Iris Murdoch’s first-person narrators were all male, because those novels were written by a male-identified, male-chauvinist, alternate personality.

In 1976, an interviewer asked Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) why all her novels that were written in the first person had a male narrator/hero. She answered:

Murdoch: I identify with men more than women, I think. I don’t think it’s a great leap; there’s not much of a difference, really. One’s just a human being. I think I’m more interested in men than women. I’m not interested in women’s problems as such, though I’m a great supporter of women’s liberation—particularly education for women—but in aid of getting women to join the human race, not in aid of making any kind of feminine contribution to the world. I think there’s a kind of human contribution, but I don’t think there’s a feminine contribution (1, p. 48).

Consulting two biographies, I see that Murdoch was an extraordinarily variable person. She had affairs with men and women; she was alternately and simultaneously heterosexual and lesbian. She was reported to have “fantasied in her inner life that she was a male homosexual”  (2, p. 164), but she also had a lesbian relationship for many years. In general, “she had a striking ability to be different with different friends” (3, p. 538).

So it appears that her novels that had male first-person narrators were written by the male-identified, male-chauvinist personality, who answered the interviewer’s question. But her history of having dramatically and distinctly different senses of identity and relationships indicates that this male narrator was not her only personality.

It is common for people with multiple personality to have an opposite-sex personality, as was dramatized in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (see past post).

1. Gillian Dooley (ed). From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

2. A. N. Wilson. Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her. London, Hutchinson, 2003.

3. Peter J. Conradi. Iris Murdoch: A Life. New York, W.W. Norton, 2001.