Iris Murdoch's waifs, orphans, refugees, demons, and saints, all share a common isolation, a loss of community, and the absence of close relationship to "a rich and complicated" group from which as moral beings they should have much to learn. As a philosopher, Murdoch connects this loss of community to the inadequacies of existentialist and empirical thought that rely on self-centered standards of individual consciousness and sincerity, rather than on other-centered values of virtue, love, and imagination. As a novelist, she dramatizes her ethical concerns by increasingly demonizing the existentialist, solipsistic hero who rejects the "messy reality" of involvement with others in order to pursue what he perversely sees as freedom, abstraction, and romance…. By failing to see reality as worthy of loving exploration, Murdoch's benighted protagonist is compelled to rely exclusively on personal values as his sole guide to morality. The resulting psychological distortions to which such solipsism is liable cuts a man off completely from others and from society…. Murdoch's characters cannot see because they are enclosed in "a fantasy world of our own into which we try to draw things from the outside, not grasping their reality and independence, making them into dream objects of our own."… Her protagonists, therefore, can redeem themselves only by discovering new ways of seeing reality and by resisting the false consolations of form and of fantasy which Murdoch defines as "the enemy" of that true imagination which is "Love, an exercise of the imagination."… (pp. 557-58)

The response of Murdoch's characters to community is complicated by the paradox of their personalities: although her isolated characters long to be part of a familial, social, or national group, they are at the same time solipsists who rely chiefly on will, ego, and power in order to manipulate the behavior of others according to their own systems and beliefs. Where there is power, there can be no community. Murdoch's concept of community … is realized, therefore, only within a nexus of morality, imagination, selflessness, and love. (p. 558)

Murdoch's repudiation of the retreat from disorder has led to her creation of various images of man-made order as alternatives for isolation and as versions of community. Among these, the more important are such social patterns as work, erotic involvements, family entanglements, and the restricted inner spaces of houses within which relationships are explored and confined…. In the first instance, work substitutes for community in three ways that serve to illuminate both character and theme. First, the vocation to which an individual is drawn in some cases reflects his psychological inadequacy or reveals an abortive effort to give order and meaning to an otherwise vacuous life. Anna's work with the Miming Theater in Under the Net, for instance, suggests her need to fit herself into the theoretical world of Hugo Belfounder in order to win his approval and love…. Second, work might reflect a character's demonic need to control and exert power over others. Such an elusive and magical character as Mischa Fox, the newspaper magnate in [The Flight from the Enchanter], is supposed to have "at his disposal dozens of enslaved beings of all kinds whom he controlled at his convenience."… Third, work can also serve as a means for a protagonist to redeem himself and to work his way towards self-discovery: the changes in Rosa's jobs in Flight from factory worker to journalist and in Jake's jobs in Under the Net from hack-writer to hospital orderly to creative artist measure their movement towards selflessness, towards exorcism of their minds from the spells of fantasy and delusion, and towards becoming creative artists in their own right.

Not only work, but rooms and houses in [Murdoch's] novels function metaphorically to define and be defined by the relationships within them. The L-shaped room with its presiding blind and deaf mother, with its empty bed frame within which the Polish brothers make love to and enchant Rosa (Flight), Mischa's labyrinthian palazzo (Flight), Hannah's multi-mirrored rooms where she is imprisoned by the misperceptions and expectations of herself and others (The Unicorn) … [are] enclosures that reflect ailments of interiority as manifested in the character of their occupants and in the nature of their spell-bound, erotic, and frequently incestuous relationships.

[Although each of Murdoch's] novels experiments with a variety of communities, I have chosen to focus on … three Gothic novels, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Unicorn, and The Time of the Angels, because of their curious demonic inversions of community, in spite of which they also contain the recurring Murdochian theme of the struggle of love against the many guises of evil in everyday life. The elements of community in these works are Gothic extensions of similar concerns in her other novels. Here, the nets of fantasy are tighter, more difficult to escape, more terrifying, and cause more tragedy (disappearances, suicides, murders) than in her other novels. (pp. 559-60)

The fictional technique by which Murdoch pursues her ideas in these novels reveals a movement from an open to a closed structure. The already limited mental and physical spaces inhabited by narcissistic and Faustian characters in Flight and The Unicorn contract still further into the final confines of madness and death in The Time of the Angels. While Flight focuses on several different levels of society and a variety of erotic relationships, The Unicorn focuses more narrowly on a few philosophical attitudes and relationships confined within two houses, and The Time of the Angels concentrates even more narrowly on the mostly incestuous relationships within only one isolated ingrown household—that of an atheist priest who lives in a bombed-out rectory. These novels, therefore, are dramatizing the consequences of solipsism: the psychological and sexual enslavement of oneself and others through fantasy, delusion, self-abnegation, and power….

Murdoch's society in these novels resembles Northrop Frye's description of a demonic human world, a society dichotomized between the ruthless, inscrutable tyrant on one hand and the sacrificed victim or pharmakos on the other, a community held together by "a kind of molecular tension of egos, a loyalty to the group or the leader which diminishes the individual." The setting in each novel also conforms to the requirements of both the demonic and Gothic traditions: the straight path and rich topography of what Frye calls the apocalyptic is contrasted in Murdoch against the labyrinth or wasteland of the demonic. (p. 561)

The Flight from the Enchanter may be read as an allegory of power, power willingly conferred by psychologically enslaved individuals upon those who seek to control them by force of their personal magnetism and ego. The plot centers on Mischa Fox's attempts to gain control of a small independent magazine, the Artemis, its owner's sister Rosa, and various other independent people he can't bear to see free from his control….

Each of the major characters in Flight is an orphan, an alien, or a refugee who attempts to compensate for his isolation by creating and controlling his own world, free from the accidents and threats of real life. Mischa Fox, the supreme enchanter of the novel, is both ruthless controller and passive innocent. His own self-image as melancholy lover of the world emerges in confessional talks with Peter Saward when he weepingly recalls incidents from his childhood in an East European village. But this strange region of sensibility within him contrasts drastically with his life as a sophisticated power-magnate who rescues refugees such as Nina, only to trap them into his deathly web, and who manipulates his alter-ego, henchman, and "minotaur" Calvin to carry out his evil designs. (p. 562)

In the Murdochian credo, love is incompatible with power; it never involves the need to change another individual, but consists instead of "the non-violent apprehension of difference" and the delightful perception of the inexhaustible otherness of the other. In this novel, Peter Saward, historian of pre-Babylonian empires, is the only person capable of Murdochian selfless love, "the lover who nothing himself, lets other things be through him." Unlike Mischa, who needs to "place" people in order to control them, and Rosa, who fears intimacy as a threat to her independence, Peter is seen to be totally vulnerable to others, "a personality without frontiers" who never needs to defend himself against the powers of others. (p. 563)

The Unicorn (1963) represents a significant development in Murdoch's handling of the closed Gothic novel—the novel of form, myth, and socio-religious philosophy rather than that of character. Reminiscent of Wuthering Heights, "The Lady of Shallot," and Mme. de LaFayette's La Princesse de Cleves, this story is about the self-imposed exile and imprisonment of a group of people at Gaze Castle who weave themselves into a web of enchantment designed in part by Hannah Crean-Smith and by Gerald Scottow, her demonic master-caretaker…. Part of the ambiguity of the novel lies in the nature of the bonds that imprison Hannah—ambiguous bonds that are variously interpreted by others as superstitious, pagan, Christian, spiritual, evil, or sexual. Hannah is believed to be either under a seven-year spell or undergoing a seven-year period of spiritual suffering as expiation for her adultery and her attempted murder of her husband Peter. (p. 564)

The communities in the novel … are composed not of singularly independent centers of significance, but of actors who find safety in a looking-glass world, whose eyes project on to Hannah their image of her, and who see in her the reflections of spiritual, platonic, or courtly ideals. She dies when their faith in her wanes along with their existence as mirror images of her reality…. Hannah's mirror is finally a metaphor for her dependence on the introspective, self-contemplative code of conduct that gradually leads her to utterly disregard all others as independent and complex beings to be known, understood, or loved.

If the ability of a community to create its demonic controllers is seen in Flight and The Unicorn, Murdoch's The Time of the Angels is about the power of the demon to contaminate himself and others. In all three novels the enchanter manipulates the fantasies of victims who need a dominating figure to provide metaphysical meaning and dynamic tension to their otherwise vague drifting lives. In Time the need for some reconstructed value system directs this enchanter figure towards mad Nietzschean fantasies of the self as a potential Deity in a nihilistic world. Particularly in her central figure, Carel Fisher, we understand Murdoch's perception of the demonic as the inevitable result of conceptual and imaginative inadequacy in an age that venerates power and solipsism. (pp. 565-66)

Carel is Murdoch's modern representation of a Faust, who like Thomas Mann's Leverkühn, signals the end of a humane intellectual and ethical tradition. The parallels between Leverkühn and Carel (their similar philosophical backgrounds, their pacts with the inhuman, their sexual enslavement of others) emphasize their author's concern with those nihilistic and irrational elements in modern existentialist thought that Mann had earlier seen as responsible for the inhumanity of the Germans during the Second World War….

If the central image of interiority in The Unicorn was the mirror, here it is the cocoon. Carel's effect on others takes the form of a kind of spell that imposes on them his special brand of immobility and dehumanization…. (p. 566)

Murdoch's choral use of Blake's "Introduction" to "The Songs of Experience" as part of Pattie's musings is intended to suggest a healthy Romantic norm, a positive Romanticism that emphasizes the regenerative power of wonder that accompanies the discovery of the external sensory world through goodness, love, and imagination. Murdoch's pursuit of true imagination as man's key to the discovery and love of others also recalls what Alfred Kazin calls the great theme of Blake's work—the search for imagination "that has been lost and will be found again through human vision." Seen within a framework of Romantic theories of perception, her sudden recognition scenes (such as Muriel's chilling keyhole vision of her father's naked body entwined with Elizabeth's) may be understood as devices intended to startle the self-deceptive mind into seeing the truth of others, and occasionally understanding, as Pattie does, the "face of evil as a human face." Carel's evil then is the result of man's intellectual errors that are created by his inadequate imagination—what Blake would call lost imagination, and Murdoch fantasy. (p. 568)

Her three Gothic novels are crucial to an understanding of her treatment of evil, the dangers of fantasy, and the problem of the discovery of others which is the only means to achieve human community. Within the Gothic form Murdoch has also found powerful images and a "new vocabulary of experience" that capture her sense of the moral and emotional failures of this age: the ruined church as an emblem of the failure of conventional religion to cure the sickness of the age, the incestuous family as a demonic extension of egoism and solipsism, and the enchanter or Faustian priest as a manifestation of modern existential man who defines his own values in a world bereft of the community of men and of God. The retreat of her characters into mental and spatial enclosures that admit neither contingency, humanity, nor love is most perfectly embodied in the progressively inward movements and the enclosed structure of Iris Murdoch's Gothic house of fiction. (pp. 568-69)