Sex, Purity, and Madness in Iris Murdoch’s Fiction

Abstract

The novels that Iris Murdoch wrote in the early part of her writing career ran parallel with other novels by writers like Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt, Doris Lessing and Penelope Mortimer, which depicted sexually passive housewives often on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Murdoch`s female characters share many attributes in common with the women represented by all of these other writers and, perhaps in the same way, Murdoch used the motif of women`s sexual experience to comment on a societal double standard. When exploring this she particularly draws attention to the loss of virginity and its connection with morality. This article deals with the issue of how society`s expectations of female purity can lead to mental illness and the ways in which Murdoch reflected and judged this in her writing.