WOMEN & WRITING
THE BLACK PRINCE BY IRIS MURDOCH
by Fuat ÖZKUL (05 April, 2006; METU - ANKARA)
BIOGRAPHY
Iris Murdoch was born on July 15, 1919 in Dublin, Ireland to Anglo-Irish parents. Her family moved to London when she was one year old. She was an only child, a status that she enjoyed. Her mother was an opera singer and her father was a civil servant. After winning a scholarship to Oxford College, she studied philosophy and classics, including Greek and Latin. She graduated in 1938, just before World War II, and was drafted into the civil service as a Treasury worker. After the war, she continued working for the government as an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Belgium and Austria. While on the European continent, she came in contact with both Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher, and Raymond Queneau, the French novelist. This period of her life reawakened her love for philosophy. She applied for a visa to study in the United States, but was denied since she had recently registered as a communist. Soon after, she returned to Oxford for an advanced philosophy degree and studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein. After receiving her degree, she took a teaching post at Oxford, which she maintained until she was nearly sixty years old.
Murdoch was strongly influenced by Plato, Freud and Sartre. Her novels are by turns intense and bizarre, filled with dark humor and unpredictable plot twists, undercutting the civilized surface of the usually upper-class milieu in which her characters are observed. She often included atypical gay characters in her fiction, most notably in The Bell (1958) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). She also frequently wrote about a powerful and almost demonic male “enchanter” who imposes his will on the other characters — a type of man Murdoch is said to have modeled on her lover, the Nobel laureate, Elias Canetti.
Although she wrote primarily in a realistic manner, on occasion Murdoch would introduce ambiguity into her work through a sometimes misleading use of symbolism, and by mixing elements of fantasy within her precisely described scenes. The Unicorn (1963) can be read and enjoyed as a sophisticated Gothic romance, or as a novel with Gothic trappings, or perhaps as a brilliant parody of the Gothic mode of writing. The Black Prince (1973) is a remarkable study of erotic obsession, and the text becomes more complicated, suggesting multiple interpretations, when subordinate characters contradict the narrator and the mysterious “editor” of the book in a series of afterwords.Murdoch was awarded the Booker Prize in 1978 for The Sea, the Sea, a finely detailed novel about the power of love and loss, featuring a retired actor who is overwhelmed by jealousy when he meets his erstwhile lover after several decades apart.
Several of her works have been adapted for the screen, including the British television series of her novels An Unofficial Rose and The Bell. J. B. Priestley dramatized her 1961 novel, A Severed Head, which was directed by Richard Attenborough in 1971, and starred Ian Holm. Richard Eyre’s film, Iris (2001), based on her husband’s memoir of his wife as she developed Alzheimer’s disease, starred Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet respectively as the older and younger versions of Dame Iris Murdoch.
Iris Murdoch was an amazingly prolific writer, producing in her lifetime twenty- six novels, eight books of philosophy, and eight plays. Her writing career began in 1952 with Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, a critical assessment of his writings. She published four novels in the 1950s, starting in 1954. Between 1961 and 1971, she published ten novels and one book of philosophy, more than one per year. When asked by an interviewer how much time she took off between novels, she responded “half an hour.” In another interview, she noted that she writes fiction in the morning and philosophy in the afternoon, while still maintaining her teaching post. Murdoch’s means of writing her novels also were noteworthy since she hated typewriters and usually just wrote two or three drafts of the novel in longhand before delivering it to the publisher in a brown paper bag. Once she finished her book, she would not let anyone edit so much as a word, another rare privilege for an author. Many of Murdoch’s novels met with mixed criticism, especially those published rapidly in the sixties. Critics cited the insubstantial nature of her characters, the occasionally pretentious presentation of philosophy, and poorly written narrative that needed editing. Frank Kermode stated in the early 1970s that each of her books contains “somewhere inside, the ghost of a major novel.” With the arrival of The Black Prince in 1973, many believed that that novel had come. The Black Prince is widely considered the best of Murdoch’s novels. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in its year of publication. It was, like almost all of her novels, a resounding popular success.
Iris Murdoch admired the great nineteenth-century English and Russian novels written by Tolstoy, Doestovesky, James, Dickens, and Eliot. With her books, she longed to replicate the complex characterization and detailed scenery of those authors. In comparison, she believed 20th century novels to be weak and uninteresting. In her effort to recreate a 19th century style of fiction, Murdoch combined a variety of techniques, so that her novels usually contained the intrigue of a thriller, the twists of an adventure story, the dynamics of a romance tale, and the comic patterns of Shakespearean and Greek literature. Some have compared her novels to soap operas because of their romantic intrigues and bizarrely coincidental plot twists that rely upon doorbells bringing trouble and phone calls bringing disaster.
Murdoch’s background as a philosopher is obvious in her fiction, as her texts are frequently interspersed with philosophical commentary. Such direct philosophical restatement is particularly prominent in The Black Prince. Its primary themes are the possibility of glimpsing eternal truth through the experience of erotic love, and possibility of presenting truth through the creation of art. As Murdoch was a Platonist, she believed, like Plato, that people go through life with only a limited sense of truth since our “everyday” world is a world of illusion. Behind this world however, Plato believed, is a world full of “ideal forms”. It is this world, which contains truth, that Bradley Pearson, the main character of The Black Prince, is able to touch upon as a result of his experience with erotic love. Structurally, Murdoch’s tendency to shift into philosophical discourse while telling her stories may be slightly disconcerting and difficult for some to follow. Her use of philosophy often gives her novels a fragmented style. Overall, her ability to merge philosophy and fiction, however, leads to a profound reading experience.
Iris Murdoch was made a Dame of the British Order in 1987 for her scholarly achievements. Her writing stopped in 1994, sometime after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Murdoch died in 1999. Her personal struggle at the end of her life was chronicled in a book by her husband, John Bayley, entitled Elegies for Iris.
CRITICISM
Murdoch was criticized in 2003 by the British writer A.N. Wilson in his Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a book described by The Guardian as “mischievously revelatory” and “quite spectacularly rude,” and described by Wilson himself as an “anti-biography,” in which he wrote of her promiscuity and disloyalty, that she “thrived on acts of betrayal”, was cruel, and was “prepared to go to bed with almost anyone”, (Wilson 2003) .
PLOT OVERVIEW
The Black Prince tells the story of Bradley Pearson, a fifty-eight year old man who has previously published three books. In order to write a great novel, he quits his lifelong job as a tax inspector, but soon finds himself struck with writer’s block. He decides to spend the summer in a rented cottage on the coast for inspiration.
Before he can leave for the coast, however, a series of events keeps him home. When his detested ex-wife’s brother, Francis visits him he finds out that his ex wife, Christian, has returned to London. He is called to intervene in a marital dispute between his close friends, Arnold and Rachel Baffin. Arnold is a successful but unartistic writer. During the fight, Rachel Baffin hits her head on the fireplace poker, but is not dead, as Arnold initially fears. After leaving their house, Bradley runs into the Baffins’ twenty-year-old daughter, Julian, by the subway station. She wants Bradley to teach her how to write. The next morning, Bradley’s sister, Priscilla, unexpectedly arrives, because she has left her husband. She almost immediately tries to commit suicide with sleeping pills. During the confusion of her suicide attempt, for which all of the Baffins and Francis Marloe are present, Christian, Bradley’s ex-wife, appears, but is taken away by Arnold before Bradley sees her.
After Priscilla gets back from the hospital, Bradley visits Christian in order to tell her to leave him alone. Bradley then goes to Bristol to pick up his sister’s jewels. He is unable to do so, and finds that Priscilla’s husband has a younger, pregnant mistress. Priscilla starts staying at Christian’s house so Francis Marloe, a former doctor, can care for her. While all of this is happening, Arnold Baffin becomes interested in having an affair with Christian and Rachel Baffin becomes interested in sleeping with Bradley. During Rachel and Bradley’s attempted lovemaking, however, he cannot perform sexually. He and Rachel later determine to become platonic friends.
Julian has been pestering Bradley to teach her about Hamlet and arrives one day for a tutorial. During the tutorial, Bradley falls passionately in love with her. He initially tries to keep his love secret. After becoming physically ill while watching Der Rosenkavalier with Julian however, he confesses his emotions. He tells Julian that he is forty-six, instead of fifty-eight. Julian considers the issue of his love thoughtfully. By the next morning, she has determined that she loves him. Julian later confesses her love to her parents. They respond by locking her in her room and yelling at Bradley. Despite Rachel and Arnold’s anger, Bradley refuses to see that his love is inappropriate. When Julian sneaks away from her parents’ house, she and Bradley meet and leave for his rented cottage.
On their first day away, Julian entertains romantic fantasies about marrying Bradley. Their initial attempts at lovemaking are not successful. The next day, Bradley finds out that Priscilla has killed herself. He keeps the news from Julian to maintain their bliss. When he returns home, he finds Julian dressed up as Hamlet. He drags her to the bed and makes violent love to her in such a rough way that Julian later weeps. Arnold finds them later that night and begs Julian to leave. He tells her of Priscilla’s death and Bradley’s true age. Julian seems confused, but refuses go. After her father leaves, she isolates herself in a separate bedroom to think, but is gone by the time Bradley wakes in the morning.
Bradley goes back to London for Priscilla’s funeral. He believes that Arnold stole Julian away in the night. Bradley cannot find her anywhere. Christian wants to start a relationship with Bradley, but he declines. Rachel tells Bradley that Julian left him freely because she learned of Bradley’s recent sexual encounter with Rachel (Rachel had described the encounter in a letter that Arnold delivered). Bradley is so angry at Rachel’s interference that he spitefully shows her a letter that Arnold wrote describing Arnold’s love for Christian. Rachel is furious and vows never to forgive Bradley. A few days later, Bradley receives a letter from Julian. Despite her saying otherwise, he decides that she still loves him and that she is in Venice. He makes plans to go there. Before he can leave, however, Rachel calls and begs for his immediate assistance. After arriving at the Baffins’ house, Bradley finds Arnold dead, having been hit with the same fire poker that once hit Rachel. When Bradley tries to cover up Rachel’s crime, he is accused of it himself. He is later convicted because everyone believes that he killed Arnold out of envy. Bradley has written his novel from prison. In the final postscript of the book, the editor, P.Loxias, notes that soon after finishing the book, Bradley Pearson died of a fast growing cancer.
CHARACTER LIST
Bradley Pearson
Bradley Pearson is the main character of the novel and also the one who writes the majority of it. In the beginning of the book, Bradley is a cold, occasionally cruel man. Although he acts politely, his internal monologue usually reveals him to be much less polite than he appears. Much of his external behavior is shockingly rude, especially to Christian and Francis. Furthermore, his self-interested nature leads him to neglect his sister, Priscilla. Even when he hears that she has killed herself, he lacks the compassion and concern that one would normally feel for a sibling. Despite his unfriendly nature, Bradley is a compelling character because he changes throughout the book and also because he aspires, to some extent, to do good, primarily by writing a novel. Bradley’s love of Julian changes him. Bradley’s lengthy description of his love, at the beginning of Part Two, allows us to understand the nuances of his soul. With his heart fully exposed, it is difficult to dislike him, even if some of his behaviors are less than honorable. The way that Bradley keeps changing also makes him an intriguing figure. By the end of the book, he is a kinder, gentler soul, having experienced true love and after having seen the errors of his ways. Bradley is finally able to act selflessly, by not accusing Rachel of Arnold’s murder. Bradley’s ability to change and eventually realize his faults makes him a likeable character, despite his earlier bad deeds
Arnold Baffin - The very successful popular writer whom Bradley is accused of killing at the end of the novel. Arnold and Bradley’s friendship is one of the primary relationships within the novel. Although Bradley frequently dislikes Arnold, Arnold is portrayed very favorably. He is a polite, interesting man who always wants to know more about people’s characters and who always longs to talk to them. He takes great pleasure in hearing about Francis Marloe’s life, for example, while Bradley at the same time is trying to get Francis out the door. Arnold’s compassionate interest contrasts Bradley’s coldness.
Rachel Baffin - The wife of Arnold Baffin. Rachel is a forceful woman whom both Arnold and Bradley underestimate. Arnold seems to think that all is well between him and his wife; Bradley regards Rachel as a benign, older woman. Rachel’s firm speech and unforgiving tone, however, suggests the power within her personality, even if the other characters cannot see it. Rachel herself predicts her fierceness when she tells Bradley that she still has “real fire” in her. Despite Rachel’s fierceness, she is also a sympathetic character who also helps to articulate the difficulties of being a middle-aged housewife.
Julian Baffin
Julian is the twenty-year old daughter of Arnold and Rachel Baffin, with whom Bradley falls in love. Julian is characterized by youth and naïveté. She has never been a successful student, but suddenly decides that she wants to be a writer. Her lack of knowledge that Homer and Dante were poets, however, shows her sudden career goals to be romanticized dreams. The way that she falls in love with Bradley is equally so. In one of the opening scenes, she performs an exorcism to rid her recent boyfriend from her life, but after just one week she believes that she pictures marrying Bradley and living happily ever after. Such ideas are naïve and romantic. Were she involved with a man her own age and not Bradley, such naïveté would likely not be a proble
Her failure to understand the dynamics behind her relationship with Bradley is problematic. First, her cluelessness leads her to confess the affair to her parents. Furthermore, she cannot understand why they appear so angry about it. Later, she throws herself from a moving car to prove her love. While she is not seriously hurt, her youthful impetuous actions suggest trouble. Her illusions finally will be shattered when Bradley makes violent love to her, leaving her weeping. The lustfulness of his passion finally reveals to her the nature of Bradley’s self and after she realizes it, she flees. Julian is a sympathetic character, but also a slightly foolish one. Furthermore, because Bradley is telling the story, Julian often comes across as sexually aggressive. As Bradley describes it, Julian almost initiated their affair by insisting that he become her teacher, inviting him to the opera, and coming over for a Hamlet tutorial. Despite Bradley’s perceptions, Julian remains a naïve, not extraordinary girl who is unversed in the ways of love. Julian’s youth, however, generally forgives her character faults.
Francis Marloe
Francis Marloe’s primary role in the novel is comic. Francis is a classic buffoon style character, characteristic of Greek comedy or Shakespeare. Francis is comic because he is pitiful and easy to be laughed at. The other characters laugh at him consistently and cruelly. Bradley Pearson’s cruel treatment of Francis, in particular makes us want to sympathize with him. But even as we long to respect Francis, his constant fumbling makes it difficult to take him seriously. He longs to doctor Priscilla, for example, but he leaves her alone to get drunk with Bradley’s homosexual neighbor, during which time Priscilla kills herself. Furthermore, in his explanation of the incident, Francis insists that the neighbor, Rigby, drugged the wine so Francis could not return, whereas it is more likely that Rigby and Francis were having sex. Francis’s final postscript makes him look entirely silly. Francis’s identity as a comic figure also comes from his pitiful background, being a doctor whose license was taken away for misuse of pharmaceuticals. Finally, his tendency to ingratiate himself to everyone makes him easy to laugh at. In many ways Francis is a sad character, often talking about the pain of his life, but still his loose emotions serve for comic effect.
Priscilla Saxe - The sister of Bradley Pearson. Priscilla is a sympathetic, but pitiful woman who spends the majority of the book moaning about the ruined state of her life. Priscilla’s life, it appears, is somewhat ruined, since she spent most of it in an unloving marriage. Her painful experience testifies to the difficulties of life as well as the specific difficulties of being a woman. Priscilla’s great regret is the abortion that left her unable to have children. Priscilla’s sadness helps to establish Bradley’s coldness as a character, because, despite her needs, he basically ignores her.
Christian Evansdale - Bradley Pearson’s ex-wife. Christian is a confident, strong woman who has aged but still remains sexually attractive. She has lived in America for the past few years and appears slightly brassy and American. Christian’s character is seen entirely through her interaction with Bradley, which is not entirely credible given his previous hatred of her. She, like Rachel, is a woman of power, even though she has aged. Christian is a sympathetic and even admirable character, given the strength of her personality, but at the same time her brassy quality gives her a slightly comic edge.
Roger Saxe - Priscilla’s husband and Bradley Pearson’s brother-in-law. Bradley always has disliked Roger’s chummy, non-intellectual style. Roger has done bad things in the past, namely having Priscilla have an abortion and then making her father pay for half of it. Her current affair with Marigold in some ways also seems cruel since he is abandoning his wife, who cannot have children due to the abortion that Roger insisted upon. Still, while Roger has flaws, he is not all bad. Although Priscilla trick him into marrying her, he stayed with her for twenty years, despite their unhappiness. Furthermore, although he did have an affair, he kept it a secret until after she left him; then he asked for a divorce. Generally, the tendency to have an affair during marriage does not appear honorable, but since Roger and Priscilla’s marriage was so terrible, his actions actually seem understandable.
Marigold - Roger Saxe’s mistress who is pregnant with his child. Little is known about Marigold except that she is a dentist. Her name suggests her freshness and youth. Her presence in Roger’s life testifies to the terrible state of his marriage. She and Roger also are a couple that mirror Bradley and Julian, since Roger is significantly older that Marigold.
P. Loxias - The editor of the novel. “Loxias” is a pseudonym for Apollo, the Greek god of the Arts. The prophetess Cassandra refers to Apollo as “Loxias” in Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. Loxias is not truly a developed character in the novel, as he only serves to provide a foreword and postscript. His primary role is to alert the readers to the primary theme of the book: the importance of art in articulating truth. Since Apollo is the God of Arts, it seems appropriate that he is the one to supervise a novel that debates its relative merits.
Hartbourne - A friend of Bradley’s from work. Little is known about Hartbourneexcept that Bradley frequently has lunch with him and Christian later marries him.
Oscar Belling - Julian’s ex-boyfriend. He never appears in the novel. At the end of the novel however, Julian’s name has changed to “Julian Belling” signifying that she has married him. His presence merely serves to suggest Julian’s youthful approach the art of loving, since it is just after breaking up with him that she decides that is passionately in love with Bradley.
THEMES
Art as a Vehicle for Truth
As Loxias and Bradley Pearson explain in their forewords and postscripts, art is one of the rare venues that allows for the articulation of truth. As Loxias says in the conclusion of the novel, “art tells the only truth that ultimately matters.” As a follower of the ideas of Plato, Iris Murdoch believes that the world of everyday life is a world of illusions, behind which exists a world of truth, containing “ideal forms”. When one is finally able to see the world of ideal forms, one is glimpsing truth. In a realm with both illusory and “true” worlds, art holds a special place, because through it an artist is able to bring viewers out of the illusory plane and into the true one. Art serves as a fundamental philosophical tool that can alert the world to higher meanings in life. Bradley Pearson’s struggle to write a deeply meaningful novel in The Black Prince captures one artist’s attempt to preserve a glimmer of truth for others. Although Pearson is struck by writer’s block for most of the novel, his experience of Eros allows him to create the ultimate master work. In doing so, as P.Loxias (the God Apollo) suggests, he is able to bring truth to us, the readers.
Eros’s Facilitation of Expression
Bradley Pearson’s experience of Eros gives him the ability to write. “Eros” refers both to erotic love and to a deeper lust for power, love, and desire. Bradley’s experience of Eros originally starts as pure love for Julian Baffin: he becomes happy and pleasant after feeling it. As his love turns towards lust, however, he begins to refer to his Eros as “black Eros,” referencing the negative qualities that overtake him during his obsession with Julian. Despite the potentially destructive power of Eros that Bradley experiences, it still is the avenue that allows him to glimpse truth. After such a sudden and intense voyage with Eros, Bradley emerges changed and is finally able to express truth through the creation of art.
The Randomness of Life
Iris Murdoch was not an existentialist, but she shares the existentialist idea that life has no greater purpose than what individual humans designate. For Murdoch and existentialists, there is no God who has preordained one’s life path before one is born. Instead, one is born with freedom to create whatever type of life that one chooses. Despite the ability to be free, most people generally prefer to cling to a preordained meaning by believing in God, or by assigning meaning to everything that happens to them. In an effort to counter this tendency, Murdoch attempts to argue for the random nature of life in her novel. For example, Bradley and Julian randomly meet twice, but there is no sense that their coincidental meetings were meant to be. Likewise, a series of random arrivals and meetings drive the entire plot of her novel. These events are what make up people’s lives, but they were not each individually plotted by the Fates. As Murdoch demonstrates, life is just a series of random accidents connected together.
MOTIFS
Marriage
The Black Prince begins and ends with a domestic quarrel between a married couple. During the novel, Murdoch analyzes the institution of marriage by looking at it through three different couples. For each of these couples, marriage fails. Furthermore, in two of the marriages, Priscilla’s and Roger’s, and Rachel’s and Arnold’s, the marriage proves fatal; one of the partners is dead by the end of the book. Given the failure of marriages in her novel, Murdoch suggests that it is a consistently painful institution, which might be better avoided. Bradley Pearson himself articulates a similar perspective when he suggests that the state of being married is inconsistent with a human’s natural desire and that marriage generally leads one towards a state of perpetual loneliness.
Hamlet
Hamlet is major motif in the novel. Hamlet’s characters, text, and themes recur several times. The play primarily appears because Julian Baffin wants to study Hamlet, so she keeps asking Bradley to teach it to her. By explaining it to Julian, Bradley is able to articulate his interpretation of what Hamlet actually means. The theme in Hamlet that is most important to The Black Prince is that of identity and the ability to create one’s identity through the use of words. As Bradley Pearson writes his narrative, he struggles with this issue, which may be the reason for which the novel is called The Black Prince—a title usually given to Hamlet. Hamlet’s appearance in the novel also plays an important role in the growing rapport between Julian and Bradley, since their initial tutorial is a symbolic sex scene, and when Julian eventually dresses up as Hamlet, Bradley proceeds to make violent love to her. Murdoch’s frequent references to Hamlet also indicate her textual allegiance to Shakespearian techniques, which she greatly admired.
Feet and Boots
Attention to Julian’s feet is a motif that chronicles the sexual awakening of Bradley. The motif begins when Bradley sees Julian walking barefoot by the subway station. He proceeds to buy her a pair of purple boots, but not before his socks tumble out of his pocket and she puts them on. It is when she finally puts on the boots in the store, that Bradley feels his first swell of lust. Later during their Hamlet tutorial, Julian arrives wearing the same purple boots. As the room grows hot, she asks if she can take them off. She asks Bradley if her feet smell and he says that they do, but that he finds it “charming”. As lust and unrealized love overwhelm him, Bradley comments that he could smell “her sweat, her feet, her breasts.” Julian’s exposure of her feet galvanizes Bradley’s sexuality and serves as one of the symbolic steps towards the awakening of his love.
SYMBOLS
Kites
When Bradley leaves Rachel’s house after kissing her, Julian releases her kite and Bradley follows it faithfully as he walks to the subway station. The kite symbolizes the glimpse of the eternal that he is soon to get, but has not yet received. Bradley already has philosophized about the importance of kites when he was drunk in Bristol noting that kites are distant high things that are “an image of our condition.” As he follows Julian’s kite to the train station, he feels that it is the “bearer of some potent as yet unfathomed destiny.” The kite’s ability to fly and to see the world from a higher perspective is something that all humans aspire to and is something that Bradley shall be able to do by the end of the novel. The kite symbolizes the ability to see beyond the world of illusionary forms that dominates the everyday world.
Priscilla’s jewels
Priscilla is obsessed with her jewels and believes that if she receives them, all of her troubles shall be over. This belief is false and represents the sad state of her life. Priscilla’s jewels represent the one thing that she was able to gather during her married years. To some extent, they represent her sole legacy, since she has lived a childless existence. But it is a sad legacy, as jewels are cold, meaningless items whose primary significance is their monetary value. Priscilla’s inability to see the illusionary and meaningless nature of these items is consistent with her inability to have seen, or looked for, a deeper layer of truth during her entire life. When Priscilla finally receives her longed after jewels, she not surprisingly does not feel happier. Her jewels are meaningless items that suggest the way in which she, and most people, waste their lives by not trying to aspire for more meaningful truths.
Der Rosenkavalier
Der Rosenkavalier is Strauss’s opera that Bradley and Julian attend. The opera has a special symbolic role because it contains sexual partners of grossly different ages, similar to the one in The Black Prince. Bradley’s realization of the similarity between the opera and his own sexuality causes him to vomit after only several minutes of watching it. The color red that plays such a large role in the opera’s setting also is significant in bringing out Bradley’s silenced sexual desires. Although Bradley may not know this at the beginning of the novel, the plot of Der Rosenkavalier also foreshadows that of The Black Prince. While Bradley and Julian will have a love affair, as the Princess and Octavian did, both Julian and Octavian will eventually leave their older lovers and find partners their own age.
WORKS CITED
Murdoch, Iris. The Black Prince. New York: Penguin books, 1982.
Wilson, A.N. Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her. London: Hutchinson, 2003.
INTERNET SOURCES
http://www.aesthetics-online.org/memorials/bonzon.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/imurdoch.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/20/specials/murdoch-prince.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Murdoch
