciding whether or not we like Charles Arrowby and watching Murdoch keep us off balance long enough that we get to find out, but in another way this novel is a thorough explanation of the way love perverts one’s life.

In her letter to Arrowby, Lizzie tells him that after a difficult personal struggle she has finally managed to quiet her love for him. She is deeply afraid of letting that love rise again and begs Arrowby not to impose himself on her. She knows that it will waken “forces which I commanded to sleep.” Yet, she can’t simply leave Arrowby alone: she hopes that they can “love each other, but not in a way that would destroy me.”

The obvious irony here is that the old cad Arrowby gets a dose of his own medicine when his love for Hartley is awakened and almost destroys him, but I think in her exploration of love Murdoch is after more here than this simple demonstration of the Golden Rule. Arrowby’s and Lizzie’s stories have one important difference: whereas Lizzie’s entrapment is designed and provoked by Arrowby, Arrowby’s own entrapment comes about by an astonishing coincidence: he happens to move right next door to Hartley. This is so amazing that, in fact, it strains credulity. How could it be that Arrowby, who searched in vain for Hartley for years after she left him, would just happen to move next door to her late in life? Is it coincidence or fate? Much in The Sea, the Sea points toward the latter.

Throughout this novel there is a strong current of mysticism, although it is a very skeptical mysticism, one that is always quickly, but not convincingly, discounted. Early in the story, Arrowby records that he becomes terrified when he sees coil up out of the sea a horrible monster that looks like a giant, 30-foot eel. Eventually he puts it down to a flashback occasioned by his use of LSD once when he was younger, but the impression of something else remains. (Moreover, there is later evidence that the creature may exist.) Later, Arrowby is half-convinced there’s a poltergeist in his home when items start mysteriously breaking, but this turns out to be an old flame entertaining herself with a bit of playful malarkey.

As these instances of something otherworldly slowly pile up like parts of some neo-Gothic novel, Arrowby’s older cousin James arrives at the house to bring the greatest mystical heft into the novel. James has spent a great deal of his live traveling through Tibet while in the military; a Buddhist, he is deeply enmeshed in the ancient religious traditions he discovered there (his collection of artifacts is coveted by English museums), and yet he also says that things like the Indian rope trick or being able to change body temperature by force of will are simple “tricks” that anyone can learn. At one point the sea almost claims Arrowby’s life—it is James who saves him, and Arrowby’s clouded memory of the event leaves open the possibility that James utilized some sort of supernatural intervention.

Seen in the light of all these instances of possible mysticism, one can choose to believe that the amazing coincidence of Arrowby moving next door to Hartley is yet another one of these ambiguous brushes with the mystical. It’s possible that what appears to be a clunky coincidence—the one flaw in an otherwise marvelously structured novel—is in fact quite purposeful. Perhaps in making Arrowby’s rediscovery of Hartley inexplicable, The Sea, the Sea is telling us that there are certain things about love that we simply can’t know. The novel may be positing love as a force with its own logic, a logic of which we only see a small part, just as we only see a limited part of the mind that comprises Arrowby.

In addition to telling Arrowby about the Indian rope trick and Tibetan mysticism, James also tells him about bardo, a sort of otherworldly holding pen for souls in between their trips on the wheel of life. It’s pretty explicitly stated that Arrowby’s life in between leaving London and re-discovering Hartley is a sort of earthly version of bardo, one that applies to lovers in between trips on the “wheel of love.”

In other words, when we find Arrowby at the start of The Sea, the Sea, he is in a lonely, painful sort of place that he is destined to eventually be released from. This isn’t the only indication of bardo in The Sea, the Sea. At the novel’s end, after a short period of quiet solitude after Hartley, there’s some indication that Arrowby will again take another ill-fated venture on the wheel of love. Also, over the course of the narrative a number of other of Arrowby’s friends (the most obvious of whom is Lizzie) all travel along their own arcs, falling in and out of love

If one takes the parallel between the wheel of life and the wheel of love seriously, then this is further evidence that something is manipulating Arrowby’s love behind the scenes. Perhaps it is something mystical, but perhaps it is simply the unseen logic of a world too complicated for any one person to comprehend. All the arcs of love that occur throughout The Sea, the Sea are linked; all are dependent for their own completion on the actions that other people make while completing their own circuits. In that light, there is the possibility that the coincidence that brings together Hartley and Arrowby is mystical or earthly. In this beautiful, richly complex novel, Murdoch leaves open the possibility for either or both, but I wouldn’t say she leaves open the possibility for neither.

SEXUALITY IN “ A FAIRLY HOORABLE DEFEAT”

Just as she wrote The Bell in the midst of the public debate surrounding homosexuality in the late 1950s, Murdoch again used her fiction to ruminate upon the major political and social changes affecting the lives of homosexuals in Great Britain in the late 1960s. The Wolfenden Committee ultimately failed to bring about legislative change concerning homosexual offenses, and the public controversy about the decriminalization of private

homosexual acts persisted throughout the 1960s. However, the return of a Labour government in 1964 opened up avenues for political change. Private sexual acts between men over age twenty-one were decriminalized in Great Britain upon the passage

of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. This legislative reform precipitated the Gay Liberation Movement, which ostensibly acted as a catalyst for political and social change for homosexuals.

In spite of this apparent progress, social judgments and misconceptions still surrounded homosexuality at this time. The outrageous sexual freedoms of the 1960s belied a developing counterculture that was ‘‘extremely puritanical, especially towards ‘queers’ and other sexual ‘deviants.’ ’’ Both the pro-reform and anti-reform sides of Parliament, the Church of England, doctors and psychiatrists ‘‘agreed on two things: first, the importance of relegitimizing the law, and second, that homosexuality was not a good thing.’’ As Weeks points out, because the law ceased to be the guardian of private morality, many believed that it would be able to control public decency and order more

effectively.

Thus, countervailing public opinions on the subject of homosexuality continued to exist throughout the 1960s.

Mary McIntosh published ‘‘The Homosexual Role,’’ the seminal article on the social construction of homosexuality, in 1968. In this work, McIntosh analyzes the societal phenomena affecting the lives of homosexuals in the 1960s, particularly the manner

in which society’s expectations of the homosexual ‘‘constructed’’ the homosexual role. Since Murdoch finished writing A Fairly Honourable Defeat in 1968, this work of fiction is contemporaneous with McIntosh’s article and should reflect the same social phenomena discussed in ‘‘A Homosexual Role.’’ In this section, therefore, I shall first investigate the similarities between the social construction of homosexuality in McIntosh’s article and the characterization of the homosexual in Murdoch’s novel. Having established that Murdoch’s fiction is alialigned with McIntosh’s social constructionism, I shall conclude by discussing additional parallels between the novelist’s work and those of more recent social constructionists.

Although Murdoch’s fiction has been praised for its realism, it has been noted that A Fairly Honourable Defeat is more than a realistic novel. Dipple states that this work is a ‘‘commentary on good and evil’’ written with a high level of psychological verisimilitude.

‘‘Murdoch had solved her formal problem (how to create a realism which does not underestimate the world’s darkness and unintelligibility) and her moral problem (how to show human beings as possessing real, limited subjective freedom . . .).’’

While subjectivity will be explored later this section will continue to focus on what Murdoch saw as the social and moral inappropriateness that inheres in judging others

solely on the basis of outer, public behavior. As in The Bell, her philosophical views and aesthetic technique shape her realistic representation of the social forces that have an impact upon the life of the male homosexual in this novel. Murdoch’s realism brings her characters to life, especially two of the primary characters in this work, Axel Nilsson and Simon Foster, a homosexual couple. Conradi has commented on this aspect of the novel, stating that ‘‘the depiction of a happy homosexual relationship between Simon and Axel is itself a small triumph.’’ David J. Gordon claims that ‘‘the homosexual marriage

of Simon and Axel was an extraordinary novelistic achievement in 1970. Similarly, Cheryl Bove asserts that ‘‘Murdoch sensitively establishes Simon and Axel as a believable, worthy, and normal couple.’’ In consolidating these viewpoints, I would add that Murdoch’s characterization of Axel and Simon is believable and normal because it effectively illustrates the social pressures facing male homosexuals during this era. It is triumphant, extraordinary, and worthy since it also attempts to challenge on a moral level certain of these social prejudices about homosexual men.

Murdoch begins to explore these social pressures in the first few pages of the novel in her depiction of a conversation between Hilda and Rupert Foster, Simon’s sister-in-law and brother—a scene that Dipple describes as ‘‘a flawless reproduction of social dialogue.’’ McIntosh asserts that in order to determine whether one is ‘‘afflicted’’ with the ‘‘condition’’ of homosexuality, certain members of society often spend time ‘‘puzzling over the question of how to tell whether someone is ‘really’ homosexual or not.’’

Murdoch illustrates that speculations about others’ sexualities are inherent in the preoccupation with determining how to discern whether one is really homosexual.

Simon and those closest to him portray the way in which members of society query the authenticity of others’ sexualities and, in particular, demonstrate that this speculation often comes from the homosexual’s family and friends. The speculation over the authenticity of Simon’s sexuality occurs as Hilda asks Rupert, ‘‘Do you think Simon is really homosexual?’’ (FHD,7).

Murdoch shows that the impulse toward speculation is so powerful that even partners or close friends can succumb to the temptation to question the homosexual. Axel, Simon’s partner, ‘‘wondered whether Simon might not really be heterosexual after all’’ (FHD, 139). Morgan, Hilda’s sister and Simon’s close friend, also tells Simon that Rupert ‘‘might have known that you were queer. . . . That is, if you are queer, dearest Simon’’ (FHD,176).

Speculations about another’s sexuality may arise because of the appearance of the homosexual, based on the underlying assumption that one can discern homosexuality from an individual’s countenance, demeanor, or physical attributes. Marjorie

Garber explains society’s urge for this assumption: ‘‘Culture . . . is saying to itself: if there is a difference (between gay and straight) we want to be able to see it, . . . to tell the difference.’’

Murdoch illustrates this notion of ‘‘queer appearance,’’ showing that the homosexual may be aware of and participate in it. After considering Morgan’s query regarding the authenticity of his homosexuality, Simon replies, ‘‘I won’t ask you if you think I look it. I know I look it’’ (FHD, 176).

Members of the public may also express opprobrium about the homosexual’s appearance. When Simon witnesses an altercation in a Chinese restaurant, the victim’s assailants taunt him:

‘‘Look who’s here, . . . a fucking queer. Listen to his squeaky little voice. Want those pretty looks spoilt mister? . . . We don’t like pooves’’ (FHD, 214).

These epithets accurately express certain public sentiments toward homosexual men during this era. First, the use of the word ‘‘queer’’ articulates the pejorative connotations

of homosexuality since, prior to the culmination of the Gay Liberation Movement in the late 1970s, ‘‘queer’’ was the universally used word to describe homosexuals derogatorily.

The use of the ubiquitous sexual swear word intensifies the pejorative use of the word ‘‘queer’’ and serves to underscore the ‘‘deviant’’ sexual connotations associated with homosexuality. Lastly, the disdain inherent in these epithets stems from the notion

of ‘‘queer appearance’’ because Simon’s feminine voice and appearance mark his body as ‘‘deviant’’ and therefore implicate him in this encounter as a homosexual.

The belief that male homosexuals could be identified by their feminine attributes was a common one throughout the twentieth century. These beliefs can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century, during which various sexologists promulgated the theory of gender ‘‘inversion’’ in homosexuals. Under the inversion model, homosexuality stemmed from the failure of men and women to possess the ‘‘proper’’ gender. Accordingly, male ‘‘inverts’’ were expected to be feminine, while female ‘‘inverts’’ were expected to be masculine. Explaining that these views remained intact in the late 1960s, McIntosh states that the predominant social expectation was that the male homosexual would be ‘‘effeminate in manner . . . [and] personality.’’

Since effeminacy is founded on the notion of a misappropriation of the feminine, the construct of femininity warrants further investigation at this juncture. Elaine Showalter asserts that the view of femininity during this era inhered in ‘‘a set of opinions, prejudices, tastes, and values’’ that served to oppress subordinate groups.

In The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Betty Friedan attempts to explode the ‘‘myth of femininity,’’ which she lamented as perpetuating this oppression throughout

the 1950s and 1960s. Friedan expounds on the then-common opinion that ‘‘feminine fulfillment’’ could be achieved through an interest in beauty and attention to the home. Weeks likewise points out that during the postwar period, femininity was associated with an interest in cosmetics, clothing, and interior decoration. Murdoch depicts Simon acting in accordance with society’s expectations of effeminacy at this time as he possesses these feminine traits. Gordon has also briefly noted that as ‘‘the younger, more feminine partner,’’ SimSimon’s characterization displays a measure of social stereotyping.

Simon has a preoccupation with his personal appearance and is concerned about his hair style and the fragrance he chooses to wear (FHD, 26). He also gives advice to others who he feels lack the appropriate dress sense. For example, he advises Morgan that

‘‘with a strongly patterned dress like that you shouldn’t wear any jewellery, darling. It just confuses the effect’’ (FHD, 173).

This dispensing of advice shows that Simon has no qualms about expressing his feminine expertise in matters relating to beauty. In addition, Simon’s primary avocations relate to domestic pursuits. He enjoys cooking and entertaining. Being a good cook, he delights in having dinner parties in the home he shares with Axel (FHD, 21). He also enjoys decorating the home and especially likes to have fresh flowers on display (FHD, 63).

This interest in domestic matters is often at odds with the financial matters involved in running the household, however. Friedan emphasizes that, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, financial concerns were generally viewed as the responsibility of men, who acted as the masculine breadwinners in the marital home. Axel, who has a responsible position in the governmental offices at Whitehall, has tried to explain to Simon numerous times the ‘‘balance of payments’’ process, one of the most important aspects of his job. In spite of these recurrent explanations, Simon fails to understand the ‘‘balance of payments’’

(FHD, 21). Simon’s failure to grasp this financial process aligns him with the feminine since an interest in finance was considered unfeminine during this epoch. The feminine individual could also encounter problems with the financial side of adorning the home since this avocation necessarily involves managing the amount of money spent on interior decoration. Femininity therefore could imply a lack of financial sense, perhaps to the

point of spending extravagantly. Simon likewise lacks the analytical skills necessary to budget his household expenditures.

After he purchases an expensive piece of Irish cut glass, Axel gently reproaches him: ‘‘Do be more prudent, my dear creature, we aren’t made of money’’ (FHD, 266).

Further, Axel’s comments demonstrate that he sometimes acts as an agent of control over Simon. McIntosh explains that the conception of ‘‘homosexuality as a condition . . . operate[s] as a form of social control in a society in which homosexuality is condemned.’’ Kenneth Plummer similarly argues that homosexual behavior can be imposed and reinforced by ‘‘control agents.’’ Axel is an agent of social control in regulating the impermissible feminine behavior that marks Simon as a homosexual.

Axel hates ‘‘the least suggestion of ‘camp’ ’’ (FHD, 27) and endeavors to ‘‘cure’’ Simon of his ‘‘damned tribal habits’’ (FHD, 62). While tolerating Simon’s effeminate habits when they are alone within the confines of their own home, Axel is loath for Simon to engage in feminine behaviors in the presence of others.

As Simon arranges flowers in the drawing room as they await Julius’s arrival, Axel laments ‘‘sometimes I think you have the taste of a suburban housewife’’ (FHD, 63). Axel now feels the necessity to police Simon’s feminine behavior because they will be entertaining a guest who can act as a witness to all that is impermissible and ‘‘deviant.’’ The comparison of Simon to a housewife reiterates a preoccupation with domestic concerns, which were considered feminine during this era.

Axel also attempts to police Simon’s behavior during their interactions in public. On their way to Hilda and Rupert’s party, Axel exclaims: ‘‘For God’s sake stop patting your hair, Simon.

. . . And I believe you’re wearing that ghastly after-shave lotion again. . . . Try to remember you’re male not female, will you?’’(FHD, 26). Axel thus unwittingly reinforces Simon’s femininity.

This reinforcement occurs through Axel’s attention—for although it is negative, it is nonetheless attention—to Simon’s public displays of femininity. McIntosh analyzes this cycle of reinforcement and asserts that the expectation of femininity can become a self-fulfilling prophecy since homosexuals, like Simon, play out their social roles based on this expectation.

Homosexuals may then become fixed in their ‘‘deviance’’ once society has conditioned and labeled them. The accolades that Simon receives from others reinforce

his feminine behavior, causing the expectation of effeminacy to become a self-fulfilling prophecy for him. At Axel’s birthday party, Julius comments: ‘‘He’s such a feminine person. All the little dainty touches in this room are obviously Simon’s work.

The cunning way those cushions are put, the graceful looping back of the curtains, the particular arrangement of the flowers, indeed the presence of the flowers. Am I not right? Simon provides the feminine touch’’ (FHD, 271–72). Although intended to embarrass Simon, these blandishments instead serve to highlight, and hence reinforce, the virtue of his feminine attention to the infinitesimal details that help to beautify the home. As a result of such social conditioning and reinforcement, these impermissible feminine habits may be exceptionally difficult for the homosexual to terminate. Likewise, ‘‘Simon did his best to change his ways and to drop what Axel referred to as ‘tribal habits.’

But sometimes he felt that the change was only superficial and he was almost being guilty of insincerity’’ (FHD, 27).

Bearing much resemblance to McIntosh’s coeval research on the social construction of homosexuality, Murdoch illustrates through the characterization of Simon in this novel the thencommon societal view that the homosexual would be effeminate min personality, manner, and appearance.

Homosexuals who possess the marker of effeminacy fulfill society’s expectations of the homosexual role. The fulfillment of this expectation operates as a further mechanism of social control since individuals can then be labeled as homosexual, and, therefore, ‘‘deviant.’’

Heightening the social controls over homosexuality, social labeling also segregates those who engage in ‘‘deviant’’ practices from other members of society.

As in The Bell, Murdoch appears to have anticipated in A Fairly Honourable Defeat certain social constructionist theories. Most significantly, the similarity of the characterization of Simon in this work to McIntosh’s theories supports the view that Murdoch’s work is aligned with social constructionism because McIntosh is commonly identified as one of the leading theorists in this field.

Murdoch also presages the work of other social constructionists who began their careers after McIntosh, namely Kenneth Plummer and Jeffrey Weeks. The research of

these social constructionists focuses on the manner in which societal interaction makes homosexuals feel guilty and anxious about their sexualities. Plummer asserts that the homosexual

‘‘must face . . . the doubts and anxieties, guilts and fears that one experiences as a consequence of knowing homosexuality to be ‘deviant.’ ’’ Similarly, Weeks maintains that ‘‘by the end of the 1960s there was a burgeoning of a more sophisticated homosexual

subculture than [during] the 1950s and earlier . . . but the legacy of guilt and necessary timidity was still present.’’

In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, guilt is also associated with homosexual ‘‘deviance.’’ Axel is ‘‘out’’ with his close friends, but he nevertheless guiltily berates himself and society: ‘‘He blamed the rottenness of a society which still looked askance at such a harmless and natural phenomenon. Sometimes he blamed himself for lacking the courage to be frank about his preferences’’(FHD, 158).73

Axel’s reluctance to ‘‘come out’’ also links Murdoch’s fiction with Plummer’s social constructionist account of homosexuality as an interactive process of social control, one in which an individual’s sexuality is correlated to the reactions of members of society. Under the social interactionist approach, homosexuals reevaluate their relationships to society after their disclosures.

This reevaluation may cause the homosexual to withdraw further from society, which Murdoch vividly illustrates in the conversation between Simon and Axel as they reconcile at the close of this novel. After Simon mentions that he would gain more confidence if they went out more together, Axel responds that his own failure to go out is ‘‘probably to do with being homosexual. We’re all a bit afraid of society’’ (FHD, 388). Although Simon and Axel are ‘‘out’’ to their close friends and do not experience closeting as profoundly as Michael in The Bell, they have experienced negative reactions to their relationship in the past. These reactions cause them to reevaluate their future behavior by limiting their interactions with society.

Homosexuals also fear negative repercussions in their careers or professions following disclosure. Sedgwick emphasizes that many homosexuals remain partially closeted for economic reasons.

Indeed, the problem of earning a living can be one of the most basic for the homosexual because of the connotations asso-ciated with his ‘‘deviance.’’ This is especially true when work penetrates other aspects of the homosexual’s life. Axel carefully evaluates the risks in ‘‘coming out’’ to Rupert, a member of his social circle, who is also a colleague at Whitehall. Fearing a possible leak that would impact negatively on his career as a civil servant, Axel is initially reluctant to reveal his homosexuality

to Rupert and other members of the Foster family. To allay these fears, Axel remains closeted to the entire Foster family when he begins to socialize with them. Simon, Rupert’s brother, comments on Axel’s behavior during the early days of their acquaintance:

‘‘Of course I hadn’t the faintest idea that he was

queer. I don’t think Rupert had either’’ (FHD, 176).

By later informing the reader that Rupert has also experienced and acted upon his own closeted same-sex desires, Murdoch illustrates the pervasiveness of homosexuality, as well as the impulse for remaining ‘‘in the closet’’ (FHD, 321). Yet, Axel, like everyone else in this social circle, is unaware of Rupert’s secret life. Axel manages to keep his homosexuality secret from the Fosters until he becomes romantically involved with Simon. Now partially ‘‘out of the closet,’’ Axel must employ a new mechanism

to manage the flow of communication between his social and professional spheres. In order to control the movement of information between various audiences, homosexuals may utilize the strategy of collusion, whereby ‘‘the discloser enters into an agreement with a person or persons to keep the information [about his sexuality] away from certain others.’

Murdoch illustrates the use of collusion, as well as the potential reactions of the colluding parties, in Simon and Axel’s semicloseted relationship.

During one of his parents’ many cocktail parties, Peter, Simon’s nephew, vehemently criticizes the tacit agreement that everyone remain silent about their relationship. Addressing Axel, Peter erupts: ‘‘You keep your relationship with Simon a dark secret, don’t you! Oh you let us know because we’re your so-called dear friends and we’re discreet. You can rely on us to tell lies on your behalf. But you’d die if everyone knew. You’d beashamed! . . . Why don’t you tell everyone in Whitehall that you live with another man? Are you afraid of losing your precious job?’’ (FHD, 119). Peter correctly asserts that Axel continues to remain closeted at work following his disclosure to Rupert and his other friends, implicitly expecting them to keep his secret.

Peter also properly intuits that Axel does this not only to protect his career interests, but also to avoid potential feelings of guilt and shame.

Murdoch commented that her novels ‘‘contain quite a lot of criticism of society. . . . I think there is a lot of social comment in my own work.’’ Bove points out that in this particular novel, ‘‘Murdoch intentionally makes a social statement in her portrayal of Axel and Simon.’’ Byatt has also noted that the author intended to make a moral statement in many of her novels and claims that Murdoch is successful in this endeavor because she draws both the reader and the characters though experiences which are at the center of morality.

To these excellent observations, I would add that the moral commentary which Murdoch intended to make in A Fairly Honourable Defeat is an implicit yet well crafted indictment of the social prejudices that continued to plague homosexuals during this era. In her 1964 article ‘‘The Moral Decision about Homosexuality,’’ she states, ‘‘It does not . . . seem to me that . . . there is anything inherently immoral about being a homosexual; . . . if there is an illness here it is our society at large that is ill, in the sense of prejudiced and morally blind’’ (MD, 5–6). She depicts these prejudices as Axel and Simon are sometimes afraid to appear in public as a couple because they fear adverse reactions

from society. Axel states that as a result of social attitudes about homosexuals, ‘‘There’s a tendency to hide. It’s bad’’ (FHD, 388). In making this comment, Murdoch subtly criticizes the social prejudices that force homosexuals to keep their sexual identities

private and hidden from society. Speaking through the voice of Axel, then, Murdoch clarifies her personal moral stance: that such social prejudices are morally ‘‘bad.’

In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Murdoch depicts the problems that continued to render problematic the homosexual’s public declarations of homosexuality throughout the 1960s. Showing that the homosexual can remain ‘‘in the closet’’ for social or economic reasons, she aligns her fiction with the view that homosexuality is socially constructed through the creation of the ‘‘homosexual role.’’ Finally, she illustrates her belief that society polices and controls homosexual behavior through its prevalent misjudgments and expectations of homosexual people, a social phenomenon that she personally considered to be morally reprehensible.

IV GENDER MISREPRESENTATION IN THE NOVELS MENTIONED ABOVE

In a 1968 interview, iris murdoch explained, ‘‘sex is connected with [the] extension of power, with the way in which we make other people play roles in our lives—dominating or slave roles.

So this sort of drama is a fundamental expression of sex, though it has other aspects connected with power in what seems to be a much more primitive sense.’’ Despite the interest in the themes of power and sexuality that the author expressed in this and

other interviews, there is currently a dearth of criticism on the representation of these themes in her fiction. As Peter J. Conradi points out in his recent biography, Iris Murdoch: A Life, critics of Murdoch’s fiction have often failed to see that the theme of

power was a deep obsession in her work.

In addition, there are very few studies available at present on the representation of

gender and sexualit y in her fiction. Deborah Johnson’s book, which explores the representation of gender in the first-person male narratives, provides a useful feminist analysis of the fiction, while W. S. Hampl’s recent article offers a queer reading of several of Murdoch’s novels. This study aims to explore the overlooked theme of power in Murdoch’s fiction, particularly the interplay of power, gender, and sexuality in her characters’ personal and social relationships.

Gender and sexuality were important topics for Murdoch to consider in her fiction because her views on aesthetics and philosophy were integral to her representation of these themes. The author often stated that she wished to write in the realist tradition

and to be considered a realist writer. Social relationships and other social considerations affected the themes that she considered in her fiction because she wanted to reflect on and illustrate realistically the social scene of her epoch. Thinking about the effect of social forces on the expression of one’s gender and sexuality thus enabled the author’s impulse toward realism. Since the interaction of the individual with society involves the

confrontation of moral dilemmas and moral choices, the author’s philosophical views were linked to her desire to portray the individual and society realistically. Accordingly, Murdoch’s representation of gender and sexuality demonstrates her preoccupation with realism and morality, as well as her insistence on individual autonomy and freedom of choice.

A consideration of the author’s discussions on and representations of personal and social relationships reveals that her views on the interaction of the individual with the community informed her philosophical thought, as well as her art. She discusses this interaction in her highly regarded essay on literary criticism and morality entitled ‘‘Against Dryness,’’ asserting that human beings are ‘‘free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world’’ (AD, 290). Murdoch was concerned about the inner moral life of the individual and argued that the task of the individual within society was to become more moral by viewing others with justice and love. Holding the view that

the morality of the individual had its bases in one’s private, inner thoughts, she addressed in her writings on moral philosophy the dichotomy between the public and the private.

In ‘‘The Idea of Perfection,’’ she criticizes the notion that the moral life consists merely of outer, public behavior, which disregards the individual’s private, inner thoughts—what she calls the ‘‘inner life’’ (IP, 314).

For Murdoch, the individual’s ‘‘inner life’’ was part and parcel of the moral tenor of one’s interactions with others. In her fiction, she illustrates that moral considerations are especially keen for homosexuals because social pressure often compels persons of this sexual orientation to keep their private lives away from public view. Her portrayals of homosexuality enabled her to think more deeply about the manner in which society attempted improperly to discount the ‘‘inner’’ sexual identity of homosexuals—a process that parallels her assertion that certain philosophical views are invalid because they disregard the inner moral lives of all human beings.

The fiction reveals that Murdoch was especially troubled with the impact social forces had upon individuals who might be socially marginalized because of their gender or sexuality, namely those who display ‘‘nonnormative’’ gender or sexual behaviors.

The author believed that marginalized individuals—like any human beings—needed to cultivate their own inner lives in order to interact properly with their communities, but equallyshe challenged social prejudices about gender and sexuality by asserting that the community’s views on the ‘‘nonnormative’’ were unloving and morally unjust. That is, the community and society need to view individuals of any gender or sexual orientation

with justice and love, in Murdoch’s view. However, notes in the author’s manuscripts at the University of Iowa show that she believed that society was often unjust to two especially marginalized groups: homosexuals and women. As she planned how best to represent a social dialogue illustrating then-conflicting societal views on male homosexuality, she wrote, ‘‘Permissive society? Not for queers and women!’’ in the draft of one novel.

In keeping with this view, Murdoch’s fiction represents these social prejudices by illustrating the power of society to shape the behaviors and lives of homosexual people and women. An examination of the political and social debates surrounding the subjects

of homosexuality and woman’s role in society during the postwar period, as well as during the specific time periods in which Murdoch wrote her individual novels, is therefore illuminating for queer and feminist readings of her fiction. Since she so vividly depicts the effect of social forces upon the lives of homosexuals and women, her fiction is also aligned with social constructionist theory, which maintains that gender and sexuality are shaped by social, cultural, and historical forces. In other words, Murdoch’s fiction illustrates the manner in which the power of society and social expectations affect the roles that homosexuals and women are expected to play out in their relationships,

as well as in their communities. Murdoch represents with particular clarity the impact of patriarchal power upon women and male homosexuals, illustrating the feminine roles that society established for and expected of them. Because she argued for a picture of human beings that situated human freedom of choice and personal moral responsibility within the individual’s interaction with society, her views on gender bear resemblance to Simone de Beauvoir’s often quoted statement from The Second Sex: ‘‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,’’ since this assertion implies that gender is partially constructed and partially chosen.

Murdoch often illustrates in her fiction a view very similar to the one Beauvoir expressed in The Second Sex: although freedom of choice applies to gender, this freedom is somewhat constrained by one’s social and cultural conditioning.

The author’s preoccupation with the individual’s confrontation of form and contingency also informs her fictional portray-als of gender. Defining ‘‘contingency’’ as the random elements of life that are beyond an individual’s control, Murdoch states in her nonfiction that the contingent should be respected in the work of art. On the other hand, she warns that too much form can destroy art, rendering it subject to the control of the artist’s

neurotic impulses and foibles (SBR, 284). For Murdoch, the task of the novelist is to respect the contingency of the characters because the contingent is the ‘‘essence of the personality’’ (SBR, 285). The moral task of the individual within society parallels

that confronting the novelist in creating characters: how to see others lovingly, while granting them their freedom (SBR, 286).

The novelist is engaged in a moral quest in developing his or her characters since the artist must love his or her creations and allow them to be free by giving them access to the contingent.

Thus, Murdoch accomplishes a moral achievement in respecting and loving her own characters in this way. In her fiction, Murdoch shows that both men and women struggle with the contingent in matters of power and love. She expresses her view of gender equality by illustrating that human shortcomings transcend gender limitations since the inherent impulse toward selfishness affects individuals equally, regardless of their gender. William Hall, Steven Cohan, and Deborah Johnson have offered lucid discussions of the representation of form and contingency in Murdoch’s fiction, analyzing the manner in which the male character’s egoism and solipsism are threatened as he has contact with the female world of contingency.

These analyses lead one to query how Murdoch’s female characters fare as the author portrays the male’s attempt to impose form on the female. These discussions also raise the question as to whether the contingent is indeed primarily associated

with the female in Murdoch’s view. Nevertheless, because Murdoch stated that real life involved the random elements of the contingent, her representations of both the male’s and the female’s involvements with contingency are convincing examples of realism.

In addition to depicting the power of society to impose expectations on individuals of certain genders or sexual orientations, the author illustrates the notion that power is obtained through the knowledge one gains about another’s sexual secrets, especially

secrets about homosexuality and incest. Because homosexuality may involve secrecy or lying to others about one’s sexual orientation, while incest is a deeply hidden family secret that also involves lying and secrecy, knowledge about these sex-ual secrets can prove to be especially powerful. Homosexuality and incest are also elucidating focal points for a reading of Murdoch’s fiction because of the moral considerations inhering in

these forms of sexuality.

When considering the themes of power, knowledge, and sexuality, one recalls the writings of Michel Foucault, who claimed that the human subject is discursively formed through power and knowledge. Since both Foucault and Murdoch had such a fascination with power, one might wonder what similarities and differences exist between the works of the two writers. While it appears that both writers had a preoccupation with the use of

knowledge—especially knowledge about sexuality—as power, Murdoch would not have embraced fully all of Foucault’s views because of their association with poststructuralism. In her essay entitled ‘‘Derrida and Structuralism,’’ she vehemently criticizes poststructuralism and other linguistic theories for what she sees as their assertions that individuals are controlled by language and their concomitant attempts to strip human beings of autonomy and moral responsibility. Because Murdoch believed in individual autonomy, she held the views that human beings were autonomous users of language and that the use of language, even that involved in inner thought processes, was inherently a moral activity (DS, 196). And since her aesthetics and philosophy are so closely connected with each other, Murdoch’s views on moral philosophy, her narrative stance, and her effective use of literary devices and genre enhance her portrayals of power, knowledge, homosexuality, and incest.

Although Murdoch was keenly interested in the theme of power, she was also committed to illuminating a path away from that which distracts the individual from the pursuit of

goodness, thereby enabling one to overcome the problems associated with the misuse of power and to become more loving and more free. In ‘‘Against Dryness,’’ the author states that the ‘‘technique of becoming free’’ is much more difficult than many philosophers and literary critics imagine. She argues that ‘‘we need to be enabled to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to picture . . . the transcendence of reality’’ (AD, 293). A. S. Byatt asserts in her excellent seminal study of Murdoch’s early fiction

that ‘‘all of Miss Murdoch’s novels can in an important sense be seen as studies of the ‘degrees of freedom’ available to individuals.’’ While Byatt’s study explores the representation of personal and social freedom, Murdoch also gives her characters degrees of freedom with respect to their gender and sexuality, and she illustrates in her fiction the manner in which these gender and sexual freedoms are inextricably linked to one’s moral

quest.

As any avid reader of Murdoch’s work is aware, Platonism pervades both her fiction and nonfiction, and the tenet of Platonism which is most central to her work is that of Eros. Under this Platonic theory, sexuality and spirituality are integrally connected.

The innate sexual energy that all human beings possess is a strong life force which, when functioning at the base level of low Eros, causes one to act in irrational, selfish, and egoistic ways.

However, following the tenets of Platonism, Murdoch believed that through attentive discipline and moral vision, one could virtuously transform these sexual energies into a higher, more spiritual level called high Eros. Since Eros was so central to Murdoch’s thought and art, she represents this notion to some degree in nearly all of the romantic relationships in her fiction, whether they be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. She depicts the power of Eros in transforming sexual love particularly poignantly in her illustration of ‘‘other sexualities,’’ namely, bisexuality and transvestism. Because bisexuality and transvestism relate to an individual’s sexual love and because sexual desires can be transformed from low Eros to high Eros, these ‘‘other sexualities’’ might enable or impede one’s spiritual ascent and therefore increase or restrict one’s degrees of gender and sexual freedom.

Believing that the production of a work of art was a moral activity and that gender freedom increased as one evolved morally, Murdoch personally attempted to experience freedom from the constraints of gender through her own art. In order to transcend spiritually and artistically, she had to overcome what she saw as two of the enemies of love in art: the egoism and solipsism of ‘‘neurosis’’ and the patterned, stylized world of ‘‘convention’’ (SG, 217). Murdoch’s own narrative theory has been used to analyze her works of fiction, and in these analyses, the author’s fiction has often been found wanting.

In particular, Murdoch’s first-person male narratives have been the subject of a great

amount of scholarly debate in recent years. The author has been criticized for refusing to give women a voice in her fiction, while simultaneously receiving praise for her negative capability in achieving such a narrative feat. Although Murdoch’s narrative voice appears to be aligned with the masculine, a more thorough study of her work reveals that she used her art to attempt to transcend the limitations of gender. In an interview on her literature and philosophy, Murdoch stated that ‘‘a literary work is an extremely heterogeneous object which demands an open-minded heterogeneous response’’(LP, 24).

This comment seems to apply extremely well to Murdoch’s own fiction since a large number of variegated philosophical, social, and artistic factors influenced her fictional representations of sexuality, gender, and power.

While the author tried to expunge herself from her art, it is now possible to speculate more accurately about the possible personal influences on her fiction in light of John Bayley’s and Peter Conradi’s recent biographies. In exploring possible insights into the author’s personal life, as well as the sociohistorical, artistic, and philosophical influences on the author, this study aims to take such a variegated, heterogeneous approach to examining the representation f sexuality, gender, and power in Murdoch’s fiction.

Weather, especially weather thatis bound up with the sea, can be construed symbolically in each of the books. The actual cleansingtakes place as he reflects on "how tawdry and small" the whole matter,including his life's work, has been: He saw himself now as a little rat, a busy little scurrying rat, seeking out its own little advantages and comforts. Their dramatically different experiences of the sea emphasizethe emotional distances between them. Ducane sees Dorset as arefuge from the closeness of moribund Whitehall and London and willinglyundertakes his job. "Iris Murdoch: A Life." Harper's Magazine 3 3 (December 2 1): 74-78. . For example, fact that Radeechy turns out to have beendabbling in all manner of supernatural nonsense so as to exercise sordidappetites deglamourizes Ducane's activity. "The Social Construction of Homosexuality in Iris Murdoch's Fiction." Studies in the Novel 36 (2 4): 552-559.Murdoch, Iris. To live easily, to have cozy familiar pleasures, to be well thought of. As he puts it, and as Charles later recalls: "Whitemagic is black magic. As in The Nice and the Good, thesea here functions as a metaphor for life itself and for "spiritualvastness and aloneness" (Capitani 1 7). In that environment The Nice and the Good appeared,and its principal line of action has to do with the protagonist's discoveryof a distinction between so-called "nice" people, who consider themselves"good" and real goodness. Part of that good issubverting Charles's project, which aggravates Charles's longtimeresentment. Then he was simply standing on the water"(463). It is obvious from the title of The Sea, the Sea that the sea islikely to be a potent narrative symbol. In other words, he does not exploit the cleansingproperties of the sea. And a less than perfect meddling in the spiritualworld can breed monsters for other people. . That stuffiness is to be compared to the coastal watersof Dorset, where the Grays live and where Ducane is a frequent guest, nowreporting his results. Only Charles can stand on the rocksoverlooking the ocean and comment "how stuffy [the weather] is," seeing notpeace but rather a serpent in the very sea from which he hoped to gaincontentment. Over the course of the novel, Ducane becomes entwined withthe "nice" family of his superior, Octavian, only to extricate himself andthereby resolve his own moral ambivalence when he sees that so-called nicepeople are probably not at all good but instead (as in the case of OctavianGray) hide their pettiness in personal and professional life behind ascreen of "niceness." Murdoch uses the pathetic fallacy, or the device ofenlisting nature to explain psychological states, to move the narrative.Just after the shot startles everyone in Whitehall, the text evokes a "hotstuffy corridor, amid the rushing murmur of London" (NG 7). Long locked into his fantasy about Titusand Mary, Charles resents James's "maddening air of contented repose,looking out over the sea" (TS 32 ). "Ideas of the Good: Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea." Christianity and Literature 43 (Autumn 2 3): 99-1 9.Grimshaw, Tammy. The stuffinessof the place is likened to the stuffiness of the office-politics ethos ofWhitehall of which Octavian is a master. The Nice and the Good. The Sea, The Sea. The sea is the source of all thatdetritus, and that makes it a symbol of the messiness and lack of clarityof life as a whole. He intends to cleanse himself inthe sea when he descends the rocks to clear his mind. Eventually he recognizes it as a symbol of the jealousy he hasnever been able to shake (486). Charles's resentments of James's repose evolve into murderous anger astheir rivalry over Titus intensifies. In this novel, which representsMurdoch's mature work, the sea is also, and deceptively, repository ofcontingency, which is the basic condition of life, regardless ofsociopolitical culture. Nothing is worth doing except to kill the little rat, not to judge, not to be superior, not to exercise power, not to seek, seek, seek. That distinction is discovered in a setting ofcomplete chaos and real physical danger, since John Ducane achieves hisepiphany while stranded in a sea cave that may at any minute flood anddrown him. Further to that point, there isa view that The Sea, the Sea shows Murdoch's fascination with "the Buddhistidea of the road to goodness but was also struggling with its potential todeviate into 'demonism' and 'magic'" (Capitani 1 9). To love and to reconcile and to forgive, only this matters (NG 329). Another symbol that comes to the fore is that of religion, which isalso a source of both serenity and chaos, although as used by Murdochreligion is perhaps more properly considered as a departure point for thetheme of the vagaries of goodness, or the moral life well lived. James's descent is a full embrace of the whole of life, crags andserpents and all, as well as a celebration of his own goodness; Charles canonly achieve insight into life's complexities by misadventure. More successful at such exploitation is James Arrowby, who hasabandoned his career in favor of a quasi-monastic existence as a Buddhistand in favor of a determination to do authentic good. It turns out that, as John Ducanediscovers, Octavian is a stultifying, smug presence in Whitehall and thatthe petty-politics environment was in no small way responsible for thedeath of Radeechy. The purpose of this research is to compare the use of symbolism in twoof Iris Murdoch's novels, The Sea, The Sea and The Nice and the Good. Yetas the investigation proceeds and Ducane becomes more enmeshed with theGrays, the sea becomes an increasingly hostile presence. Charles Arrowby seeks the seaside haven, disgustedby the "miserable stupid anxious messy existence I led over years andyears" (TS 45), only to embark on an anxious and messy project of stalkingMary and her son Titus. New York: Penguin Reissue, 1978.–. In both The Nice and the Good and The Sea, the Sea, the cleansing,almost sacramental power of the sea does not prevent it from containingserpents and demons. The premise of The Nice and the Good is that John Ducane, a civil-service lawyer, is asked by his superior to look into the apparent suicideof a colleague. Demons used for good can hangaround and make mischief afterwards" (441). The best response to thatcontingency is the moral one, which finds a way around or throughuncertainty and toward a little insight, doing as little harm as possiblealong the way. That is another way of saying that life as a whole isfilled with both possibility and contingency. New York: Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, 2 1.Parini, Jay. . Just as the sea-shore has "invaded" the Gray house with its artifacts, so does Ducane beginrealize that the investigation–as well as Octavian and Kate is "grittywith sand and stones and crushed sea-shells and dried up marine entities ofanimal and vegetable origin" (NG 12). Works CitedCapitani, Diane N. [I]f I ever get out of here I will be no man's judge. In no small part that is because of the open sea. The repose comes from the goodness thatJames embodies and that he has cultivated after years of Buddhist study. Yet James is unhesitating aboutdiving into the sea after a fallen Charles, deftly descending the sea cliffto rescue him, as if by magic: "One moment he was against the rock as if hewere clinging onto it like a bat. Theplan of the research will be to set forth the pattern of ideas in the textsand then discuss ways in which Murdoch employs symbol to make resonantmoral meanings. The sea does indeedconcentrate Ducane's mind, but in the process it turns treacherous, as thetide fills the cave from which he might not escape. The exertionis a prelude to James's death, for, as James recognizes, goodness asenacted by the good is nevertheless fated to be imperfect–James's versionof the sea serpent. As the action unfolds, it becomes clear that Ducane has fallen in lovewith the Grays, and the attraction is mutual. Yet in The Sea, the Sea and The Nice and the Good,much of the action takes place along the seacoast, and in both novels, thesea operates as a powerful symbol for the vagaries of life experience thatare at once most serene and most chaotic. The cultural context for the appearance of The Nice and the Good was1968, a year that witnessed what can be described as a "sea change" inWestern culture. It has been observed by more than one critic that Murdoch's novels aretypically set in suburban London (Parini 75; Grimshaw 554), in part areflection of Murdoch's own adult life, which was spent in a modest Oxfordneighborhood in England. The Vietnam War was raging and dividing the US; two majorassassinations occurred in America; European capitals (notably Prague andParis) were in turmoil.

The Sea, the Sea, was Iris Murdoch's 19th novel. It was also her fourth to make the Booker shortlist. Naturally, the fact that Murdoch was so often nominated and only triumphant later in her career has been the cause of plenty of speculation, but it's easy to understand why she so often fell at the last hurdle.

   The Sea, the Sea is told by Charles Arrowby, a sixty-something actor, director, and playwright of some renown, recently retired. He has bought a place by the sea – Shruff End, "upon a small promontory" –, hoping to abandon his old world and life. Writing is part of his escape: he pens his memoirs cum diary, recounting past and present. Past, it turns out, intrudes into present far more than he hoped.  The house he bought is solitary and dilapidated. There isn't even any electricity. But it suits his purposes.
       Two things, above all else, preoccupy him: the sea (a central character throughout), and food. Many a menu is described by the would-be gourmet, though Arrowby's tastes differ greatly from most who highly value their food. But he enjoys himself.
     Arrowby doesn't fit in particularly well among the town people, but he prefers to live in his odd isolation anyway. Still, he can't quite let go of his past – even before he stumbles across Mary – and his past won't let go of him either. Lovers, friends, and others come to bother him. He does his best to shoo them away, but the house fills up steadily. One friend – Gilbert – even becomes his "house-serf", which proves quite convenient.
       Among the visitors – occasional and repeated – there are also the devoted (and occasionally obsessive) Lizzie and Rosina. There is Peregrine – like most of the rest also an actor. And there is Arrowby's cousin James, an unlikely military man who is also a Buddhist. Arrowby's own obsession, with Mary, becomes the driving force to all his actions.

He won't accept that they can't be together, and an odd psychological drama plays itself out. Arrowby, who usually can get any woman he wants to do his bidding, finds he has a harder time here.  The sea is nearly ever-present – at least as background, and occasionally as foreground. Characters do fall (or are pushed) in. Monsters are seen. Life is lost. And iteven responsible for re-births, of sorts.  Actor Arrowby finds drama high and low – and melodrama, and farce. Shruff End turns out only to be a stage for all this to be played out on, over the course of a few acts; at the end Arrowby shuffles off and retires
 The Sea, the Sea is an odd tale, veering dangerously towards the melodramatic. Arrowby's passion for Mary –now plain, and settled in a different lifestyle, decades removed from the girl he loved –comes very close to being beyond believable. Much of the action is slow, the drama somewhat artificial –though admittedly reasonably done by the stage-managing Arrowby, who once wrote plays, who achieved fame for his direction.
       Arrowby writes grandly much of the times – Murdoch the stylist does not disappoint – but parts of the story are a bit much for this character to carry. There are interesting scenes and characters (though some of his actor-friends are a bit rich). Parts of the novel are superb: the beginning, the toned-down postscript, and bits throughout. But the centre, Arrowby's obsession with his old flame and the actions it causes him to take, does not fullyconvince.

Whenever an act of rejuvenation or a nascent notion of the protagonists' own sense of

sexuality is in progress, this development is harshly interrupted by the death of a central

figure. I shall elaborate on the claim that here, death acts as an impediment on sexual

awakening with unfavourable effects.

Only by the concurrent or mutually opposing forces action of the two primal instincts Eros and the death instinct never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of life (Analysis Terminable and Interminable, 243).

The beach is metaphorically linked to both Eros and Thanatos and the seaside is a site

of revelation; it discloses deepest anxieties as well as most profound longings. The metaphorical spectrum found in the novels encompasses elements such as withdrawal, reclusion, escapes, personal sanction, as well as a psychological dimension which takes

the liminal space of the beach as a symbol of personal crises and transformations, which makes the beach a suitable stage for personal drama. Hence, this overtly liminal space, acting as a manifold border, with its inherent in-betweenness, and its divides, entails two movements, two states and two dimensions, which add to its strong attraction: on the one hand, the beach is inviting (for all the reasons stated above), and on the other, it is regarded as a dangerous and even repulsive site. Above all, the seaside is fluid and in a

recurring flux as well as static entity. Freud claims that Thanatos, the principle of strife, is

working on the grounds that we are forever longing to achieve the following, "[b]y tracing back our instinct of destruction to the death instinct, to urge of what is living to return to an inanimate state (Analysis Terminable and Interminable, 245).

Where there are tides, ongoing development, growth, recreation and rejuvenation, there is also the fear of diseases, germs, unhygienic conditions as well as fear and the threat from the deep (i.e. mystical sea monsters), of drowning, shipwreck and death. Due to theses opposing forces, the seaside experiences quite an absurd and controversial atmosphere. Or, as John K. Walton states, the seaside resembles a carnival,

[It] puts the civilizing process temporarily into reverse […] and conjures up the spirit of carnival, in the sense of upturning the social order and celebrating the rude, the excessive, the anarchic, the hidden and the gross (Walton, 4).

On further deliberation, the exact reversal is equally valid, in the sense that the underlying contradictions of the beach's properties and dimensions intensify the attraction and its powerful beckoning. Consequently, death itself, its occurrence and the

mere possibility of death, stimulates the libido and the characters in the novels experience a kind of sexual thrill and excitement which is directly derived this potential

deadly site. According to Freudian theory these incommensurable, opposing forces are in constant conflict. While Eros, the sex drive is a creative force, Thanatos acts as its very antagonist:

The two fundamental principles are, both in name and function the same as our two primal instinct (Urtriebe), Eros and destructiveness, the first of which endeavours to combine what the second endeavours to dissolve these combinations and to destroy the structures (Gebilde) to which they have given rise (Analysis Terminable and Interminable, 245).

Prevalent and most dominant at the beginning of the novel is Charles Arrowby's longing

for an escape, for a place of private sanction in order to seek personal balance and rejuvenation. In the introductory part writer John Burnside discusses at length the human

desire to withdraw and escape from the demands of living in the contemporary world; generally, as for many people, the only sphere of authenticity is the personal; the public realm, the political and social, appears to have become corrupted beyond redemption.

The desire to withdraw, to be quiet, to stake out some limited, controllable space, is

widespread, and the longing for authenticity is presented, not as a profound spiritual need, but as a form of an eccentricity. Accordingly, Charles retreats to the coastal village, seeking balance and inner peace.

The subsequent joys of his sojourned stay at Shruff End, his invigorating daily swims and simple culinary pleasures, are soon to be followed by obsessive reveries and megalomaniac reactions to his friends, strengthening his emergent notion of an independent, nature- loving recluse who is in desperate need of recovering from an egoistic and womanising past self- definition. Reminiscing about the trials and tribulations of the somewhat unrewarding and decadent world of theatre ("I am tired of it

all. There has been a moral change", 3), Charles ponders about the only pure emotional

attachment as he seems to remember:

The light of pure love and pure unanxious romance illuminated our days together, our nights apart. This is no absurd idealization of a youthful Arcadia. […] We were free to love. […] She never knew how robustly her love defended me against some kind of collapse of my pride (203).

This statement has to be enjoyed with much care and due considerations. Firstly, his active brooding over his first encounter with "love" is soiled with nostalgia, tainted by the

fact that he, as a retired playwright and director, quasi as an occupational hazard, has a tendency to over-dramatise. Secondly, the mere fact that he mediates his stories for the

purpose of publication, give rise to suspicion and tends to assign a further layer of unreliability to his memory, to emotions which rose in him some three or four decades ago. His cousin James observes how memory, fiction and his sense of reality have intermingled:

`I won't call it a fiction. Let us call it a dream Of course, we live in dreams and by dreams, and even in a disciplined spiritual life […], it is hard to distinguish dreams from reality. […] Ask yourself, what happened between whom all those years ago? You've made it into a story, andstories are false' (361).

Towards the end of the story, when his plotting and scheming, his project to regain Hartley's affection went all topsy-turvy and romantic endeavours ended up in loss and

death and no satisfactory outcome was to result from his mad pursuits, Charles' obsession with his first love, Hartley, as it is slowly losing its weight and preponderance,

judges this former inkling to be nothing exceptional, an obsession which has its roots and cause not on an individual, but on the level of the human condition:

What an egoist I seem in the preceding pages. But am I so exceptional? We must live by the light of our own self- satisfaction, through that vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason (512).

What he so ingeniously calls the "self- satisfaction" is no less than the sexual driving

force of any human being, which guarantees reproduction and an enduring trace of one's existence in the afterlife, the need and the innate longing for a legacy, for fame and glory. Since Charles' repudiation of the world of theatre along with all the promises it previously held in store for him, his attention and life force have shifted to the re-establishment of his sexual identity, focusing and seeking the most innocent loves he had experienced (i.e. epitomised by the character Hartley), and abandons the offers of what amount to "quick-fix ego balm" in the form of other romantic adoration, generously

furnished by Lizzie, Rosina, and Peregrine.

As the novel progresses, continuously more doubts are cast on Charles' tendency to

make sense of the world through the lens of his obsessive "love- story" about his first

infatuation. Thus, in the last section of the novel termed Postscript: Life goes on, Charles

concedes:

[W]hat a `fantasist' I have been myself. I was a dreamer, I, the magician. How much, as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at reality (535).

Titus' death, taking place in the cauldron under mysterious circumstances, leaves Charles shaken, and fascinated by the corpse's beauty. Still incredulous to the fact of this demise, he observes:

[T]itus who was lying on the grass verge. […] He was drowned. Titus was already dead, there can be not doubt about that, although I did not want to belief it at once. He looked so whole, so beautiful, lying there limp and naked and dripping, his hair dark with water (387).

Soon after, it dawns on Charles that he had a direct involvement and hence a responsibility for what happened. He is aware that due to his callus boasting and showing- off he was too inattentive when swimming with Titus in the dangerous sea. In

short, Titus' death was indirectly caused by Charles' narcissism and vanity.

Overwhelmed by this guilt, Charles confesses:

Of course, guilt too had fed my rage. My responsibility for Titus' death, which now so largely occupied my mind, amounted to this: I had never warned him about the sea. Why had I not done so? Out of vanity. […] I had wanted to show him that I too was strong and fearless. […] I acted out of vanity, and out of a silly vicarious pride in his youth and his strength, in the agility which I had seen him (402)

As Freud suggests, narcissism and vanity are both inherent to Eros and Thanatos:

[…] Love, as the source of perfect union, means the absence of tension. For Freud, Eros brings about the increase in tension, and narcissism is the culture of death, although Eros is intimately bound up with the death instincts […] What is proper to the death instinct is installed in the very heart of love (Freud and Fiction, 37)

Towards the end of the novel, the celebration of his revived youthfulness comes to an

abrupt end and his romantic pursuits are perceived anew, i.e. Charles has rudely woken

from his reveries and is faced with the messy and contingent reality of his former

behaviour:

[…] I was too selfish, too dominating, as she [Hartley] put it `so sort of bossy'. I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all" (534)

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher before she succeeded as a novelist, and continued to teach philosophy at Oxford for several years after her first novel was published. The place of philosophy in her fiction is, however, surrounded with paradoxes. She has said, ‘I mention philosophy sometimes in the novels because I happen to know about it, just as another writer might talk about coal mining’ (Biles 116); and that in fact ‘as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships and hospitals than about philosophy’ (Magee 535).

It is, however, hard to imagine how the practical knowledge of some aspect of technology could replace the pervasive influence of her moral philosophy in her fiction. Apart from playful elements, like the Wittgensteinian jokes in Under the Net and A Fairly Honourable Defeat, her philosophical sophistication and informed attention to moral problems are some of her most distinctive features as a novelist: she refrains from preaching, but often presents moral and philosophical theories only to subject them to the strain which is inevitable in their practical application. She admits to being, ‘in a way, a Wittgensteinian; but if I am a Wittgensteinian, I am one in a proper, as it were, negative sense. It isn’t that one has got any body of theory, but one has got a style and a way of looking at philosophical problems’ (Bellamy 137). Writing fiction is part of her philosophical style, and this may be in the final analysis her greatest problem: James Wood remarks that it is possible to ‘read … her novels as hapless enactments of philosophy, as necessary metaphysical failures or lapses’ (‘Iris Murdoch’ 180).

Compared with other novelists, Naipaul for example, she has not said much at all about why she writes. In her 1968 interview with William Rose, she said that the impulse to write was an early one: ‘I started writing stories when I was about 9 or 10, and I always knew that this was what I wanted to do’ (63). She does not give the impression of anxiety or neurosis about her ambition; she ‘always knew that I would do something else as well’ (Rose 63). Her reasons for writing novels, insofar as they are defined at all, are implicit in statements like, ‘Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. That is certainly one of the reasons why one enjoys it, and one of the reasons why it is both good for us when it is good and bad for us when it is bad’ (Magee 533). She does not, she says, ‘wait for inspiration; I just go ahead and work office hours, as it were’ (Rose 70). Although she told Rosemary Hartill in 1989, ‘I can’t imagine not needing to write. I should be very unhappy if I couldn’t write’ (92), she evinces little curiosity, and few doubts, about her reasons for writing.

She is more concerned with her attempts to create ‘free’ characters, and the difficulties she finds doing so. The creative process is to some extent beyond the control of her conscious mind. She told Frank Kermode in 1963 that she was always attempting to represent ‘character in the old-fashioned sense … but I find it very difficult to do so’ (‘House’ 63); and fifteen years later she is still saying: ‘all the time, one is terribly conscious of one’s limitations as an artist … one’s ability to improve is still extraordinarily limited. One’s always hoping to do better next time: to create better characters, to break out of certain patterns’ (Biles 122). Talking about these patterns, and symbolism, she said, ‘When you are imagining the whole thing, much of this

happens absolutely instinctively. Sometimes, one notices later on various things one has done … The total situation is thoroughly set up and you are thoroughly imagining it; then, many of these effects happen automatically’ (Biles 124). ‘In a way,’ she said to Rose, ‘one is just a slave of one’s unconscious mind; but in so far as one can push one’s work one way or another, I am always pushing myself towards a starting-point in experience’ (Rose 65). At the beginning of writing a novel, there is ‘a period of reflection – when one has nothing, except notes, of course, to remind one … it’s a kind of deep free reflection which may be more difficult later on’ (Heusel 4). She finds this stage

very frightening because you’ve committed yourself at this point. … A novel is a long job, and if you get it wrong at the start you’re going to be very unhappy later on. … You have the extraordinary experience when you begin a novel that you are now in a state of unlimited freedom, and this is alarming. Every choice you make will exclude another choice. (Meyers 211-212)

For her, the important attempt is not to control one’s characters, to let them be free from the patterns within one’s own mind. To submit them to the test of reality and contingency, to make them act as real people act, to avoid making them unnaturally heroic or saintly, to prevent them being agents of the author’s fantasy or wish-fulfillment, is her ideal. So, paradoxically, one must try to be conscious of the creative process in order to surrender the control one’s mind would otherwise unwittingly have over one’s characters:

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don’t expect. The idea of the myth and the form have got to be present, but one has brutally to stop the form determining the emotion of the book by working in the opposite direction, by making something happen which doesn’t belong to the world of the magic … I am very conscious of this tension at the start, and I play it to and fro. (Haffenden 34)

‘The intellect comes in very much to prevent … the plot from being coerced by unconscious forces’ (Bigsby, ‘Interview’ 227), forces of fantasy and myth-making which would create characters who are not free.

She is tolerant, up to a point, of her readers’ differing interpretations. At a symposium on her work, she responded to a paper by Diana Phillips on A Fairly Honourable Defeat by saying ‘I think a novel is allowed to be ambiguous, I mean it’s not surprising if people interpret a novel in different ways. … One could have read the book without bothering about the refinements which you’ve drawn attention to’ (Todd 96). Because she realises that her intentions are not always fulfilled, and that ‘in a way, one doesn’t want to know altogether what one’s doing’ (Bryden, ‘Talking’ 433), she is willing to allow her readers a certain amount of freedom of interpretation. She said, perhaps a little testily, to Barbara Stevens Heusel, who was drawing comparisons with Dostoevsky and trying to discuss her work with her in Bahktinian terms, ‘I’m just a novelist and critics are critics. If people want to explain something by saying that it is like something else then okay. Anyway we can’t stop them, so they will’ (8). She is, however, not prepared to surrender complete control to the reader:

I am sure that people can go too far in playing these games, for sometimes this can be actually misleading, because somebody can see a pattern which really isn’t there. I think out matters of symbolism and I’m very careful about names and so on; thus, the chances are, if there is something fairly telling in the book, then, that is something I intended. I feel there is a small area of conscious activity of this kind. … I should be surprised, in fact, if anybody pointed out anything of this sort in my own work which I wasn’t conscious of, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of there being an area of this kind. It isn’t very profitable to look at. (Biles 123)

In fact, because ‘a work of art has got to have a form, it has got to have notation, it has got to have something which is fixed and authoritative’, then ‘it must have authority over its victim, or client or whatever you can call the person who is meeting it. This of course is a principle which is now very much disputed and even attacked but in this sense I am an authoritarian’ (Bigsby, ‘Interview’ 214). With this rather severe statement, with its extraordinary use of the word ‘victim’ and its defensive tone, she is stating one side of the equation. Talking to an interviewer in Israel in 1995, she changed the emphasis a little, from the author’s authority to the author’s duty: ‘I believe the writer is responsible for providing readers with real endings rather than multiple options’ (‘Writing, Faith’). In the nature of artistic achievement there is often, perhaps necessarily, a tension between the author’s intentions and the reader’s interpretation, and without this tension art would lose its appeal: ‘If the reader or observer can do anything he likes with the thing then one result, of course, is that he becomes bored’ (Bigsby, ‘Interview’ 228).

Her expectations of readers are not unreasonably high, however; she is not elitist. In response to Jo Brans’ question, ‘Your books are so full of meaning. Would you be disappointed if people only read them for the stories they tell?’ she said, ‘I would like the reader to see everything in the book. But I’m glad if people like those stories, it gives me pleasure, because stories are a very good way, you know, of getting away from one’s troubles’ (53-54). Asked by another interviewer to describe her ideal reader, she said, ‘Those who like a jolly good yarn are welcome and worthy readers. I suppose the ideal reader is someone who likes a jolly good yarn and enjoys thinking about the book as well, thinking about the moral issues’ (Meyers 224). In other words, she is more disturbed by over-reading than under-reading.

She believes a novelist should offer something to the average reader:

A novel without a story must work very hard in other ways to be worth reading, and indeed to be read. Some of today’s anti-story novels are too deliberately arcane. I think story is essential to the survival of the novel. A novel may be ‘difficult’ but its story can carry and retain the reader who may understand in his own way, even remember and return. Stories are a fundamental human form of thought. (Meyers 225)

She has said several times that the novel is a very versatile form, ‘so versatile you can do virtually anything you like’ (Biles 120), but she nevertheless has certain ideas about what novels should and should not be. Once more, the idea of a creative tension seems important. A novel must be comic, not tragic: ‘a novel which isn’t at all comic is a great danger, aesthetically speaking’ (Bigsby, ‘Interview’ 230). It can be a tragi-comedy – ‘good novels are tragicomedies’ (Heusel 11) – but it needs to beware of satire: ‘satire is a dangerous game unless you are frightfully good at it and have a particular end in view … Satire goes with allegories and fables and a kind of story telling which is not like the novel’ (Heusel 3). The great writers she admires, Tolstoy and Shakespeare, are not satirists, and at their best ‘it is very difficult to see what exactly what the author is thinking’ (Bigsby, ‘Interview’ 216).

One thread that runs through all her aesthetic judgments is to do with the contrast between fantasy and imagination, which is connected with her struggle to create ‘free’ characters. She does not reject all fantastic elements, but

if fantasy and realism are visible and separate aspects in a novel, then the novel is likely to be a failure. In real life the fantastic and the ordinary, the plain and the symbolic, are often indissolubly joined together, and I think the best novels explore and exhibit life without disjoining them. (Hobson 28)

Fantasy is dangerous to fiction,

because creative imagination and personal fantasy are awfully close, in relation to fiction. The obvious example is the bad novel which turns out to be simply a fantasy of how the hero, who is the writer, triumphs over all his enemies and is loved by the girls, and becomes rich, and so forth. This kind of fantasy is a menace to the creative imagination. (Magee 534)

Realism is her highest aim, and she sees the novel as ‘a marvelous form’ which tries to show that ‘human beings are very odd and very different from each other’ (Bellamy 137). In this way, it ‘fights against the drama’ because ‘ordinary life is not dramatic’ (Biles 117). Here is another area of creative tension, however, because, as she said to Haffenden,

of course a novel is a drama, and dramas happen when there is trouble. A completely harmonious life might not produce the drama. … In spite of the fact that people have a bad time – this is true of the novel in a general way – the novel is a comic form. (34)

Good novels, then, can be many things; however, they should be comic but not satirical, imaginative but not fantastic, or rather fantasy-ridden; their nature is to be dramatic, but this should be resisted; and realism of character and incident should be their goal. Experiment is fine, but not at the expense of plot, or a certain amount of determinacy: readers should have enough information to be able to work out the author’s true intentions as to the events in the story, although the interpretation of the events can be to some extent delegated to the reader. Above all, she values truthfulness: ‘Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina’ (Meyers 218).

Social commitment is, she believes, out of place in the novel. ‘I think it’s a novelist’s job to be a good artist, and this will involve telling the truth, and not worrying about social commitment,’ which ‘can make the novelist nervous and anxious and not able to open himself to the whole of reality as he understands it’ (Rose 60). She once tried ‘to write a novel about the Trade

Union movement and put M.P.’s in it and so on, but I don’t know that world. It’s no good; I don’t understand it and I don’t want to write political propaganda in that form.’ It is only in the novel that she rejects propaganda, however: ‘I prefer to write political propaganda in other forms, in the form of pamphlets or articles’ (Bellamy 133). This does not mean that novelists should or even could be amoral, however:

A writer cannot avoid having some sort of moral position, and attempting to be nonmoral is in a way a moral position, an artificial one. … a novelist, a storyteller, naturally portrays his own moral judgments. But these very judgments are not just a small area of human discourse; they’re almost all of it. We are always making value judgments, or exhibiting by what we say some sort of evaluation, and storytellers dealing with persons must constantly be doing this. (Brans 44)

‘In fact,’ she told Bellamy, ‘in a quiet way, there is a lot of social criticism in my novels’ (Bellamy 133).

Her own approach to the ethical techniques of writing largely, as one would expect, centre on her characters and the form of her novels. She makes a distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ novels, and prefers to write the latter. She spoke to Frank Kermode in 1963 about the difficulties she had creating ‘a lot of people who are not me’; and the

tendency too readily to pull a form or a structure out of something one’s thinking about and to rest upon that. The satisfaction of the form is such that it can stop one from going more deeply into the contradictions or paradoxes or more painful aspects of the subject matter. (Kermode, ‘House’ 63)

There is a ‘moral challenge involved in art: in the self-discipline of the artist, expelling fantasy and really looking at things other than himself’ (Magee 535). ‘With what exhilaration do we experience the absence of self in the work of Tolstoy, in the work of Shakespeare. That is the true sublime,’ she wrote in ‘The Sublime and the Good’ (218). This is a central tenet of her philosophy of fiction. The expulsion of fantasy involves ‘fighting against … and blurring … even destroying’ the dramatic shape of the novel, ‘because ordinary life doesn’t have shape. Ordinary life is comic and absurd. It may be terrible, but it is absurd and shapeless’ (Biles 117). Her desire for realistic characters different to herself does not, however, mean that she draws her characters from life: ‘I would abominate the idea of putting real people in a novel, not only because I think it’s morally questionable, but also because I think it would be terribly dull’ (Meyers 216).

She is well aware of the danger of overusing symbolism. ‘I think a writer of a traditional novel is wise to rub out or fudge over a piece of symbolism that is coming out too clearly’ (Hartill 89). Symbols are, in any event, not always a direct statement by author to reader, but may be part of the characterisation: ‘very often, the symbolism in a novel is invented by the characters themselves, as happens in real life. We’re all constantly inventing symbolic images to express our situations’ (Biles 125). She believes, however, that symbolism has not always been sufficiently under control in her novels, ‘when it’s connected with a dominating myth’ (Rose 67). Nevertheless, on the whole she believes she is not ‘a symbolic writer in any allegorical or complete sense. … I would want them to come in in a completely natural way … through the characters’ (Rose 66).

Concepts of freedom and the many ironies and contradictions they entail are deeply interesting to twentieth century novelists. Murdoch’s view is that freedom is only to be achieved ‘only by self-forgetfulness. As we bec[o]me less obsessed by our own goals, drives and desires, and substitute involvement with others, we mature spiritually and creatively’ (Heyd 139-140).

In 1968, asked if freedom was her main subject, she replied, ‘No, not now. I think it might have been in the past. No, I think love is my main subject. I have very mixed feelings about the concept of freedom now’ (Rose 68). In 1985, she spoke to William Slaymaker at length about the idea of freedom. She distinguishes between different kinds of freedom:

This problem about freedom and unfreedom is, of course, confused by problems about political freedom as opposed to or as contrasted with intellectual, emotional or spiritual freedom. Of course, if the law prevents you from publishing your book, you are unfree, and if you can get the law changed, then you are free. (426-7)

It is, she says, ‘important to distinguish between a political definition of freedom which isn’t to do with having good desires, and a spiritual definition which is to do with having good desires’:

People torment themselves – this is obvious, one needs merely to look around to see this happening – by unworthy or irrational desires: envy, jealousy, and so on, frustrated ambition. I would think of ‘true freedom’ as being liberated from these desires, and having desires that are higher, like desires to help people or desires connected with great art or love of nature or one’s work, trying to see one’s work as something really creative, whatever it might be. (Slaymaker 430)

Asked by Rosemary Hartill about justice, another controversial topic which often arises in her novels, she replied,

I think the concept of justice is a very difficult one unless you use it in a secular context – relating to courts of law and how they operate, and what you blame people for. … I think the concept to hang on to is truth. Let justice look after itself. Justice suggests judging other people, and punishment and so on. Truth and love are much more fundamental concepts. (Hartill 85-6)

As for people’s responsibility for their actions, she says:

Now a great many things which people do are excused because we know the psychological background to them which makes us regard them no longer as responsible actions. All the time one is balancing what one can find out about history and the human mind and all these things, these factual things … against these other factors which are to do with things which seem self-evident, with natural law, with a conception of human nature, with certain religious ideas, and so on. …

In making a moral judgement you have to take to take into consideration a lot of things. A particular case is so particular. This is why novels are interesting objects; they explain particular cases in very great detail. (Bigsby, ‘Interview’ 221)

Implicit in these statements is a recognition of the difference between striving for good oneself and judging others. As a novelist, ‘you can’t help explaining characters and scrutinising their motives. The novelist is the judge of these people – that can’t help emerging – and it is more difficult for the novelist to be a just judge’ (Haffenden 35). This is an interesting paradox, because the novelist as judge is often criticising the characters for judging, as is the case with Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. She is perhaps not totally conscious of this contradiction. Asked if all her characters were not ‘at the mercy of the egotistical fantasies,’ she replied, somewhat judgmentally, ‘Yes, but they ought not to be, ought they?’ (Slaymaker 431). Christopher Bigsby asked her if she saw ‘any connection between the coercive plotters in the novel and yourself as a coercive plotter, a writer of fictions’; she replied, ‘No, because it is quite different. … what the people in the novel are doing is working out their fantasy life in terms of some sort of pattern which suits them and I very much hope that I am not doing that’ (Bigsby 227). In her interview with Bellamy, she comes closer to the problem. Discussing the myths that people create about themselves and other people, a ‘mythology [which] is often very deep and very influential and secretive’, she admitted,

one is talking of something which in ordinary life – this is where the whole problem of truth is so important – which in ordinary life one doesn’t necessarily see, which one guesses at. And one may have one’s own motives for wanting to think that other people have a certain mythology, and one may be wrong. What is the test of this sort of speculation? … The test of truth here is very hard, and I think the novelist must be awfully scrupulous about playing this game of explaining peoples’ [sic] secret concerns. But after all, it is the essential game. (138)

These ‘persons who are imperfect’ (Slaymaker 431) whom she is representing are, of course, imperfect in her terms, and thus throw into relief an accurate picture of her ideals of moral perfection. However much she may wish to create ‘free’ characters, she can have no doubt that ‘any artist reveals himself to some extent in his work’ (Haffenden 33).

Murdoch is a deeply serious novelist, which is, of course, not to say that her novels are not comic. Her moral thoughtfulness and philosophical training give her novels a compelling sense of a broad and inclusive tolerance, backed by ‘an assertion of old-fashioned values, of the reality of virtue’ (Brans 44), but she combines these qualities with an unembarrassed use of suspense and other narrative techniques which makes her novels compulsively readable. She rather disarmingly believes that all writers are equally serious, even the writers of bestsellers: ‘I find it hard to imagine that even if one started off as a cynic one wouldn’t be converted by one’s own work’ (Gerard 139-40).

In the following three chapters I will examine some themes and techniques which are interesting in Murdoch’s case. Firstly, I will discuss her ‘theological myth’, the battle between good and evil, in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The questions of freedom and justice are important themes in this novel, and there are some interesting differences between her intentions and readers’ interpretations. Secondly, I will look at the technique of first person narration in The Black Prince, and how it relates to her moral concerns; and how the reader is led to understand the ‘true’ course of events by means of an unreliable narrator. The third chapter is a survey of four novels which focus on marital unfaithfulness on the husband’s part, tracing a shift in her implied attitudes through more than thirty years of writing. Attitudes to personal freedom, women’s issues and social problems are considered, as well as her use of symbolism and its limits.

V. CONCLUSIONS

How do Murdoch’s novels live up to her ideals as she has expressed them outside her fiction? She has developed an ethical view of what novels should be, not based on the way she can best use her particular talents, but on what James Wood calls ‘a stern metaphysics’ (‘Iris Murdoch’ 183). Her most important aim is to create ‘free’ characters in ‘open’ novels. She is conscious of failing to achieve this aim, but to what extent do her opinions about the nature of that failure correspond with those of her readers?

She said in 1986 that she thought her later novels were better:

I think in novels with a great many characters one just has more successful ones because they have a larger field to play in. The danger with a very strong plot and a few very strong characters is that other characters, perhaps, haven’t got any space in which to develop themselves. I think there’s more detail in general in the later novels. They are longer novels, and there’s more opportunity for descriptions of all kinds, and I think they are more realistic. The characters are better, and I think this is the main thing, to be able to invent characters who have a life of their own, who seem to exist, and who may not be obviously like ordinary people at all, but then they may be what ordinary people are like in the eyes of God, as it were. I think the advantage of the novelist is that he can see into the soul. (Todd 101)

Characters who have a life of their own, one would expect, would live on in the reader’s memory long after the novel had been read, and would seem to amount to more than their physical description and their thoughts and utterances – in other words, they would be more than the sum of their parts. Murdoch has created so many characters in her career that it is not surprising that certain types recur. There are certain peculiarities which keep appearing – many middle-aged people are childless, for example; hardly anyone, in the age of the supremacy of television, owns a set – they prefer the radio; and women setting up new households with their lovers, however temporary, delight in buying domestic utensils – even characters as different as Emily in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and Julian in The Black Prince. She has, nevertheless, succeeded in creating some ‘real people’ who remain in the memory. It is not, in spite of her belief to the contrary, in the later novels that most of these people appear. They tend to be characters seen principally from the outside, as is natural: an outside view can show memorable idiosyncratic details which are not registered via the inside view, except via contrived views in mirrors. Both Simon and Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat remain in the memory, because they are objects of focalisation as well as focalisers; Emma Sands in An Unofficial Rose is memorable, with her clever face, her voluminous skirts, and her cigarettes. They are not always major characters, either. Often they are economically sketched, like Miss Handforth, Demoyte’s housekeeper in The Sandcastle. Wood writes that her novels ‘are full of characters who are clearly not their author, but who often seem savagely meaningless in any way other than in their histrionic freedom’ (‘Iris Murdoch’ 183). A.N. Wilson sees ‘her fictions as an endless series of make-believes, of Iris imagining herself in different roles like the only child with a crowd of imaginary friends’ (80), while Harold Bloom observes that

of all her talents, the gift of plotting is the most formidable. … that is how Murdoch tends to manifest her considerable exuberance as a writer, rather than in the creation of endless otherness in her characters, which nevertheless (and rather sadly) seems to constitute her largest ambition.

Her success in creating characters is qualified, but nevertheless, as Schneiderman says, ‘in her many novels, Murdoch gives testimony to the wide range of her empathetic capacity, made possible by her moral intensity and her ability to imagine lives very different to her own’ (392). It may be that Murdoch’s reiteration of this as her most important aim has made readers over-critical in this regard: the chief problem is not that characters are indistinguishable in looks or personality, but that emotional preoccupations and intellectual obsessions carry over from one novel to the next, embodied in different people in different, but often similarly bizarre, situations. Patricia Waugh quotes Murdoch’s discussion of Under the Net in her interview with Kermode: ‘The problem which is mentioned in the title is the problem of how far conceptualizing and theorizing, which from one point of view are absolute, essential, in fact divide you from the thing that is the object of theoretical attention’ (65); and goes on to say, ‘However, her obsessive concern with the self-conscious presentation of this dilemma in her fiction often precludes the possibility of developing the “opaque” or “contingent” characters which she desires’ (81). She herself acknowledged that ‘in order to tell the truth, especially about anything complicated, we need a conceptual apparatus which partly has the effect of concealing what it attempts to reveal’ (‘Existentialists and Mystics’ 221).

Her other criteria for good novels are perhaps easier to measure against her work. Comic they certainly are. Awful things happen, but they are most often absurdly awful, surrounded with irrelevancies and distractions, rather than the stark and beautiful terror of tragedy. Life goes on for the survivors, the dead are left behind and superseded by other loves, other obsessions. Even Bradley Pearson’s death, which could almost aspire to tragedy, is cushioned with the postscripts of other characters who comically demonstrate their continued vitality. She also resists the satirical urge: it is difficult to think of a passage in any of the novels which could be described as genuinely satirical, although there are some which she could have steered that way if she were so inclined: Rupert’s philosophical explanation of why stealing is wrong in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, perhaps, or Blaise’s professional psychological activities in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. Perhaps the closest approach to satire comes in ironic touches in her first-person narratives, for example, when Bradley describes a childhood experience of beauty: ‘the child wept and knew himself an artist’ (87); but satire is a mode of writing which refuses to countenance explanation and understanding and stands apart from and above its subject matter, and its particular hard brilliance is not Murdoch’s style at all.

Another of her criteria is the all-important distinction between imagination and fantasy: imagination being an impersonal force, and fantasy mere wish-fulfillment on the artist’s part. Schneiderman points out that ‘we know so little about her private life, that it is difficult to estimate the extent to which she has been able to compose her novels without drawing upon her deepest personal concerns’ (391-2). In what she regards as imaginative, truthful writing, ‘poetic justice’ must be resisted. Tallis must sustain his fairly honourable defeat, but go on trying, while Julius enjoys himself unpunished, because that is the way of the world. This does not mean ‘happy endings’ are disallowed. As Joyce Carol Oates remarked, in a perceptive essay written in 1978, some of Murdoch’s characters ‘realize that they are doomed to happiness and to the mediocrity that seems to imply’ (‘Sacred’ 3). Happy endings occur, but they are never unqualified. Tim and Gertrude reunite in Nuns and Soldiers, but the Count remains alone as a result; Simon and Axel re-establish their happiness in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, but in the shadow of Rupert’s absurd and horrible death. The characters who end up happily are not always the ‘best’ or most deserving, or the most identifiable with Murdoch and her ideas.

Her novels, she would like to think, dissipate drama and allow ordinary life to leak in: the comic and absurd play their part in this dissipation. But many of her novels contain highly dramatic situations; and they tend to be the memorable parts, rather than the philosophical conversations or reflective musings of her characters, or, in many cases, the individual characters themselves: as Bloom points out, plotting is her greatest talent. One way drama can be resisted effectively is at the close of a novel, and this is perhaps where she is most successful in this regard. The end of The Sea, The Sea, after all the drama, shows Charles, the protagonist, drifting back to his old ways. Mor, at the end of The Sandcastle, wanders, resigned and undramatic, back into his family circle and picks up the threads. Drama is not interested in the accommodations made by the survivors of catastrophe, whereas Murdoch’s novels make a point of noticing them.

Murdoch is an authoritarian novelist in the sense that she does not want her novels to be factually indeterminate. A careful reader, she believes (or hopes), can always establish what ‘really’ happens in her novels. It is clear, however, from her interviews that this is not always the case. She has had to explain that Bradley did not kill Arnold in The Black Prince (Todd 103), that Anne in Nuns and Soldiers really may have been visited by Jesus (Heusel 11), and that James in The Sea, The Sea did save Charles’ life by some super-human feat accomplished through his Buddhist training (Bigsby 213). Most of her novels, though, do leave one in little doubt as to the events, natural and supernatural. The deeper meanings and myths are naturally not so obvious, but she has said several times that she is not concerned if readers fail to notice them. The novels she feels are better, her later novels, as she says, are longer and have room for descriptions of all kinds; the elliptical statement and the pregnant silence are not her style. The later novels are not in fact uniformly better than the earlier ones. It could be argued, for example, that Ludens’ quest for the truth he believes Marcus possesses in The Message to the Planet is merely an unwieldy and overblown reiteration of Jake’s pursuit of Hugo Belfounder in Under the Net. Her belief in the superiority of the later novels is a symptom of her central problem: that she regards her great dramatic gift as, in a way, a drawback, which impedes her in the impossible aim of creating the perfect open novel. Because she was continually worrying at the problem of writing the novels she believed she should aspire to, she failed to develop in the way she might have had she accepted her considerable novelistic gifts for what they were. Patrick Swinden analyses her problem thus: some of her characters have learned to accept their situation, like Tallis, and

in a world where most people are for ever exercising their claim to be free, such behaviour is … bound to seem eccentric. The form of Iris Murdoch's plots, and the positions occupied in them by these natural and eccentric characters, reveals the ambiguous position she finds herself in vis-à-vis the worlds of nature and of freedom. Intellectually, she escapes the trap this modern dilemma sets for her. But her very intellectuality narrows the scope of her work to an enrichment of the concepts by which we grow to understand reality. (257)

Her plots, meanwhile, become increasingly tailored to demonstrate these concepts, rather than to portray realistic situations, and are driven by a similar set of compulsions embodied in her various major characters, with the ironic consequence that her strivings for realism are undermined by the very techniques she has developed to attain it. The fact remains that, though her plots may be ‘silly [and] inconsequential’, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, they are nevertheless ‘deeply absorbing’ (Oates 5): her attempts to suppress her plotting skill never entirely succeeded.

She told Michael Bellamy that there was social criticism in the novels, ‘in a quiet way’ (Bellamy 133). And it certainly is quiet. It is difficult to think of an example of what would ordinarily be called social criticism, in the same way, and for similar reasons, as it is difficult to identify any satire in the novels. D.W. Harding said, talking about Jane Austen, ‘Not to be preoccupied with abstract social questions is almost a necessary condition of writing a good novel’ (Harding 65). Murdoch is sometimes too preoccupied with abstract moral questions, but although social reality constantly obtrudes in her characters’ lives, it most often comes in the form of necessary personal responsibilities, like Mor’s duty to his children, or Bradley’s duty to Priscilla. The belittling and destructive power of gossip is sometimes mentioned, but more as an example of human nature than as social criticism. Individual responsibility is too important to Murdoch for her to be a social critic.

Individual responsibility is connected with individual difference. One of her most striking techniques for conveying her moral position that individual people have value and are profoundly different is to show how often people’s opinions and feelings are very different to what other characters believe, or assume, they are, even when there is no intention to deceive. Sometimes very close siblings, or lovers, or happily married couples are able to read each other’s thoughts, but more often assumptions are inaccurate, often with desperate consequences – for Hartley in The Sea, The Sea, for example, whom Charles disastrously misunderstands. Schneiderman says ‘her favorite strategy is to reveal, at the end of a novel, how the protagonists’ perceptions of various relationships were entirely mistaken’ (380). Her detailed descriptions and sometimes almost Homeric repetition of epithets are also a part of a moral imperative to particularise. Felix’s car, in An Unofficial Rose, is always described as the ‘very dark blue Mercedes’, Julian’s hair in The Black Prince is described carefully every time she appears – in fact, an interesting study could be made of hair in Murdoch’s novels: so much attention is paid to it that one could conclude that it must have some coded meaning. Very few of her male characters are bald, for instance. However, coded meanings can always be constructed by an ingenious critic, when the author’s intention may have been only to describe each character and situation in all its particularity. Murdoch certainly uses symbolism. A painting, or a place, or rocks or flowers, can all carry symbolic weight. Usually, as she said, it is ‘invented by the characters themselves’ (Biles 125), and in these cases it is quite natural. It is a human tendency, similar to the narrative impulse, to invest inanimate objects with human meaning. Many of Murdoch’s novels have a natural or prehistoric phenomenon – a secluded pool, or an ancient rock carving – which the characters experience as magical in some way. These symbolic patterns can add to the repetitious effect from novel to novel, and occasionally seem perfunctory, but the symbolism she uses in her best novels is well integrated and adds resonance and texture to the narrative.

Murdoch's distinction ‘between a sort of closed novel, where my own obsessional feeling about the novel is very strong and draws it closely together, and an open novel, where there are more accidental and separate and free characters’ (Rose 66), is an ethical concept, part of her philosophy of the novel. In practice, she seems to believe that the distinction comes down to how self-contained the novel's world is – whether there are many peripheral characters or not. In the Rose interview, she said she would like to write ‘a novel which was made up entirely of peripheral characters’ (66). Presumably this was not an entirely serious idea; she is a novelist who likes to be read! Some of her best novels, such as An Accidental Man or Nuns and Soldiers, have a lot of characters, others, like A Severed Head or The Black Prince, have a Murdochian ‘court’. Over the course of her career, the irrepressible vitality which characterises many of the earlier novels gradually becomes encumbered with superfluous characters who exist merely as examples of literary freedom. In The Sea, The Sea, for example, Joyce Carol Oates complains, ‘there are too many sketchy characters’ (7). Murdoch acknowledged this problem in her interview with Frank Kermode in 1963; ‘there is a tendency to oscillate between achieving a kind of intensity through having a very powerful story and sacrificing character, and having the characters and losing the intensity’ (‘House’ 64). But the ‘space in which to develop’ (Todd 101) that she tries to give her characters in the later novels is occupied by more and more detailed description of their mental and emotional processes which actually inhibits their development, because they become over-determined and the reader is not allowed enough space to imaginatively recreate them. More indeterminacy would allow for greater realism.

Murdoch told Rose in 1968 that freedom was no longer her main subject, although it might have been in the past. Later novels nevertheless treat the subject. Morgan, in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, who aspires to be free, cannot achieve freedom because she is incorrigibly selfish; but nobody could describe her selfless husband Tallis as free except in the most abstract metaphysical sense. Ann, in An Unofficial Rose, a good, unselfish person, is psychologically not free to marry Felix because of her bond with Randall. Freedom, for Murdoch, comes to be almost a meaningless concept. A character who claims to be free, or wishes for freedom, is almost guaranteed to be in the grip of some undeniable necessity.

Murdoch sees that the novelist is often in the false position of being a judge but trying to discourage others from judging. Her judgmental characters are usually shown to be wrong in their judgments, and she is, as she told Hartill, more interested in truth than justice. Her attention to particulars is important here, and her reluctance to satirise. Satirists are judges, who refuse to understand or to take mitigating circumstances into account. She would prefer to mention, for example, that Julius spent the war in Belsen, than merely to condemn his bad behaviour with no explanation. Murdoch tries to make each character realistic, with a unique inner life: she has criticised herself for making Nan in The Sandcastle and Morgan in A Fairly Honourable Defeat too unpleasant and shallow, because this makes it too easy for the reader to condemn them. Schneiderman comes near to defining an ethical problem when he says, ‘Murdoch attempts to use her imagination to trace the consequences of her protagonists’ need-determined fantasies’ (380). She believes that only a very small number of people are good enough to rise above their fantasies: ‘It is extremely difficult, there aren’t any saintly people’ (220), she told Bigsby. Therefore, either she believes herself doomed to failure, or she regards herself as one of these saintly people, which does not accord with her habitual modesty – in fact, she wrote in ‘The Sovereignty of Good’ that ‘the good man is humble’ (385). James Wood has found that her aesthetics have a strange, quasi-philosophical circularity. … She knows that Shakespeare is great, philosophically. In other words, her aesthetics is not aesthetics at all, but is philosophy. … In one rather austere sense, her own novels must then seem irrelevant as practice, for they are just shards of this ideal. For if one just knows Shakespeare to be great, then one also knows that, out of sight, there is an even greater artist, the Idea of the artist. In this view of things, one could not only never be as great as Shakespeare or Tolstoy, one could never be as great as fiction itself; one could never be as great as the Good. Thus one could never be great at all. (‘Iris Murdoch’ 179-80)

He goes on to ask ‘why should it be the case that the highest ethics is the suppression of self, or that the greatest artists gloriously smother their personalities?’ . She set herself the most exalted standard, realising that she might never attain it, but she believed the effort was an artistic and moral imperative.

And it is partly this constant, if vain, effort to make her characters unique, to show that everyone has their own inner life and everyone can suffer, that there is no-one that doesn’t matter, that makes her such a compelling writer. When her characters betray each other, someone gets hurt. No-one can indulge selfish urges and get away with it: there is always a price to pay. Her novels do not imply that adultery or lying are absolutely wrong, but they have consequences, some more predictable than others, which must be dealt with. She told Jo Brans, ‘I think some people … might read my books because there is a kind of assertion of old-fashioned values, of the reality of virtue. Of course this also annoys other people who regard it as something not proper to be said’ (44). Her values may be old-fashioned, but they are also quite austere, and if there were no escape from the machine of compulsive behaviour and habitual wrong-doing her world would be bleak indeed. Even her good characters can be, like Anne Cavidge in Nuns and Soldiers, ‘too high-mindedly concerned with organizing the defeat of [her own] hopes to have any thought to spare for catastrophes which her selfless masochistic morality might be bringing about’ (502). Very often, too, the qualities she praises – imaginative attention to others, apprehending their individuality and difference – can lead to situations like falling in love disastrously. A person with little imagination, like James Tayper Pace in The Bell, is less likely to be tempted. She does, however, let some of her characters off, even if that means the consequences fall more heavily on others, like the two children in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine who suffer while Blaise lives happily with Emily. Life is not fair, but some can salvage happiness, and are not condemned for doing so.

As a realist, which is her highest aim, she is only partly successful. Her novels delight in extreme and dramatic situations. However, even realistic art must be selective, and her plots usually concern those short periods of high, unsustainable drama and stress in people’s lives which can be seen as their defining moments. Kermode observes that love and death are her constant themes, and ‘the reality in which they deal is a different reality from the order of ordinary poetry … The contingent must be got in. … This reality is a difficult vocation’ (‘Bruno’s Dream’ 25). Strange things do happen, people are odder than they appear to be, and to show this is a part of her moral intention, but, as A.N. Wilson observes, ‘the dramas of the books … take place inside the author’s head, rather than in some attempted photographic representation of the real world’ (80). The characters are odd, but they are odd in a very characteristic, and eventually monotonous, way.

Are her characters ‘free’ in her sense? L.R. Leavis quotes her own criticism of Nan in The Sandcastle explaining how she feels she could have improved the novel (see Bigsby 227), and goes on to criticise her for her mentality as a writer: her characters perform roles according to a preconceived pattern, a pattern without artistic inevitability which can be reprogrammed to come out differently. Characters are for her vehicles for concepts, which can without compunction be shuffled around.

This is unfair, but contains a grain of truth. It is not that she sees characters as ‘vehicles for concepts’, although her plots may be seen in this way; it is more that she wants to be just and truthful, and not allow fantasy to skew the picture; and ‘the intellect comes in … to prevent … the plot from being coerced by unconscious forces’ (Bigsby, ‘Interview’ 227). A difficulty arises unless one sees this question of the freedom of fictional characters as a continuum. If characters are either free or unfree, perhaps none would pass the test; but if some characters are more free than others then we can see the measure of her success with characters like Bradley and Julian in The Black Prince, Tim and Daisy in Nuns and Soldiers, even Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, who is, despite his mythological origins, quite an extraordinary individual. None of these people seem like Murdoch in any significant way, and neither are they like each other. It must be, in the end, a matter of balance, a balance which at her best she achieves, but which is compromised when, in her quest for an all-inclusive realism, she tries too hard to fill in all the details.

Warner Berthoff believes that Murdoch, together with Muriel Spark, are ‘very nearly the first serious English novelists who have not only broken with the exalted ethos of modernism, the supreme commitment to “writing well” and producing masterpieces, but are no longer haunted by it’ (329). But Murdoch had another ‘exalted ethos’ which did haunt her. As James Wood puts it, ‘perhaps some such excessive Platonic scrupulosity on Murdoch’s part infects her practice as a novelist; it may explain the apparent wildness, even the carelessness, of many of her novels, not to mention the almost disrespectful fecundity of her imagination’ (‘Iris Murdoch’ 180). Bloom regarded her as the most eminent contemporary British novelist, while predicting that ‘her formidable combination of intellectual drive and storytelling exuberance may never fuse into a great novel’ (7). And Frank Kermode sums up his article on Bruno’s Dream by saying that it is ‘disappointing only by the fantastically high standards it contrives to suggest’ (25). The duty of the artist ‘to silence and expel self, to contemplate and delineate nature with a clear eye, is not easy and demands a moral discipline’ (‘On “God” and “Good”’ 352). The intentional fallacy alerts us against judging an artist by her own standards. If Murdoch longed to be a great realist and creator of characters, like Jane Austen and Tolstoy, but was rather a marvellous creator of plots, we should appreciate what she has actually done rather than complain that she has not succeeded in her own impossible, quixotic aims, at the same time acknowledging, and perhaps regretting, the extra handicap she placed herself under by her dedication to her high ideals.

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