The Engendered and Dis-engendered Other in Iris Murdoch’s Early Fiction

Abstract

Outside of the developing community of Iris Murdoch scholars it is rare for those with a passing interest in her work to question her relationship with gender in fiction and the underlying sexual conflict. Murdoch’s work is often viewed as exclusively concerned with moral realism. It is only in recent years that the dearth of criticism connecting Murdoch’s fiction with the themes of gender and power relations has begun to be rectified. Tammy Grimshaw’s work Sexuality, Gender and Power in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction(2005) has invigorated scholarship in this area and, along with Deborah Johnson’s Iris Murdoch(1987), is the only critical text commenting directly upon sexuality and gender in Murdoch’s oeuvre. Previously, the oft-repeated critical method was to consider Murdoch’s theoretical writing on the novel and then apply the template she provides to her own fiction. Although this offers some insight into Murdoch’s work, it in no way allows for the large variety of readings that her novels warrant; it also debases her philosophy and theory to an extent as it fails to attend to (a very Murdochian concept) the contradictions and self-division within her work.