Iris Murdoch’s Gothic Fiction
Blog post by Miles Leeson
Scratch the surface of just about any Murdoch novel and, just like the nineteenth-century forerunners she wished to emulate, there are elements of the Gothic. Although she wished to distance herself from this, ‘As a would-be realist, and somebody who I hope is writing novels that have a lot of different characteristics and different atmospheres, I would not like to be labelled a Gothic Novelist. I would regard this as limiting in a slightly derogatory sense’, in 1978 she agreed that her London novels had much in common with the genre. ‘My London, the Gothic London? That’s O.K. by me. I don’t mind the idea of Gothic London, the sort of Piranesi London; although insofar as London is a sort of main character in appears differently in different contexts’. However, by the publication of her last major work that deals in the London Gothic, The Time of the Angels (1966), she had decided that a reconfiguration of her style was needed.
The key to understanding Murdoch’s interest in, and use of, Gothic settings and archetypes is, I think, in her love for the great nineteenth-century novels of Austen, Henry James, Dostoyevsky and, especially perhaps, Dickens. Whilst Shakespeare was her ‘patron saint of novelists’ she thought of Dickens as the preeminent novelist of his age (although she had difficulty pinpointing the greatest of his works) and readers of Dickens are well aware of the darkness and decrepitude that mark out Bleak House, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit and many others.
Why we should return to this form of realism is highlighted in her important essay of 1961, ‘Against Dryness’ where she says that ‘Literature can arm us against consolation and fantasy and can help us to recover from the ailments of Romanticism. If it can be said to have a task, that surely is its task…prose must recover its former glory, eloquence and discourse must return. I would connect eloquence with the attempt to speak the truth’. She would go on to write in 1966 that nothing mattered so much to her as writing a great novel, and that to do so she need to return to re-reading Shakespeare for his sense of character, and his ‘negative capability’ – to disappear from the scene itself leaving no trace of authorial oversight. That this occurred in the same year as the publication of her final Gothic novel, The Time of the Angels, should perhaps come as no surprise.
Murdoch’s experimentation with the Gothic genre is bookended by her first and tenth novels, roughly the early period of her fictional career. Whilst it is arguable that The Flight from the Enchanter is not a Gothic novel at all, but rather a realist work with occasional Gothic elements, The Bell, The Unicorn, The Italian Girl and The Time of the Angels are definitely in this mode and one could also make the case for A Severed Head. Most of the works of this period, particularly the early novels, are all experimental in some sense: Murdoch is playing with differing modes of narration, the form of genre and characterisation, and the structuring of the text itself. What strikes me in revisiting these early works in advance of my forthcoming course is how deftly the Gothic mode she employs is connected to the ‘livedness’ of the text. By this I mean the everyday ‘thinginess’ (as she would later say) of her fictional worlds rubs up against the fantastic set pieces in such a way that you don’t have to suspend your disbelief in it. You realise you are in ‘Murdochland’ and the reflexive form of realism she uses to drive her plots forward synergises perfectly with these scenes of Gothic horror.
Even in her most ‘appalling’ (a word used dozens of times with the novel) work, The Unicorn, the balance between the immediacy of the embodied, sensational gothic is leavened by an undertone of the mundane everyday goodness – I’m thinking here in particular of Dennis and Alice - that becomes such a key feature of her major works of the 1970s. As Avril Horner has commented ‘in drawing on Gothic devices and conventions, Murdoch chose very obviously to draw attention to the seductive power of narrative’ and as a mode it ‘tends to encourage in its readers responses opposite to those that Murdoch’s philosophy endorses’. In so doing, then, underlining the danger in consoling fantasy.
Murdoch never truly abandons the Gothic mode but, much as her realist nineteenth century forebears did, she allows it to break through at intervals in her mature work to draw attention to the necessity of right perception to the individual. This shift in focus, she would argue, allows our conscious mind to undergo an ‘unselfing’, a reduction in ego – and you don’t need to be trained in literary criticism to realise that the classic gothic mode relies on the male ego to drive it forward. In Murdoch’s gothic novels, then, it is the concern with male power and domination that she wishes to focus on and hold up to examination: Mischa Fox, Calvin Blick, Carel Fisher, Gerald Scottow, Otto Narraway fit into this role.
These powerful enchanter figures haunt her works – much as her real-life enchanters did – but they are never allowed the final word. At the end of each novel we see characters flee from their clutches, emancipating themselves from the shadow of their masters. This, ultimately, is what Murdoch wants us to take, I think, from her gothic works; that there is always a choice to be made and that right vision enables right action, and that freedom remains a possibility for those under the spell of the domineering males who haunt these novels.
Miles Leeson
Director, Iris Murdoch Research Centre
Our live online course on Iris Murdoch’s Gothic Novels runs fortnightly from 5 April to 17 May 2023.
