Stories, Rituals and Healers in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction

Abstract

In this chapter I will ask if Iris Murdoch’s narratives of suffering and healing might justifiably make us think of Murdoch as a healer of the soul as much as a moralist. I will consider the narratives of Tamar, a young woman hideously tortured by remorse after the abortion of her baby in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and of Edward, a young man similarly tormented after causing the death of his best friend by giving him LSD in The Good Apprentice (1985). Both these narratives relate the recovery of their sufferers to the actions of healers (a priest in Tamar’s case, a psychiatrist in Edward’s). I will also consider two further narratives where healing occurs without the agency of another: that of Stuart, the lonely, troubled and misunderstood older brother in The Good Apprentice, and of Moy, a sixteen-year-old girl in The Green Knight (1993), gripped by what a mental health diagnostician might classify as obsessive compulsive disorder, but who defies such a classification when seen through Murdoch’s compassionate eyes. I make no apology for an approach to Murdoch’s fiction which appears in danger of treating it as a series of case studies: in a groundbreaking approach to D.H. Lawrence, Gerald Doherty shows the extent to which Lawrence uses prior sexological discourse in his fiction.¹ I contend that discourses from the two greatest depth-psychologists, Freud and Jung, are embedded in Murdoch’s writing, and that her approach to the suffering of her characters would not have taken the form it has without her deep knowledge of Jung.