Icons and Idols in Murdoch's 'A Severed Head'
"Can one have relations with a severed head?" Iris Murdoch herself raises this most provocative question in her novel [A Severed Head]. Obligingly, Murdoch also supplies both the myth and at least several of the meanings of her central symbol: the head of the Gorgon Medusa, the Freudian reading of such a head as the female genitals both feared and desired, and the drastic segregating of the individual from a whole nexus of relationships…. Her characters include a psychiatrist, a sculptor, and an anthropologist. Every major character in the novel is in some sense a head-hunter, with the exception of the chief victim, Georgie Hands—and when Georgie realizes to what extent she has been a victim of two brothers in turn, she cuts off her hair as prelude to a more literal attempted suicide.
Yet a secondary sequence of images belongs to a different order: art, specifically religious art….
"If you asked Francesca to describe her soul," Saki asserts in The Unbearable Bassington, "she would probably have described her livingroom." So it is with the characters in A Severed Head (for instance, "The room was Antonia")—all except the naive Georgie, who lacks, not a soul, but an established nexus for her identity. The narrator, Martin, and Antonia, his wife, are always placing objects carefully "in the rich and highly integrated mosaic of [their] surroundings,"… while Georgie [Martin's mistress] is "destined not to possess things." (p. 92)
[The menages depicting Martin and his wife and Martin and his mistress], both significantly lighted with firelight and candles, [are] a version of [Plato's] Cave. In each, Martin makes icons of shadow-deities: himself and the woman…. Martin perceives Antonia, with her greying gold hair and her great tawny eyes, as being "like some rich gilded object,"… which he is fortunate to possess.
Gold, symbolic of the firelight and candlelight, also symbolic of idolatrous worship, is used pervasively throughout the first half of the novel. The half-light of the Cave provides a golden glamor only gradually dispelled…. (p. 93)
[In the novel] Murdoch seems to be affirming her own artistic creed; yet in A Severed Head schematized symbols and caricature abound. Ironically, Martin protests on behalf of organic wholeness. Alexander has done a gold-bronze head of Antonia—just the sort of icon one would expect Martin to want. Though he concedes that "The best thing about being God would be making the heads," he mistrusts Alexander's playing God and denying the body, and he also mistrusts beauty abstracted inhumanly from "the warm muddle of my wife."… A further irony is that Alexander has always been a "head-hunter": he has stolen girls from Martin in the past;… he will be revealed later as Antonia's lover long before her adultrous affair with Palmer. (p. 94)
In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch rewrites Plato's parable of the Cave, in which the prisoners are in a firelit cave where they mistake shadows on the back wall for reality; one prisoner, type of the philosopher, escapes and painfully adjusts to look upon the sun. The allegory presupposes both the existence of the sun (the Good) and the capacity in the soul of man to perceive it. Murdoch merely asserts "We see the world in the light of the Good" … and "if we look outside the self what we see are scattered intimations of the Good."… Furthermore, she postulates not just two conditions, worshipping the shadows and perceiving the reality of the sun-lit world, but three: worshipping the shadows, turning from them to worship the fire, and emerging to accept the light of the sun. For her, the prisoners who see shadows are worshipping by "blind selfish instinct."… In the second stage "they see the flames which threw the shadows which they used to think were real," and "what is more likely than that they should settle down beside the fire?" The fire is the psyche, mistaken for the sun…. She concedes that the "virtuous peasant" may possibly escape without even noticing the fire. Most, however, go through the second stage, where "false love moves to false good. False love embraces false death." Instincts of the self are very strong; few transcend them except in special areas; true goodness is … the hardest of phenomena for the artist to describe successfully. (pp. 96-7)
Very few of Murdoch's characters succeed in being good, except perhaps in "specialized areas."… In A Severed Head Georgie, the most sacrificial character, goes off with Palmer, who seems affectionate but who may (as Martin believes) enslave her…. [Martin's] chances of survival seem slight, and his chances of becoming good or moving to the sun seem almost non-existent. Possibly, in terms of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, which Murdoch greatly admires, he has abandoned the aesthetic man for the role of the ethical man; if so, he goes, like the moth to the flame, to his own sacrifice. (p. 97)
Ann Gossman, "Icons and Idols in Murdoch's 'A Severed Head'," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction (copyright © by James Dean Young 1977), Vol. XVIII, No. 3, 1977, pp. 92-7.
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