Sex, Purity, and Madness in Iris Murdoch's Fiction

Sex, Purity, and Madness in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction 5 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol.20, No. 3 (2012) Sex, Purity, and Madness in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction Michelle Austin (De Montfort University) In the later part of the twentieth‐century, women’s writing was beginning to offer a direct commentary on, and, in many cases, a detailed examination of women’s sexual status and attitudes in society to the changing ideas about the choices women were making regarding their virginity and sexual conduct. Novels by Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Mary McCarthy, Doris Lessing, Sylvia Plath, and countless others, offered a range of perspectives on the effect of new birth control methods, the consequences of freer attitudes to sex, and the inevitable correlative issues of pregnancy and abortion. These novels took many of their perspectives from, and threaded back into, debates among feminists during the second‐wave and were shown to present women as recognizing and actively combating the suppression of the same rights surrounding sexual exploration that were afforded to men. The contrast that this presents in terms of Iris Murdoch’s fiction is an important one as many of her male characters offer the standard social response to the knowledge 6 Michelle Austin that female characters in these novels have either lost their virginity, or that they are believed to have done so. Additionally, many of these attitudes are highly reminiscent of the kind of moral pomposity put forward in nineteenth‐century novels and the kind of hypocrisy that was noted and mocked by writers like Henry James or Thomas Hardy, both of whom are known to have influenced Murdoch. The effect of these seemingly archaic presentations is such that Murdoch could be seen to be upholding male‐designated roles of either virgins or whores. In previous centuries, this sexual double‐ standard often resulted in what Elaine Showalter has called “the female malady,” a term meant to refer to a perceived passivity, hysteria, and frigidity in women but which is instead a response to the impossibility of choosing correctly between maintaining innocence and virginity and gaining sexual knowledge. This article is therefore concerned primarily with the manner in which female characters perceive and manage their own sexual status in Murdoch’s fiction as well as with highlighting the ways in which Murdoch explored the social perceptions of women who become sexually active. In doing this, the seemingly automatic switch in view of the sacred ‘virgin’ and the depraved ‘whore’ is examined in relation to several of Murdoch’s texts with a view to explaining the confusion experienced by women and the resulting mania and despair that they feel when presented with an impossible choice between purity and the realization of sexual desire. The fact that many of these texts were published in the midst of radical cultural changes and shifting attitudes through the rise of feminist and sexual revolutions goes some way to explain Murdoch’s Sex, Purity, and Madness in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction 7 obvious desire to question female sexuality and sexual initiation and to try to understand what these things meant to women on a personal level and in terms of social perception. Whereas in previous decades the moral reactions against sex before marriage had been much stronger, the 1970s saw the advent of radical feminism and more readily available birth control. Phyllis Chesler has written that “[w]omen can never be sexually actualized as long as men control the means of production and reproduction. Women have had to barter their sexuality . Female frigidity as we know it will cease only when such bartering ceases” (47). In Chesler’s view then, the frigidity, passivity, and hysteria that Murdoch registers in her work all come from the fact that their knowledge of sex and their access to the means by which to become sexually autonomous were controlled and restricted by men. Murdoch can be seen to agree with this view, as her women are woefully ignorant of birth control, while many are innocent, or are treated as such, of the realities of sex. The key point to be made here is that Murdoch’s use of reproving male moralists is often misconstrued as upholding the expectations of women’s ‘right’ behaviour. Instead, what she means by portraying such characters and their views is that, despite the freedom provided by new methods of contraception such as the Pill, unmarried and sexually active women were still subject to all the same prejudices that had existed for centuries before. Characters such as Jessica Bird in The Nice and the Good (1967) provide an acknowledgment of the realities for women who either become pregnant or who live in perpetual terror of pregnancy and the stigma of unmarried motherhood. The latter fear is described in 8 Michelle Austin some detail in the case of Jessica, as she is shown to have “thought herself in love on a number of occasions . [but] her attention had been very much more concentrated upon not having a baby” (82). Her method of ensuring this is explained as: “[p]erpetual change and no hard feelings” (82), meaning that she avoids sexual congress by means of frequent changes of romantic partners and thus employs abstinence as contraception. This early policy of celibacy and horror at the prospect of unwanted pregnancy is the same as that expressed by female characters in other Murdoch novels and, further still, it echoes sentiments expressed in the broader canon of women’s writing during the 1960s. Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar (1963), for example, presents her own argument that women’s potential enjoyment of sex is impaired by this fear, explaining that men don’t “have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line” (234). Given that Esther suffers a mental breakdown in Plath’s novel, one can infer that the risk of such upheavals in women’s lives might lead to what has commonly been known as female frigidity or extreme pledges of chastity. Interestingly though, none of the women in any of Murdoch’s novels openly discuss birth control methods, and, as Jessica serves to demonstrate, many of them appear ignorant of them. In contrast to feminist novels by writers such as Mary McCarthy, who gave practical advice to women through their fiction, Murdoch’s work is less didactic and instructive, instead showing that many women felt ill‐equipped to take control of their gynecology by using birth control methods, or were overwhelmed by the options and lack of explanations about these. Sex, Purity, and Madness in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction 9 At the same time, however, Murdoch is also forced to acknowledge that it would be unusual, in modern day society, for anyone to retain their virginity into mature adulthood, and that such prolonged abstinence would inevitably result in other people attempting to convince them to lose it and perhaps even to attempt to force them to do so. Murdoch often champions younger virginal characters such as Julian Baffin or Colette Forbes for their principles and their avoidance of this kind peer pressure, while their preserved virginity is always considered to be something rare and special. As Clifford Larr comments in A Word Child: “It’s so nice to think of anybody being a virgin these days” (77). Consequently, Murdoch’s recurring presentations of this double‐bind situation demonstrates that women are condemned by men and by wider society, either for being frigid and retaining their purity for too long or for their having relinquished their virginity and become “damaged”. However, rather than offering a perspective on the ways that women can combat this, as other writers like Carter or Atwood have done more clearly in their work, Murdoch is instead concerned with demonstrating that, for many women, there is no correct action. Additionally, as is also shown in this essay, this is one of the primary reasons that so many of her female characters become mentally disturbed or unstable. Murdoch’s personal views on women and sex were not as morally censorious as those posited by her male characters; in fact, she had several love affairs of her own both before and after her marriage to John Bayley in 1954. In light of this, one cannot infer that she was personally attacking women who chose to become sexually active, or upholding rigid ideas on chastity and abstinence as a way 10 Michelle Austin to preserve women’s morality. Rather, she was reflecting social, and male, prejudice and attempting to make the point that having control over gynecology and biology, while it might prove women equal to men in one way, would also involve re‐writing 2000 years worth of established moral codes. Sexual experience, even in the modern Western world, can be shown to contribute to the attachment of derogatory labels to women, as Jessica Valenti has documented in much of her work on the subject of purity, while the man is considered a conquistador by all his male friends (Valenti, He’s A Stud, She’s A Slut). As Valenti reveals, it is the women who are subject to the backlash after the event of sexual intercourse has taken place. The men are excused or forgiven for their own misdemeanours because they are men and because the ‘nature’ of being a man renders this kind of free sexual behaviour more admissible; women, however, are not excused in the same ways. Examples of characters such as Jessica Bird, who recognizes the impending backlash that would result were she to become pregnant by a man to whom she was not married and who might be unlikely ever to marry her, as is the case in her relationship with John Ducane in the novel, demonstrate that Murdoch was also aware of the stigma attached to women when they lose their virginity.

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