A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
"A Severed Head" is a novel by Iris Murdoch that explores themes of love, power, and self-delusion through the story of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, who grapples with a tumultuous romantic life involving his wife, mistress, and various complicated relationships. The narrative unfolds with Martin's seemingly stable life unraveling as he faces shocking revelations about the motives and affairs of those around him, including his wife Antonia's desire for a divorce to marry his best friend, Palmer. As Martin confronts betrayal and his own misguided perceptions, he oscillates between power and vulnerability, ultimately leading to a painful self-discovery.
Murdoch employs a distinctive narrative style characterized by detailed realism and dark psychological undertones, which serve to highlight the complexities of her characters. The novel also incorporates feminist perspectives, questioning traditional male authority and exploring the dynamics of gender relationships. Throughout the story, Martin's inability to truly understand the women in his life exposes societal assumptions regarding masculinity and authority. Notably, "A Severed Head" was later adapted into a successful stage play and film, although significant alterations were made to its themes in those adaptations. This work stands as a compelling examination of the human psyche and the often turbulent nature of interpersonal connections.
Subject Terms
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
First published: 1961
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Farce
Time of work: The late 1950’s
Locale: London
Principal Characters:
Martin Lynch-Gibbon , a morose and reclusive cynicAntonia Lynch-Gibbon , his wife, a society woman of well-connected familyGeorgie Hands , Martin’s mistress, a lecturer at the London School of EconomicsPalmer Anderson , Martin’s best friend, a psychiatrist who is currently “treating” AntoniaHonor Klein , Palmer Anderson’s half sisterAlexander Lynch-Gibbon , Martin’s older brother, a sculptor
Form and Content
Events contradict the story that Martin tells in A Severed Head, while the plot’s old fashioned comic turns have him stumbling from one revelation to another. Martin not only mistakes the motives of the people dear to him but also mistakes his own. His love of wife and mistress that he parades so proudly at the start of the novel is eventually exposed as love for mother and child substitutes. As his assumptions are shattered, Martin gradually loses control of himself; he drinks more and more, becoming violent, sick, and irrational. Yet he begins to listen to his submerged psyche, which leads him to have a different perception of the world. The fact that Martin cannot understand the women he loves gives the novel a distinctive feminist twist. Feminist critics have observed that authors often use male narrators to give their narratives a sense of authority. Martin’s authority, however, is in question from the second chapter on, and this irony exposes some stock cultural assumptions about women and erotic experience as he loses first Antonia, and then Georgie.
Stylistically, the novel is pure Murdoch, involving a realistic and detailed attention to appearances, clothes, weather, and interiors, combined with characters who seem to be driven by dark forces beyond their control. At the beginning of the novel, Martin, full of smug self-satisfaction, returns home from a visit to his mistress, Georgie Hands. His wife soon returns from what he thought was a “session” with psychiatrist Palmer Anderson to announce that she wants a divorce so that she can marry Palmer. She and Palmer, however, want an understanding with Martin so that they can continue to maintain their long friendship—essentially, so that they do not have to feel guilty. In some way, this request renders Martin powerless, and he assumes the role of an understanding, forgiving husband, but he is now suddenly ambivalent about his mistress.
Martin first meets Honor Klein when he does Palmer the favor of picking her up at the train station, and although he conceives an instant dislike for her, he senses some of her power. Meanwhile, Martin dutifully abets the relationship between his wife and best friend, even to the extent of bringing them wine in bed. One night, while quite drunk and storing some wine at Palmer’s request, Martin is discovered in Palmer’s wine cellar by Honor. She goads him about Palmer and Antonia upstairs, and he responds by forcing her to the floor and beating her about the head. Later, when he recovers from his drinking bout, Martin writes a letter of apology, then realizes he is desperately, painfully, in love with Honor. When he tries to call her, he learns that she has returned to Cambridge; transfixed with emotion, he follows her. When he arrives at her house in Cambridge to declare his love, he finds Honor in bed with her half brother, Palmer.
Now that Martin knows Palmer’s guilty secret, he is restored to power. Antonia, sensing a change in Palmer, returns to Martin, who is still hopelessly in love with Honor. Palmer pursues Antonia, and when he tries to force her to return, Martin punches him, again gaining power. Martin is soon confronted with another confession: Antonia has had a long-standing love affair with his brother, Alexander, and now intends to live with him. This revelation finally opens Martin’s eyes, and he sees that his whole life has been based on self-delusion.
Matters come to a head when Martin waits at the airport watching Palmer and Honor leave for America, and finds that they are taking Georgie Hands, who has become Palmer’s patient, with them. Martin returns to his flat to brood, and in a final reversal of plot, Honor shows up and announces that Palmer and Georgie have gone to America without her. Although she promises nothing, she offers Martin a chance to pursue his love. Martin has suffered great pain, but he begins to understand himself. Humbly, he accepts her offer. He has grown up.
Context
Iris Murdoch’s novels have not attracted much attention from female critics, perhaps because she has never written about areas of women’s experience that do not overlap with men’s. A fictional masculine perspective permeates all of her novels, but in the case of first-person narrators such as Martin, it is always the perspective of a corrupted male psyche who wields words with power but does not truly grasp reality. Goodness, another major theme in Murdoch’s works, then becomes linked with femaleness. Murdoch’s typical male protagonists are also usually childless, professional, failed in their major enthusiasms (history, in Martin’s case), and involved in careers that parody their intellectual needs.
It remains to the women in her fiction to play the role of undermining these unreliable narrators. Many of her male narrators use misogynist generalizations in order to score points, but it is women who force the heroes to perceive the truth. Murdoch is clearly preoccupied by the unequal power relationships that exist between men and women and the way in which power is wielded in words. Part of the reason Murdoch’s male narrators fail to see truth is that they talk too much. This suggests that the connections between the male hero, articulateness, and power are presented with considerable deliberate irony on the author’s part.
A Severed Head was adapted successfully as a stage play in a collaboration between Murdoch and J. B. Priestley. The play had a tryout in Bristol, England, in 1963, ran successfully for two and a half years in London, and was released as a movie by Columbia Pictures in 1971. The novel was cut for the stage and screen version, and Georgie’s abortion and ensuing despair were omitted. The theme of childless sterility, which is important in the book as a symbol of the characters’ sterile lives, is significantly altered.
Bibliography
Baldanza, Frank. Iris Murdoch. New York: Twayne, 1974. Baldanza’s book remains a standard in Murdoch studies. It offers an overview of her first fifteen novels, focusing attention on Murdoch’s development as an artist and changing thematic emphasis. A brief biography citing formative events in the novelist’s life is included. The chapter on A Severed Head is a careful, detailed analysis that illuminates the novel.
Bove, Cheryl K. Understanding Iris Murdoch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. This volume, part of the series Understanding Contemporary British Literature, is intended as a guide for students and advanced nonacademic readers, to help clarify the special demands that influential contemporary literature makes. The book provides instruction in how to read Murdoch, explaining material, themes, language, point of view, structure, and symbolism.
Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. This book is an important discussion of Murdoch’s work in the form of an extended essay. Conradi groups the novels chronologically into three distinct periods of Murdoch’s development. There is an excellent chapter entitled “Eros in A Severed Head and Bruno’s Dream.”
Johnson, Deborah. Iris Murdoch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. The series Key Women Writers looks at women who have established positions in the mainstream of literary tradition and explores the ways in which such writers can mesh with feminist theory. Johnson’s book succeeds in finding much that speaks to feminists in Murdoch’s novels, especially in the depiction of power struggles that make up life in a competitive society. The world as Murdoch shows it is one in which the old social and ethical systems no longer work, which view lends itself to feminist analysis.
Sage, Lorna. Women in the House of Fiction: Post-War Women Novelists. New York: Routledge, 1992. This is a close examination of the ways in which women writers deal with realism and literary modernism. Sage, like Iris Murdoch, does not believe in a special kind of “feminine” writing; she believes that women writers have reinvented realism in a kind of “matriarchal realism.” She considers Murdoch a writer who has co-opted realism for her own purposes, particularly the concept of traditional marriage, which Murdoch has sabotaged.