Abstract
The frothy, uproarious, irrepressibly gay twenties could not sustain their devil-may-care hedonism. The so-called lost generation embraced an epicurean outlook that was cynical, if not nihilistic, in content. Like the characters in Noel Coward’s early plays, they were on pleasure bent, though uncomfortably aware that everything has a price, that every orgiastic experience must be paid for, that every form of excess begets its own nemesis. A period of reaction set in. When the depression came, writers focussed their attention chiefly on the socioeconomic problem. If the chief literary spokesmen during the twenties were D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, the representative figure of the thirties and early forties was George Orwell, with his interests and energies centered in politics. As a novelist he had no absorbing interest in the subject of sex.
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References
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1930, p. 106.
Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1930, Ibid., p. 123.
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust and Decline and Fall. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1960, p. 330. Decline and Fall was first published in the late twenties, before Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism in 1930.
The sixties marked a sharp turning point in the life of Great Britain. Time was speeded up, manners changed, as it were, overnight, moral values that only yesterday had the support of the community were discarded and replaced by an ethic of permissiveness. Reserve was cast to the four winds. The reputation for reserve that the British had acquired—that reputation was torn to shreds. “The traditional reserve of the British…collapsed to such an extent that when, just before the end of the decade, a young couple publicy performed the act of love at an open-air concert, it raised hardly a stir, and what stir it did raise was largely admiring. (‘Go on, baby,’ the spectators encouragingly cried, ‘do your thing’; and others, not present, seemed to share, however fearfully, the same feeling.)” (Bernard Levin, Run It Down the Flagpole: Britain in the Sixties. New York: Atheneum, 1971, p. 52.) The scandals of the ruling class, particularly the Profumo case, furnished the public a rich feast of salacious rumors. John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, had been sexually intimate with Miss Christine Keeler. She could not, technically, be called a prostitute, but “there was no doubt that she took money in return for her favours, even though it appeared that they were at first usually granted in furtherance of her own pleasures.” (Ibid., p. 52.)
See R. V. Cassill, Doctor Cobb’s Game. New York: Bernard Geis Association, 1970: a fictionalized version of the Profumo Affair.
Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs. Boston: Gambit, Incorporated, 1970, p. 34.
Rabelais quoted in Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963, p. 155.
Peter Wolfe, The Disciplined Heart: Iris Murdoch and Her Novels. Columbus: University of Missouri Press, 1966, p. 33.
See A. S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. London: Chatto and Windus, 1970.
G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell. London: Faber and Faber, 1968, p. 20.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, p. 14.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 21.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 21.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 29.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 32.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 50.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 76.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 159.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 202.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 202.
Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head. New York: The Viking Press, 1961, Ibid., p. 203.
James Gindin, Postwar British Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962, p. 194.
Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1967, p. 126.
Iris Murdoch, The Time of the Angels. New York: The Viking Press, 1966, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., pp. 41–42.
Ibid., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 69.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., pp. 80–81.
Ibid., p. 163.
Ibid., p. 175.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 176.
Ibid., p. 178.
Ibid., p. 178.
Ibid., p. 179.
Ibid., p. 230.
Ibid., p. 235.
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1973). The New Sex Morality. In: The Sexual Revolution in Modern English Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-6800-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-6800-7_10
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