Abstract
A Severed Head and A Word Child belong in the category of her fiction Murdoch has referred to as ‘closed-up, rather obsessional novels’ (Rose, 1968).1 Other novels in this group would include works from the earlier part of her career like The Italian Girl, The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels, where an entire community of characters seems to be living out a collective fantasy, and the solipsism of the cast is paralleled by the melodrama of the plot and the claustrophia of the setting. The obsessional novels often draw on the Gothic tradition (in The Unicorn a governess goes to stay in a foreboding castle) and, in their compulsive patterning, are close to Murdoch’s conception of the crystalline novel. They underline just how difficult it is to achieve the ‘opened out’ form of love Murdoch speaks of in the above epigraph. The dilemma is intrinsically connected to her specialized conception of Eros, the fusion of spirituality and sex which she derives from Plato and Freud. In her obsessional novels the Platonic ideal of ascesis is conspicuous only in isolated glimpses; for the most part, the characters remain locked into a way of behaving that resembles Freud’s baser version of the soul.