A Severed Head

Iris Murdoch

4 ideas

1. Martin Lynch-Gibbon's marriage comes apart

   Martin, a complacent London wine merchant with a secret young mistress, Georgie, is told by his wife Antonia that she is leaving him for her psychoanalyst, his friend Palmer Anderson. The couple insist on staying affectionately close to Martin. The fallout then works through nearly every pairing among six people: Martin finds Palmer in bed with his half-sister Honor Klein, learns that Antonia has long been sleeping with Martin's brother Alexander, and sees Georgie become engaged to Alexander and attempt suicide. In the end Antonia goes to Alexander, Palmer leaves for America with Georgie, and Martin is left facing Honor, the one person he cannot manage.

2. Civilized kindness as a form of control

   When a betraying couple insists on being gentle, rational and therapeutic toward the person they have wronged, they take away his right to rage. Once anger is treated as a symptom, the injured party can be managed and kept on as a dependent, almost a child. Martin's eventual violence toward Honor, and her open contempt for the arrangement, show that the 'civilized' settlement was a way for the lovers to possess him without cost.

3. The severed head as untamed otherness

   Honor Klein compares herself to a severed head, the Medusa-like object that primitive peoples kept and consulted for prophecy, and she stands in the novel as a figure of dark knowledge who resists being domesticated. Martin's fascination with her pulls him toward something outside his comfortable self-image, in contrast to partners who confirm it. The book leaves that attraction ambiguous rather than offering it as a moral cure for fantasy.

4. Shifting couplings expose rivalry and possessiveness

   As the closed circle keeps exchanging lovers, many of the attachments turn out to rest on rivalry, kinship and the wish to hold what someone close already holds, more than on knowing the beloved. Watching the pairings rearrange inside a sealed set of rooms shows how much of what the characters call love is self-regard. Even so, Georgie, Antonia and Honor each make a distinct claim on Martin, so the partners are not simply interchangeable.

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