Chapter Four

The Bell and Platonism

Before The Bell (1958), her third novel, Murdoch’s primary concern was
the development of philosophy within fiction, namely that of Sartrean exis-
tentialism and we have discussed how this leads into her fascination with
Germanic philosophy. However, this novel reverts to the (anti)pastoral, as
used by writers such as Hardy and George Eliot. The shift from Sartre is
marked by the focus upon a more rural setting. However, Frank Baldanza
believes that in sketching out this novel Murdoch uses Sartre’s distinction
between being-for-itself and being-for-others, which is at the basis of the
desire for freedom:1 Murdoch had not quite escaped from the influence
of the existentialists. A great deal of criticism has already been written con-
cerning The Bell. Of all Murdoch’s earlier work it is to this novel that critics
return time and again to re-examine the structure, the narrative content,
the inherent issues of morality, and the nature of the novel itself. It is of The
Bell that Byatt writes in 1965:

Within The Bell, as opposed to The Sandcastle, or indeed, to any of Miss

Murdoch’s other novels one has the sense that to attempt to expose a
framework of thought is to diminish it in some way; this is because here we
have a novel which has the solid life that Miss Murdoch praises in the great
nineteenth-century novels.2

At the point of her writing this (1965) Murdoch had yet to publish a large
body of work. For the purposes of this book, however, it is necessary –
indeed essential – not only to expose the framework but also to subject it
to philosophical investigation. Byatt believes that the characters have a life
outside the novel, and it is certainly easy to view the narrative as open-ended,
but of central importance here is not the open-endedness of the novel
but also of the relationship between Imber and the contingent world –
necessarily the nearby village and, to a greater extent, London.

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 The Bell and Platonism 87

I believe Byatt is correct when she suggests that The Bell ‘tends toward the
crystalline’3 due to the nature of its placement within a community – which
being a collection of disparate characters that must interact with each other
lest the community falls apart of course does so – a community which lacks
the form of the good. The crystalline nature emerges from Murdoch’s
tight narrative formation which, although exacerbated by the formulaic
characterization, is nonetheless necessary for the novel to sustain itself
although this is certainly less apparent than in the novels discussed in the
last two chapters.
I believe that Wolfe is correct in his assertion that ‘The Bell marks Iris
Murdoch’s return to a mythological setting for the purpose of blending
philosophy and social criticism’,4 as the encapsulation of Murdoch’s use of
Platonic myth and philosophy is the major force behind the narrative.
I believe that in order to thoroughly examine the impact of Platonic philo-
sophy upon The Bell we must see the novel as Wolfe does as a form of social
criticism, one that returns Murdoch to her mythological setting. Dora
and Toby are the catalysts by which a series of events unfold which propel
the other inhabitants of Imber Court, from a subsistent existence at the
outset, into a form of reality; events which have already been hinted at by
the abbess. This chapter will offer a discussion of Platonic myth and sym-
bolism, Murdoch’s use of homosexuality, the role of the outsider and
Murdoch’s view of ‘the good’ and moral vision. ‘We need more concepts
than our philosophies have furnished us with’ Murdoch writes. ‘We need
to be enabled to be able to think in terms of degrees of freedom, and to
picture, in a non-metaphysical, non-totalitarian, and non-religious sense,
the transcendence of reality’.5
The Bell and, in particular, The Sandcastle (1957) are the natural beginnings
of Murdoch’s fictional use of Platonism. The creation of The Sandcastle
marks a shift in Murdoch’s writing. In contrast to Under the Net and The Flight
from the Enchanter, in The Sandcastle Murdoch creates an insular and low-key
novel which deals directly with morality within family life and the wider com-
munity attached to it; in this case the love of Bill Mor for the painter Rain
Castle whose appearance signals the beginning of this novel. The number
of characters is strictly limited to provide greater focus than the previous
existential works, and the plot is much more predictable. This is a deliberate
act by Murdoch to create a ‘closed’ novel. The Sandcastle is not such a ‘closed’
novel, as The Bell, as the community which inhabits the school and the
surroundings is able to escape its confines. Although Dora is able to retreat
to the arms of Noel in London the other inhabitants seem trapped within

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 88 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

the radius of Imber Court. This is perhaps best exhibited in Toby’s leap
over the abbey wall, where the nuns appear content with their life in a
‘closed’ order. The Sandcastle develops the primary idea of ‘Against Dryness’
being a more pastoral vision of ‘the good’, and a more proactive visioning of
the impact of art upon ‘the good’ although it does not contain a ‘convincing
picture of evil’;6 this had been developed in The Flight from the Enchanter
but is not seen in its fully realized form until The Time of the Angels. It also
fails in another major aspect of ‘Against Dryness’:

We need to turn our attention away from the consoling dream necessity
of Romanticism, away from the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false
whole, toward the real impenetrable human being.7

The focusing of the narrative upon a specific location and the reduction
in the major characters as opposed to Murdoch’s first two novels serves the
fiction well and allows a much more naturalistic approach to emotion and
the development of the individual to develop. Even though Murdoch wishes
a fictional impenetrable person to emerge in her early novels it seems that
The Sandcastle works, in a limited sense, without one. This leads us then
towards the questioning of the Platonic influence upon both of these early
novels.
Murdoch’s interpretation of Plato is central to understanding both the
background to The Bell and her conception of the moral life:

Value is everywhere, [that] the whole of life is movement in a moral scale,

all knowledge is a moral quest, and the mind seeks reality and desires
the Good, which is transcendent source of spiritual power, to which we are
all related through the idea of truth.8

This holistic vision is one which Murdoch attempts to present in her

fictional world; The Bell in particular. I shall say more about Murdoch’s
conception of desire, vision and choice in morality, later in the chapter as
I now wish to concentrate on Murdoch’s specific use of the allegory of the
cave in relation to The Bell.
Murdoch’s vision of the moral life, as we can see from her earliest work,
is universal in relation to her philosophical concept of the individual. She
refers to Plato constantly in her later philosophy for inspiration and to
justify her argument against existentialism and linguistic analysis of lan-
guage. She describes the Cave as a ‘parable [which] portrays a spiritual
pilgrimage from illusion to reality’.9 As this is central to the development

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 The Bell and Platonism 89

of this novel, and Murdoch’s general conception of ‘the good’ it is worth

explaining in some detail: the nature of the allegory, the direct linkage
with the narrative and the connection with contemporary philosophy.
In the dialogue Socrates describes an underground chamber in which
there are prisoners who have been imprisoned there since before they had
memory. They are made to face the back of the cave wall and are fastened to
the floor by chains which are attached to their legs and necks, making it
impossible for them to turn around; here we see what Murdoch views as
unenlightened man in The Bell; those ‘chained’ in the community at Imber.
They may only look at the wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners burns
a fire, the only source of light in the underground chamber, the only world
which the prisoners know. Between the fire and the backs of the prisoners
runs a path along which people walk to and fro carrying whatever objects
they need on a day-to-day basis. The prisoners assume that the shadows
cast upon the wall in front of them are real objects and they therefore must
conclude that the voices and sounds that they hear are also emanating
from the shadows. Socrates then considers what would occur if one of the
prisoners was able to loosen the manacle around his neck and look around
and see what was happening behind him. He suggests that ‘if one was freed
from his fetters and compelled to stand up and suddenly turn his head
around and walk and lift his eyes up to the light, and in doing all this felt
pain, and because of the dazzle and the glitter of the light, was unable to
discern the objects whose shadows he formerly saw’.10 And this is Dora’s
realization when she raises the bell with Toby.
The pain involved in this transformation would lead to both bewilder-
ment and anxiety to such a degree that the prisoner would be likely to reject
the revelations and return to his old position, believing the shadows on the
wall to be more real than the objects and people now confronting him.
Indeed if the prisoner was forced to look directly at the fire behind him he
would suffer even more pain and would be blinded and so unable to distin-
guish among objects and would therefore wish to return to a darker level
where he may see forms of shapes again (a certain link to Michael can be
seen at this stage of the analogy). The next stage of the allegory involves
the prisoner’s journey from his place of confinement, past the fire and up
towards the entrance to the cave and then out into the sunlight. The process
would again be painful and the prisoner would be temporarily blinded
having never had contact with such a source of light; in which case he
would again be unable to discern what he saw as real. Eventually, however,
the prisoner would acclimatize to the light and begin to view the world
outside the cave. This process, Socrates tells us, would be slow. The final

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 90 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

point of the prisoner’s journey would be to look directly up at the sun and
discern the landscape set out before him. Only here, at this final stage in his
development, is it possible for the prisoner to comprehend the entirety of
the view before him and conclude that the sun ‘provides the seasons and the
courses of the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is
in some sort the cause of these things he had never seen’.11 At this point he
would realize the lowliness of his former state and wish that those incarcer-
ated with him could share in his discovery. However, if he were to return to
the cave and again be manacled and faced the wall he would appear to his
fellow prisoners as a fool, being unable to comprehend the shadows on the
wall. They would assume that his journey was fruitless as he returned with
his eyes ruined and, perhaps more importantly, would be unable to com-
prehend any knowledge or values beyond their own and would resist his
advance to explain the outside world to them.
Does any one of the characters in the novel make a successful transition
to the outside world from the darkness? The majority of the characters are
left at the end of the narrative in a state of confusion as they are dispatched
to disparate locations with no inner knowledge of themselves or how they
may possibly change their personal situation which originally brought them
to Imber. Only Dora seems to have gained an insight into her ‘self’ and
decides to leave on indefinite hiatus in Bristol to pursue a teaching career.
The community has failed in preparing the inhabitants for life outside (or
indeed life on the inside in the case of Catherine Fawley) due to a lack of
support from each other and a dearth of Platonic ‘unselfing’.
Murdoch believes, as Plato does, that this myth can be used as a metaphor
for the moral life, which entails levels of moral awareness and perception.
At the lowest level one only has the vaguest idea of higher states of aware-
ness, hence the difficulty of clear and distinct definition and the need for
‘metaphorical moral thinking’.12 She regards the allegory as perfectly
informing the intuitive and spiritual aspects of the moral life. Although it is
mystical in its form, Plato’s images are not far removed from our own experi-
ence and explain familiar forms of knowing and neatly resist definition
by the empirical language so beloved by Ryle, Ayer and Hampshire. For
Murdoch then:

The Cave is a religious myth suggesting, what is also accessible to any

careful not necessarily philosophical reflection, that there are discernible
levels and qualities of awareness or experience (we need this terminology),
which cannot be reduced to acquaintance with neutral factual proposi-
tions or analysed in terms of dispositions to act.13

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 The Bell and Platonism 91

Murdoch significantly alters and deflects the significance of the metaphor

which she ascribes to the narrative. Alistair MacIntyre points out that ‘Iris
Murdoch’s novels are philosophy: but they are philosophy which casts
doubt on all philosophy including her own’14 which seems to suggest that
the ‘Murdoch as Platonist’ argument is far from linear in relation to the
fiction discussed in previous chapters. Peter Conradi notes how the setting
of The Bell suggests the Phaedo with the scenery including the convergence
of the four rivers and the lake and the insistence that philosophy itself is
dying, although Murdoch is thinking here of the later work of Wittgenstein
rather than any Greek myth. Conradi sees the geography of Imber as ‘a
Platonic map of unselfing . . . An aerial map of Imber would show three
sets of walls, and resemble a dartboard. The outer circle is the wall of
half-stripped Imber Court, the next the wall of the wholly austere abbey and
the last of the concentric circles containing the happy cemetery with its
laughing nuns’;15 a fascinating conclusion that draws attention to Murdoch’s
own background in ancient history. Conradi mentions that it also brings to
mind Dante’s Inferno with the inclusion of the lake, causeway and the ferry
– which also ties in with linking Nick to the underworld and likens his dog
to Cerberus; an interesting sideline with which we need not overly concern
ourselves. This may well be a literary joke by Murdoch and it does not detract
from the overall scheme of Platonism. It is certainly put to good use within
the novel; the river separates Nick from the rest of the community and the
only other route to the cottage is from the main gate. The idea that only
Toby can enter the inner circle of the nun’s garden and be allowed access
back to the other side through an unlocked gate is surely an example of
Platonic unselfing:

The unexpectedness of the scene made Toby rigid in the doorway, his
hand still on the door. He was in a green space enclosed by a rectangle
of walls . . . ‘Good morning’ said the nun, ‘I believe you must be Toby.
Have I guessed right?’ ‘Yes’ said Toby hanging his head. ‘I thought so’ said
the nun. ‘Although we never meet, we seem to know each one of you, as
if you were our dearest friends’.16

This unthreatening scene is contrasted with one in which Dora realizes

the connection between herself and the bell:

It was black inside and alarmingly like an inhabited cave. Very lightly she
touched the great clapper, hanging profoundly still in the interior. The
feeling of fear had not left her and she withdrew hastily and switched her

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 92 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

torch on. The squat figures faced her from the sloping surface of the
bronze, solid, simple, beautiful, absurd, full to the brim with something
which was to the artist not an object of speculation or imagination.17

As we have discussed, The Bell marks a definite shift in Murdoch’s use

of philosophy in fiction. This book progresses through the philosophies
of existentialism and linguistic analysis through to the most difficult and
introverted of German philosophers and the reader now finds themselves
in Platonic symbolism, as discussed in the introduction: we shall return to
the form of the neo-Platonic in the final chapter. However, the Platonic is
not the only use of philosophy within this novel. As we have discussed in
the previous chapter, the religious and political conservatism of the 1950s
supplied Murdoch with the physical and moral setting in which we, as read-
ers, find ourselves placed in The Bell and it is, as it was to the first readers
of the novel, of immediate and topical interest due to the societal change
of both the late 1950s and today. Necessarily then the Platonic sense of
harmony, which the novel superficially presents, must have, in order for
any sense of drama in the narrative, an opposite.
Although we have discussed the influence of Nietzsche in the previous
chapter, The Bell was written eight years before The Time of the Angels, marking
The Bell as Murdoch’s earliest fictional use of his work. The aesthetic
doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, promulgated by Nietzsche in Thus Spake
Zarathustra (1884) and Ecce Homo (1888) is of primary importance to this
novel. Nietzsche promotes a ‘many worlds’ theory insisting that different
states of the universe repeat themselves; that at both a physical and psycho-
logical level we keep reliving our lives in eternally recurring patterns or,
as we would now refer to it, a theory concerning a limitless possibility of
alternate universes where every action thought or conceived is played out,
with all the possibilities which could possibly happen from that occurring
also.18 While time is unlimited, the number of positions, alterations, and
developments of force is bounded. Consequently then our actions and
thoughts must be constantly repeated. Referring to his ideals of the über-
mensch Nietzsche claims that the strong will take hope and encouragement
from this and the weak and unhappy will learn that they must repeat the
same events for eternity.19 Murdoch uses this idea of cyclical patterns to
develop the character’s actions within The Bell as, far from dismissing the
idea, she sees the fictional potential of it; she revises Nietzsche’s credo only
from the position of human volition. A regular, uniform pattern or format
does choke the creative will of an individual, but it is the individual’s
acts themselves which will trap him or her in a circle of cause and effect.

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 The Bell and Platonism 93

This rejection of Nietzsche’s historical position is the key difference with

Murdoch. The characters based at Imber Court do not see themselves as
enclosed within this cyclical pattern. It is only their guests, who are more
freely able to come and go as they please, who have any self-awareness of
the consequences of the actions they commit. It is this lack of self-knowledge
that drew them to Imber in the first place, the Staffords who are stuck in a
cyclical and diminishing marriage and Michael Meade, turning between
‘the sacred and the profane’ – a very Murdochian concept. Dora and Toby
are noticeably different as they have other reasons for visiting and staying at
Imber and, crucially, they have potential to escape it and create a new life for
themselves; the community cohesion vanishes at the merest hint of scandal
or disagreement. At the end of the novel all the characters are scattered
throughout Britain trying to assess how best to proceed with their lives,
whilst Dora finds herself in virtual control of Michael and Imber Court: ‘the
halcyon days for Dora came after the others had all gone, when she reigned
undisputed over Imber. She took especial pleasure in Michael’s domestic
helplessness’.20 More than this, in a setting that fosters a denial of selfhood
and the development of spiritual freedom, the ‘internal’ characters are
unable to develop any sense of moral clarity. It would appear that spiritual
dedication is not enough to prevent oneself being influenced by the outside
world; as Murdoch comments: ‘those who hope, by retiring from the world,
to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually
disappointed’.21
In order to inhabit the form of the good, we must first discover what it is
that we are missing; although as Michael mentions at the beginning of the
novel ‘Has it ever occurred to you that all symbols have a sacramental aspect?
We do not live by bread alone. You remember what I told you about the
bell’.22 The bell itself is connected with both Dora and the abbess, both
being, for their separate communities, the ultimate source of moral deve-
lopment throughout the novel. Although it may seem odd to connect Dora
to any sense of morality at the outset, as she has left Paul for Noel, her dis-
covery of both herself and the bell coincide; it is only when the bell is
retrieved from the bottom of the lake by the two outsiders that Dora realizes
something beyond herself of equal or greater value. Her sense of self has
been partially replaced with a new understanding of otherness. Stephen
Wall describes how the sunken bell is understood by the community as a
symbol:

Catherine sees the bell as a sign of divine pleasure, Nick, presumably as

a sign of vengeance, Dora as firstly a means of redressing the inferior

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 94 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

balance of her own position at Imber and secondly as an artefact with

a mysterious attraction and authority, – not to mention the attitudes of less
important characters such as Paul Greenfield who is interested in the bell
as a piece of art history, and Mrs. Mark who regards it as a fit subject for
decoration in spite of craft revivalism – it surely becomes difficult to pos-
tulate for the bell a static or fixed meaning. In fact, its significance alters,
according to the perspective in which it is viewed. The author nowhere
gives any indication that any one of these attitudes, or some superior
insight given to the reader alone and not shared by any of the characters,
is to be regarded as authoritative.23

The bell then has a multitude of definite symbolic meanings which are all
equally valid. What Wall says is correct up to a point but in order to fully
understand the bell one must, like the characters, listen to it; ‘Vox ego sum
Amoris. Gabriel vocor’24 I am the voice of love; I am called Gabriel, perfectly
illustrating the point of realizing the ‘otherness’ of individuals and not to be
contained within the Nietzschean idea of solipsism25 and referencing directly
the voice of god through an angel, a theme later distorted in The Time of
the Angels as already discussed. Deborah Johnson believes that the bell is
threatening to Dora, when it is finally brought to the surface, because it
expresses mythical history (the death of the nun) and the literal history
of its male creators:

The bell is threatening because it expresses by its history, its function in

the narrative, and its very shape, the inescapable connections between
erotic and spiritual love. The imagery throughout this section is power-
fully erotic as well as religious; it links the bell with unexplored and
unexpressed (female) sexuality as well as with the spiritual energy of the
past which speaks to the present through carvings and inscription in
a foreign and only half-understood language. The writing itself here
emphasizes the connection which all the major characters (except for
the abbess) seek in their different ways and for their different reasons to
deny with all the unhappy consequences.26

Johnson is partly right here when she discusses repressed sexuality and
knowledge of selfhood, but it is not only to Dora that we must look when
understanding the relevance of the raising of the bell. Dora, Michael and
Toby, at distinctly different stages of their lives, are all linked to this notion
of sexual repression or confusion of sexuality. Michael, as we know, is unable
to accept his homosexuality, Dora is unsure of the position of her marriage

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 The Bell and Platonism 95

and Toby has recently come to the stark realization that adult sexuality is
fraught with difficulties and unsurety. The voice of love which resounds
from the bell is one which seeks to reconcile these insecurities and ulti-
mately belongs not to the bell itself, which is only a catalyst, but to the abbess
who is unseen and also misunderstood to the detriment of the community.
Murdoch believes (and this is consistent throughout all the novels dis-
cussed here) that we must recognize goodness and beauty rather than the
Nietzschean ideal of power as our moral criteria for objective action. Only
then can any sense of power, connected with the Platonic ideal of ‘unselfing’
be certain. Marvin Felheim describes Dora in these terms:

She is the last to arrive at, and the last to leave, Imber. One of her first acts
there is to lose her shoes by the lake; she is somewhat afraid of the water,
as she cannot swim. Her final action is to row upon the lake in a kind of
lonely triumph (she has meanwhile taught herself to swim so ‘the depths
below affrightened her no longer’) with the feeling that ‘it belonged to
her’. The religious community has failed, the members have scattered,
but Dora, who had no vocation, has found herself.

Falheim makes an important point here by proposing that all those who
had (or imagined themselves to have) a quasi-religious vocation have been
disappointed whereas those who did not (Dora and Toby) have made a jour-
ney of self-discovery through the narrative. It would appear then that not
having a ‘vocation’ is no bar to progress in Murdochland.
The social construction of The Bell is regressive insofar as it reverts to
the embedded moral values of the British middle and upper classes. This
new moralism was only developing slowly since the late Victorian era and
neither of the two world wars had fully displaced it; in fact it could be argued
that the strengthening of British morality in the post-1945 period created
political, social and moral tensions that brought the Conservative party back
to office in 1951.27 The Conservatives responded to the social concerns of
its core group of supporters by legislating to ‘improve’ the moral climate
of Britain. The preservation of public order, the upholding of moral beha-
viour (as well as the disgust felt towards homosexuality which informed these
policies) were all tenets of the government’s agenda.
As homosexuality was still considered immoral by the vast majority of
the population in 1955, Anthony Eden’s government felt obliged to develop
its understanding of gender issues and sexual orientations. The ultimate
objective of this pursuit was to develop a ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of homo-
sexuality which would reduce the number of criminal offences committed

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 96 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

and ensure the Conservatives remained as the party of moral worthiness.

As the 1950s progressed public sentiment changed, so that although public
displays of affection between men were still viewed as repugnant, it was still
felt that private acts between consenting males should be decriminalized.
The publication of the Wolfenden report on 3 September 1957 confirmed
these findings.28 Murdoch discusses the distinction between the public life
(of public conventions) and the private life (of private phenomena) of indi-
viduals in ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’ (1952) and ‘Vision and Choice in
Morality’ (1956). Where she says:

On this view, the moral life of the individual is a series of overt choices
which take place in a series of specifiable situations . . . A moral judge-
ment, as opposed to a whim or taste preference, is one which is supported
by reasons held by the agent to be valid for all others placed as he
[is] . . . What must be clearly separated is the notion of inner or private
psychological phenomena, open to introspection, and the notion of pri-
vate or personal vision which may find expression overtly or inwardly.29

Tammy Grimshaw believes that:

Murdoch plays out these philosophical views [noted above] in her

fictional representations of homosexuality by illustrating that moral
dilemmas are especially keen for the homosexual since one’s expression
of sexuality is indeed one of the most individual freedoms, yet one that
can be fraught with a variety of moral constraints and dilemmas . . . this
tension conspires to keep homosexuals ‘in the closet’.30

Grimshaw is correct as it is clear that Michael cannot openly accept himself

as a homosexual due to societal constraints and must therefore keep himself
‘in the closet’.
Murdoch’s focus on homosexuality in The Bell can be seen, therefore, as
her reaction to the continuing debate at this time. Although she had moved
away from her earlier communist stance she was still actively involved in
political thought and supported the liberalization of morality laws. She
always held firm to the view that it is the individual that matters and that
individuals are ‘free and separate and related to a rich and complicated
world’.31 Murdoch’s fiction of this period (1958–1970) represents social
prejudices towards both homosexuals and women and the power that soci-
ety wielded to keep them at a distance from any meaningful form of power.32
As she wrote A Fairly Honourable Defeat in 1969, a novel which also concerns

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 The Bell and Platonism 97

homosexuality, Murdoch was also writing ‘Permissive society? Not for queers
and women!33 which relates directly to the plot of The Bell, the two major
protagonists being a ‘fallen’ woman and a closeted homosexual; she contin-
ued to examine the role of homosexuals in society up to and including The
Green Knight (1993) which is the focus of the final chapter.
Conradi praises Murdoch for taking on the challenge of writing gay
fiction at this point in time and working into The Bell the everyday challenges
felt by a typical closeted homosexual, the novel displaying ‘strongly leftist,
anti-fascist and pro-third-world tendencies’34 and that ‘she surely now had a
gay following . . . every novel after The Bell now had at least one homosexual
character’.35 Conradi is certainly right in asserting that the portrayal of
homosexuality in Murdoch’s early fiction is impressive for the period in
which it was written. However, the notion that her work is politically aware
at this point overlooks her previous involvement with communism and
European politics. As her friend and biographer Conradi knew that these
tendencies were expressed in her writings at least ten years before, during
her university career. That she had not totally departed from her com-
munist sympathies is perhaps the most interesting factor, seen through the
commune which Imber Court certainly is. The placement of this group
with a religious community also raises the theological question of enclosed
communities, promoting the view that individuals in such confinement
naturally assume the ideals of Marxism.
If we return to the issue of homosexuality in Murdoch’s novels we see
that her fascination with male homosexuality did not reappear until 1970,
although she briefly flirts with lesbianism in An Unofficial Rose (1962). In
1990 Jeffrey Meyers asked her what the function of homosexual characters
was in her novels:

Meyers: What is the function and meaning of the homosexual characters

who appear frequently in your novels?
Murdoch: I think it depends on the context. They play different parts in
different stories. I know a lot of homosexuals. I have homo-
sexual friends. I’m very much in favour of gay lib, and I feel
strongly that there shouldn’t be any sort of prejudice against
homosexuals, or suggestions that homosexual love is unnatural
or bad. I hope such views are tending to disappear from
society.36

Lesbianism is an important issue, as Murdoch had lovers of both genders

throughout most of her adult life and was concerned that the public

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 98 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

conception of homosexuality should develop into a positive environment

for homosexuals:

I feel very strongly that there shouldn’t be any sort of prejudice against
homosexuals, or suggestions that homosexual love is unnatural or bad.
I hope such views are tending to disappear from society.37

And it is certainly the case that early reviewers of The Bell focused, in part,
on Murdoch’s ability to assume a form of gender reflexivity:

Once again Miss Murdoch displays in these scenes of homosexual tension

her remarkable capacity for literary transvestism – Jake, Rainborough, Mor,
Michael and Toby are so intimately understood that it seems unlikely
those derogatory clichés about sensitive lady novelists will ever be applied
to Miss Murdoch.38

Presumably the reviewer has in mind authors such as Daphne du Maurier

and Elizabeth Bowen; Virginia Woolf could hardly be termed a ‘sensitive
lady novelist’. The movement away from the fantastic, by which I mean
moments devoid of any touch of realism such as the collapse of the film set
in Under the Net or the scenes in Mischa Fox’s basement in The Flight from the
Enchanter that Conradi describes as ‘Lewis Carroll-like and fantastic’,39 brings
with it a freer conception of crystalline realism (albeit one that allows the
characters a freer form) that enables The Bell and The Sandcastle to develop
Murdoch’s philosophical fiction. Both Byatt and Conradi have asserted that
The Bell is Murdoch’s best attempt at realism, and note that the particular
world in which she develops her values is one which is closest to narrative of
Eliot and Tolstoy which she was trying to attain. In contrast, Elizabeth Dipple
criticizes it for ‘frequently coming close to being a forum for moral ideas’,40
which of course it is. But the central question is whether these two state-
ments are antithetical; can one have a realistic novel which consists of a
narrative of moral ideas and development? Murdoch would point to George
Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Dickens’s Oliver Twist as examples of this. I believe
that this has to be the case if we are to experience what Murdoch determines
the ‘moral life’ to be, and this is present in the narrative form which she
creates here. By placing the major part of the narrative within a lay-religious
community Murdoch is able, in a detailed but not contrived way, to question
the significance of spiritual meaning within an increasingly secular world;
perhaps this is the major reason why The Bell has become the most discussed
work in Murdoch’s early period, examining the boundaries between the

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 The Bell and Platonism 99

aesthetic and the moral life, the bridging between the life we lead and the
‘good life’ we should aspire to, the schism between moral philosophy and
fictional existence in her fiction. These factors are intrinsically linked to
the narrative and certainly expose her philosophical ideas for her fiction
as a whole.
We have seen then that Murdochian realism is firmly founded on the
conviction that the knowledge of moral value, such as the worth of any given
person, is rooted firmly in the experience of the world around us, which in
turn forms the grounding of all our knowledge. She believes that we must
move away from the prevailing notion of fact and value so beloved of the
empiricists, which I have outlined in the first chapter, and towards a position
which ‘attempts to restore the conceptual richness of this [goodness] and
other moral terms by seeing it in the context of an agent’s struggle to appre-
hend reality by means of a total vocabulary of moral vision’.41 Although the
lineage of the barrier-creation between fact and value is rich in influential
philosophers, Kant, Marx, Sartre and Heidegger to name but four, Murdoch
regresses towards Plato for guidance as, she believes, to follow Platonic phi-
losophy will ultimately lead to a negation of value and the nature of truth
itself.
Murdoch says that she regards the fact/value discussion as ‘the most
important argument in modern philosophy – indeed it is almost the whole
of modern philosophy’42 and in order to assert her own moral vision she
feels she has to attempt to overturn these prevailing notions. It is no coinci-
dence that Murdoch uses the arguments of Sartre, Kant, Heidegger and
Freud in her novels. She uses their insistence upon the discrepancy between
fact and value to develop her fictional settings and promote her own philo-
sophical ideals. Her use of realism is only fully established once she realizes
the fallacy of the fact/value dichotomy. The linkage of these is essential to
her thesis. The argument of this book is only sustained therefore if these
links can be shown to be self-sustaining.
Murdoch contends that in order to understand a philosopher we must
first ask what he or she is afraid of. Fergus Kerr says that:

. . . her own fear over the years has plainly been the fact/value dichotomy
which has dominated philosophy since at least Hume and Kant [and] has
had immensely destructive effects throughout our culture in aesthetics
and especially in the realms of ethics.43

The list of those who broadly agree with this includes almost all the major
Western philosophers since Hume and also, crucially, involves Wittgenstein.

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 100 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

If Wittgenstein is able to reduce philosophy to a series of statements, or even

dispose of it all together (‘What we cannot speak of we must pass over
in silence’),44 and if this is universally believed to be true, then Murdoch
has failed in her primary motivation for writing both philosophy and philo-
sophical novels.
The conception that obtaining the correct facts is an entirely separate
business from evaluating their worth means that, in an ideal situation, we
can resist passing any form of moral judgement until we have gathered the
required facts for an objective and impartial stance. Murdoch realized that
a perfectly objective view is never obtainable (one can never obtain the pure
objectivity of God), but to then pronounce that any impartial view is, and
always will be, illusory is an extreme Marxist or theocratic view which is
equally invalid. Murdoch fears that the loss of a traditional form of devo-
tional religion prevents individuals from possessing the inner knowledge
to understand moral actions correctly; they can neither see a transparent
act of evil nor a correct act of goodness.45 This is the case no matter what
the circumstances of the action. The act itself may cause a range of emo-
tional responses, painful or pleasurable, in the individual, but that in itself
would not determine the rightness or wrongness of it. We may feel good
about an action, and every individual may experience the same response,
but for Murdoch the goodness or wickedness of an action is determined
independently of how we feel about it.46 Murdoch’s position is broadly
supportive of that postulated by Socrates – that true knowledge results in
right action – but the obtaining of true knowledge of reality is a moral task
in itself. Clearly The Bell is ultimately concerned with obtaining the true
knowledge of reality for Dora, Michael and the reader but it will be useful
if we leave this aside until we have determined why Murdoch takes issue
with Christianity and the communities which it propagates.
If religion is truly inescapable, and this is something which Murdoch
certainly believed in 1958 (and indeed throughout her later life) then a
return to Plato and Platonist metaphysics was for Murdoch the only viable
form. Although Murdoch was not a theologian herself, preferring instead
to concentrate on the problem of moral philosophy, she was seriously
involved in religious thought. She believed that ‘we need a theology which
can continue without God’47 based upon the thought of morality as a code
of action with religion being specifically concerned with a deep spiritual
sensibility.48 She was concerned that religion was more often than not debased
(by secular society) as a personal experience which could bring little insight
into the debate concerning morality. This is precisely, she believes, why
religion has to be demythologized; if we remove the anthropomorphic

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 The Bell and Platonism 101

image of Christ, which she believes to be nothing more than an image made
for veneration, we may begin, once again, to promote religion as a workable
system. However, Murdoch thinks that the illusion of Christ could not be
removed from believers’ minds without negating the entire fabric of their
belief structure.49
Where then does this leave the oblique notion of ‘the will’? Murdoch
seems to be suggesting, through her critique of the Humean notion of
schism between fact and value, that the will is bound up with, and left almost
redundant by, her moral vision. As we discussed earlier, Murdoch’s concep-
tion of moral understanding (or motivation) veers towards that expressed
by Socrates. If we are to fully understand the concept of ‘the will’ in these
terms we must understand how Murdoch envisages it in her philosophy
and then, most crucially, how she applies it to her work. First, however, we
must define what Murdoch means when she discusses theories of moral
motivation.
The basic question is this: is knowledge sufficient for moral conduct, or
is something more needed to compel right action? This is crucial to the
ethical system which Murdoch is trying to establish. The classic theory takes
into account two visions, the internalist and the externalist, both having
clear ideals concerning the distinctions between desires and beliefs in
defining a certain moral attitude.50 Antonaccio discusses this in Picturing
the Human:

Internalists, as the name implies, hold that since moral attitudes are
more like desires than beliefs, there is an internal relation between moral
attitudes and practical moral action. On this view, moral attitudes are
understood to contain a motive force (i.e. desire) that compels action.
Externalists, on the other hand, hold that since moral attitudes are more
like moral beliefs than desires, some external desire is required to motivate
moral action; beliefs by themselves cannot compel action on this view.
Cognitivist thinkers (like Murdoch) are thought to be externalists on
this question, since cognitivists presumably hold that moral attitudes are
essentially beliefs about the world.51

Murdoch’s view may be neatly expressed as ‘true vision occasions right

conduct’,52 which would classify her as an internalist in her theory of moral
motivation. If we now come back to the Socratic view discussed earlier,
we can see that Murdoch holds that the relation between moral knowledge
and moral action is such that one cannot act contrary to one’s knowledge
of the good. If we act on the good we see then we cannot act in a negative

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 102 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

way, which brings us back to the Socratic model. As Murdoch remarked,

‘The author’s moral judgement is the air which the reader breathes’,53 and
it is crucial we understand her formulation of the will, desire and moral
judgement if we are to understand The Bell.
Charles Taylor believes the Socratic model to be a ‘linear’ theory of moral
motivation due to it positing a direct or linear relation between seeing, or
knowing, the Good and willing, or doing, the Good.54 The original Christian
model, by contrast, is ‘circular’ because it assumes that the will is not merely
the ‘dependant’ variable, ‘shaped by what we see’, but also ‘the independent
variable, determining what we can know’.55 This has a direct relation to the
second chapter of this work where Freud’s notion of the will is discussed. It
is my contention that we see Murdoch mediating between the two positions,
Plato’s and Augustine’s, although slightly over-balanced towards the Platonic
model, in her philosophical work56 and, specifically in The Bell; I am thinking
here particularly of Plato’s concern with the highest form of good and
Augustine’s consideration of knowledge and forms as a real link to a tripar-
tite God, of whom no greater idea may be conceived. Murdoch rejects the
divinity of Christ but holds fast to the moral ideals of the Christian faith:

I think I was then [in the 1950s] perhaps gradually influenced by moral
philosophy and by an interest in Plato – and the feeling that, although
I never felt any impulse to come back to God the Father, and have never
done so (I mean, I don’t believe in a personal God, and I don’t believe
in the divinity of Christ) – I began to feel, partly as a philosopher and
partly generally in life, that the place of God, being empty, needed to be
filled by some kind of positive reflection, a kind of moral philosophy, or
even neo-theology, which would explain very fundamental things about
the human soul and the human being.57

Both views, Plato and Augustine’s, are reflected within the novel itself
with Imber Court and the abbey being in opposition and Michael Meade
and James Tayper Pace being similarly opposed. But how do these views
differ in theoretical terms? Both Plato and Augustine agree that inner
attention, or the soul’s attention, may be directed either towards the good
or away from it.58 The direction of attention determines the desire of the
inner self; both philosophers affirm the intrinsic relation between vision
and desire, and thus both, at least superficially, have the potential to assume
the Socratic model. There are, however, two specific differences. Augustine
has a more focused view of the will than Plato; Augustine believes, for exam-
ple, that the will is not entirely dependent upon knowledge, whereas Plato

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 The Bell and Platonism 103

sees it as simply a focusing of knowledge, or, that our desire for the good is
the function of how we see it: ‘This is the very perfection of a man, to find
out his own imperfections’.59 This introduces a potential conflict between
vision and desire. Wrong action for Plato, as it is for the abbess of The Bell, is
explained by a lack of vision or insight, whereas for Augustine this simply
will not do: ‘the perversity in the will can never be sufficiently explained by
our lack of insight into the good; on the contrary, it makes us act below and
against our insight’.60 This is why the central problem of weakness in The
Bell, the weakness of Michael in failing to come to terms with his homo-
sexuality, the weakness of Dora in failing to accept herself and to re-evaluate
her relationship with Paul, and James’s weakness in failing to understand
contrary points of view to his own, is of such great importance: it is the
central problem of Platonism and Murdoch wishes to examine it in a
fictional form.
Murdoch has stated that The Bell is ‘essentially a study of two types of moral
and religious attitude’,61 and the two sermons in the novel certainly exem-
plify this. Michael favours salvation through self-exploration, which is rather
odd as his failing is precisely this, whereas James preaches on unquestioning
allegiance to the word of the Bible. James, however, is able to address his
listeners from a position of, we are led to believe, purity of inexperience.
He preaches that we have no need to examine or calculate; attitudes and
practices are either sanctioned or forbidden by divine wisdom:

A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds
or regard ourselves as unique and interesting sinners. As sinners we are
very much the same and our sin is essentially something tedious, some-
thing to be shunned and not something to be investigated . . . We should
consider not what delights or what disgusts us, morally speaking, but what
is enjoined and what is forbidden . . . Truthfulness is enjoyed, the relief
of suffering is enjoyed, adultery is forbidden, sodomy is forbidden . . .
sodomy is not disgusting, it is just forbidden.62

In James’s view the universality of God’s judgements demonstrates that

perfection resides objectively in the Hegelian world of spirit. James argues
that by exploring subjectivity, like Michael, we only distort the simple rules
governing human behaviour. Michael replies in his sermon that:

The chief requirement of the good life . . . is that one should have some
conception of one’s capabilities. One must know oneself sufficiently to
know what is the next thing . . . to live in innocence, or having fallen to

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 104 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

return to the way, we need all the strength that we can muster – and to use
our strength we must know where it lies. We must not, for instance, per-
form an act because abstractly it seems to be a good act . . . self-knowledge
will lead us to avoid occasions of temptation rather than to rely on naked
strength to overcome them.63

The point being made here is that human behaviour cannot be governed
by simple rules or all-encompassing human narratives; we must obtain or
create a reflexive moral guidance system. No uniform view of scripture or
moral law exists; James fails in his attempt to correct his listeners as there
can be many interpretations of what is forbidden and what is to be enjoyed,
while Michael’s notion of Christian morality, although more democratic and
empirical, entails the same degree of personal latitude. Conradi points out
that ‘Michael’s temporizings and James’s austerities are both inadequate
partial views’,64 and tells us that Murdoch called the conflict between the two
that of saint and artist, although he does not say where this occurred. James,
as the saint, is best suited to a rigid and austere morality and is trying to
obtain the unobtainable (since we are corrupted by Original Sin), whereas
Michael is the artist as ‘he is the proponent of the second-best act and loves
spiritual drama and pattern for its own sake’.65 Of course, this is not to say
that either of these positions is, according to Murdoch, correct. We should
mediate between the two of them, she insists, in order to create an idea
of perfection suitable for understanding the attention the self must pay to
the other, whilst also allowing for some setting of boundaries. The abbess,
echoing Murdoch’s view, believes that:

Our duty . . . is not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities
of our spiritual life as it in fact is, but to seek that place, that task, those
people, which will make our spiritual life most constantly grow and flour-
ish; and in this search. We must make use of divine cunning, ‘As wise as
serpents, as harmless as doves’.66

Hers is a perfectly Platonic form of reasoning. The downfall of the commu-

nity, and the humour in the novel, are provided by the characters’ lack
of the spiritual awareness of each other. Mrs Mark, for example, lacks
the wisdom to impart to Dora any sense of belonging when she refuses to
discuss her previous life, perhaps due to the shame she feels at the break-
down of her own marriage. If she were able to properly attend to Dora
and sympathize with her on her own terms she would be able to morally
progress. The abbess sees the inhabitants’ failure to attend to each other as
a failure of love: ‘Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in

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 The Bell and Platonism 105

love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made per-
fect. The way is always forward, never back’ (235), as she says to Michael at
the end of the novel.
Michael’s inattention to Nick is the most glaring of all the failures of
love in the narrative. Murdoch’s comments concerning high and low eros
are directly related to this inattention, as Michael has failed to distinguish
between the two; indeed this distinction prevents him from realigning his
baser instincts to a more active vision of the other. Michael, learning of
Nick’s imminent arrival, is faced with the forceful entry of the major ‘other’
from his past, and is forced to rethink his position within the community
and how he may relate to Nick without betraying his homosexuality to the
group. This, in turn, turns the ego in on itself as he is forced to think of his
position within the group; a position that Murdoch warns her readership
about as she encouraged individuals to turn their attention ‘outward, away
from [the] self’.67
Although Murdoch’s use of the cave allegory is central to the form of
The Bell it is pertinent to ask if she is a true Platonist; does she completely
deny the independence of the will from knowledge? She appears to agree
with the view that knowledge and the will are inextricably linked and that
moral desire is inherently linked with both. Perhaps we can even see her as
reducing her notion of the will to some form of vision, or indeed, conscious-
ness. Although she rejects Freudian theory, Murdoch appears to be assum-
ing one of its key tenets, that of the unconscious mind being the driving
force of the will. However, we must also understand that the reflexivity of
Murdoch’s account of realistic vision makes any simple comparison with
Plato problematic and suggests, perhaps, that she is not, as she believes
herself to be, a full Platonic disciple. She acknowledges in her philosophical
work that the influence between vision and will may be seen as mutual rather
than strictly linear, or, that one begets the other in an Augustinian ‘circular-
ity’, or reciprocal fashion. If the will continually influences belief, either
for better or worse, then Murdoch must admit that vision has a great deal
of bearing upon an individual’s belief system. If we return to our earlier
discussion of The Sovereignty of Good, then perhaps Murdoch may shed some
light on it:

Will and reason are not entirely separate faculties in the moral agent [us].
Will continually influences beliefs, for better or worse, and is ideally able
to influence it through a sustained attention to reality 68 . . . leaping ahead
of what we know . . . [w]e may sometimes decide . . . to ignore vision and
the compulsive energy derived from it; and we may find that as a result
both energy and vision are unexpectedly given.69

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 106 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

And ultimately the will may exert some direction over vision, and not only
the reverse: ‘[Man] is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accor-
dance with what he sees, and who has some continual slight control over
the direction and focus of his vision’.70 So we can now see that Murdoch’s
view of the will, desire and vision is not strictly linear or indeed of entirely
Socratic origin. This in turn suggests that the problem of weakness of the
will is as much a problem for Murdoch as it was for Augustine, and so
it proves in her fiction. We can now understand why Murdoch was so pre-
occupied with the weakness of will in several of her characters, and the
lack of spirit in the community as opposed to the freedom experienced by
the enclosed nuns in the abbey.
We have already discussed the nature of the Platonic allegory of the cave,
and its repercussions on the narrative, but we have yet to discuss its impact
upon two central aspects of the novel: the impact of Murdoch’s philosophy
upon the feminist subtext and the latent homosexuality of Michael. Deborah
Johnson argues that ‘the presence of a feminist subtext can be discerned
throughout The Bell where Iris Murdoch’s narrative symbolism is particularly
sustained and subtle’,71 which Byatt argues is the most effective part of the
novel. The key point is the impact of Dora upon the community, the out-
sider arriving, along with Toby, to unwittingly disrupt and ultimately destroy
the lay-religious community. Although the abbess refers to the inhabitants
of Imber Court as ‘a kind of sick people, whose desire for the God makes
them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life’ (81) she does not predict
that they themselves will bring the community to an end. Here Johnson
relies heavily on the work of Byatt and by doing so she misses what I believe
to be the most important aspect of Dora’s relationship with Michael, for
although Dora naturally gravitates towards Toby in the later part of the
novel, in a sense a kindred spirit, she is left at the end to assess the impact
of the destruction of Imber Court with Michael. However, Johnson’s view
of Catherine as an echo of Milton’s Eve in Paradise Lost has something to
be said for it. Like Eve, Catherine is first seen by Dora in a natural setting
picking fruit (although this fruit is not forbidden by the community).
The garden itself is reminiscent of the symbolism of the bell connecting
Catherine to a more pastoral life, one which should not, and will not, be
interrupted by her entry to the abbey. Johnson believes that the garden
with Catherine in it is portentous:

It [the scene] comments proleptically upon the appalling consequences

that will follow from Catherine’s attempt to discipline her own sexual
nature through her choice of the religious life, an attempt in which all the
lay community members are implicated.72

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 The Bell and Platonism 107

Catherine’s impact on the community is discussed further on in this

chapter, although it is certainly true, and a central part of Johnson’s thesis,
that the relationship (or failure of a relationship) between Dora and Catherine
provides an interesting subplot for the long struggle of Michael to accept his
homosexuality and focus his attention outwards. It is also true, as Johnson
states, that the story of Dora’s progression through the novel is of primary
importance as she remains, at the end of the novel, with the most potential
to move forward with her life: in this context then The Bell may well be a
feminist, as well as a philosophical, novel. Johnson’s argument is this:

A ‘Dora-centred’ perspective allows for a more flexible and emotional

reading of Iris Murdoch’s symbolism in The Bell than does a neutral
overview. It allows us, in Elaine Showalter’s phrase, to see ‘meaning
in what has previously been empty space’.73 From here it is possible to
argue that Iris Murdoch’s symbolism in general presents a ‘double-voiced
discourse’.74

To assess this we must return to the impact of homosexuality upon Murdoch

and how it influenced her fiction.
In ‘Against Dryness’ Murdoch engages in her foremost attack upon
behaviourism for its view that ‘the inner life . . . is identifiable as existing
only through the application to it of public concepts, concepts which can
only be constructed on the basis of overt behaviour’.75 She argues here for
a shift in focus towards the inner moral life of the individual and goes on
to lament that ‘we no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the
manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a back-
ground of values, of realities, which transcend him’.76 It is useful to view
these statements, within her fictional representation of homosexuality, by
understanding that moral dilemmas were especially prevalent for the homo-
sexual in the 1950s as their sexuality was, as in the case of Michael Meade,
constrained by moral and social dilemmas. She depicts Michael as strug-
gling in private with his sexuality whilst trying to maintain a public image of
moral worthiness. As a leader of the community at Imber it is crucial that he
maintain the illusion of his supposed heterosexuality in order to prevent
any collapse of his public standing within the group. He believes that he
will only be judged on his public behaviour. In addition to this he first has
to contend with his past, embodied in Nick Fawley and then his kissing of
Toby – both of which, he believes, could lead to his social downfall. Michael’s
failure to master his inner life and come to terms with his homosexuality
ultimately result in his moral failure to acknowledge Nick with ‘attention’;
a factor which Murdoch may be largely responsible for Nick’s suicide.

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 108 Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist

Murdoch’s realization that Michael’s religion and sexuality both emanate

from the same source is a useful tool in understanding her vision of eros –
the vision that sexual energies can be virtuously transformed into movement
towards the good. Michael’s struggle to transform his low eros, his sexuality,
towards high eros, his love for the religious life is consistent with Platonism,
and Murdoch depicts this as a significant aspect of his inner life. His inner
drama impacts negatively on his ability to attend to his moral obligations,
and this lessens his potential to love others in the community. In Murdoch’s
view, these struggles shape his subjectivity and, as we have seen, prevent him
from obtaining an objective view of any member of the community. Michael’s
struggle to turn his attention outwards as he enters Imber Court and passes
from sexual passion to semi-religious vocation is the crux of his turmoil. By
refusing to acknowledge his homosexuality and confront it, he is unable to
fully experience the community. Sexual deviance, as viewed in the Christian
tradition, is something which must be confessed, and Michael’s refusal to
do so precipitates his undoing. For Murdoch, however, it is not the sexuality
that matters but his refusal to accept himself for what he is. Michael must
exhibit a Platonic unselfing in order to become fully naturalized with the
world around him; he must see what is truly there by walking out of the cave
and defining what his own landscape is like.
The orthodox Christian perspective is embodied in James Tayper Pace,
and although he never actively refers to Michael as a homosexual, once
he has heard Toby’s confession, he believes him to be a ‘deviant’ of sorts.
This ensures that Michael is further ostracized by the other members of the
community, as James believes the group to be without moral unworthiness.
The reader is aware, of course, of their individual failings. It is an interesting
decision of Murdoch’s to make Imber the family home of Michael, allowing
another layer of Freudian drama to proceedings. Once he has been ‘outed’
by Toby’s confession he is marginalized both from the community and the
place where he should, naturally, feel most secure.77
A character equally guilty of neglecting both the complex plenitude of the
world and the true state of her inner life is Catherine Fawley. Although she
appears to be the perfect addition to the community, and is held up as an
ideal, her inner life is far from stable. Like Michael she has frequent dreams
about drowning and is often associated in the novel with water (much like
Hannah Crean-Smith of The Unicorn) which she fears; she constantly dwells
on her unworthiness to be a part of the community and to enter the abbey
itself. When the new bell arrives at the abbey, and subsequently falls into the
lake, Catherine assumes the blame as she views it as directly related to her as
the new penitent entering the abbey through the same gate that she will use.

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 The Bell and Platonism 109

In her mind she sees this as a dreadful portent, relating it back to the legend
of the nun drowning herself in the lake once the old bell had flung itself out
of the tower. Catherine’s speech, as she prepares an attempt at drowning
herself, is childish and without reference to anybody else; her language
reflects the undeveloped self within her: ‘God has reached out his hand.
A white garment cannot conceal a wicked heart. There is no passing through
that gate. Goodbye’ (276). Clearly Catherine has suffered a total mental
breakdown at this point, although it does not come as a shock to the reader
that this should come to pass. Jacques Souvage analyses this scene:

As we know, Catherine has transferred to Michael her former passionate

devotion to Nick. Although she is to enter the Abbey as a novice (at the
moment of the bell’s installation), she is in love. In a person as unbal-
anced as Catherine such love will breed guilt . . . she comes increasingly
to identify herself with the guilty nun who drowned herself in the lake.78

As with Michael, then, myth and the past face the present and reality with
devastating consequences for the community. Catherine and Michael are
unable to transform themselves, and their piety, into a realistic appraisal of
selfhood or a satisfying relationship with an ‘other’. It is not without irony
that it is Nick’s eventual suicide which presses the two of them so firmly
together at the end of the novel: it would appear that one cannot now func-
tion without the other. If we remember the central moral impulse of the
novel, that all failures are ultimately failures in love, then only by loving
attentively and selflessly may we gain a true other-directed understanding
of reality. This is as true of Catherine as it is of the unspoken homosexual
connection between Michael and Nick.
In The Bell Murdoch represents the homosexual subject’s attempt to sup-
press knowledge, and therefore the effects of power, related to his sexuality.
She describes the manner in which autonomous inner linguistic and moral
processes affect the subject and emphasizes the importance of seeking the
truth in these processes. Finally, she depicts the moral failures of the indi-
vidual that spring from solipsism and egoism, in addition to portraying the
effect on the homosexual of the community’s failure to see him truthfully
and lovingly. It follows, of course, that this is a Platonic ideal which Murdoch
wishes to express to her readership, and she believes that the novel is the
form best suited to promote this; one which is returned to much later in
her career with The Green Knight which will be discussed later.

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