Erotics of War and Sovereignty in Iris Murdoch’s The Red and the Green

Abstract

In The Red and the Green the Irish writer Iris Murdoch creates a narrative universe that focuses on the Easter Rising of 1916, one of the most tumultuous turns in twentieth century Irish history, and introduces a rich web of moral conflicts and dilemmas experienced by members of an Anglo-Irish community in Dublin. The main concern of this article is to introduce a reading of Murdoch’s The Red and the Green in the context of the mythopoetic discourse of the Easter Rising of 1916, which predominantly reflected the nationalist rhetoric of the Irish Revivalist Movement, and to show how Murdoch revisualizes recent Irish history through her own cultural origins. The argument is grounded on the premise that Millie features in the novel as the embodiment of the feminine archetype and symbolic representation of the Erotic in stark contrast to the war rhetoric of the Easter Rising that relies heavily on the desexualized, romanticized and idealized versions of the feminine in Celtic mythic imagination. Millie’s feminine archetypal image and her symbolic representation of Eros distorts and shakes the masculine rhetoric of the Rising. As a response to the desexualized, sterile, and therefore displaced representations of the Sovereignty Goddess in the literature of the Irish Revival, Murdoch introduces a critical ethos in the novel by restoring the essence of this feminine element in the portrayal of Millie, the central character around whom the plot largely revolves.