The Monster and the Maiden: Literary Affinities in the Writings of Iris Murdoch and Elias Canetti

This thesis seeks to reassess the intellectual relationship between Iris Murdoch and Elias Canetti. According to the widely accepted view, Canetti has been portrayed through various power figures, some of whom are endowed with monstrous qualities, in several of Murdoch’s novels. This conventional model would imply that a personal and intellectual antagonism existed between Canetti and Murdoch, a view that is reinforced by the assumption that his work concentrates on the human lust for power, whereas her literary and philosophical focus is the human potential for goodness. However, by examining those aspects of Canetti’s works with which Murdoch was demonstrably familiar, this study reconsiders a group of Murdoch’s novels that have previously been used to contrast the two writers’ ideas and methods. Through a close reading of these texts, and with reference to hitherto unpublished material held in the Iris Murdoch Archive, this thesis demonstrates the presence of significant points of contact between them. These include their shared literary preoccupation with the themes of goodness and of power and the ways power is exercised and can be avoided. The thesis finds similarities between the two authors’ central, guiding insights of ‘Transformation’ and ‘Unselfing’, and uncovers affinities between individual motifs and stylistic practices in their approach to the theme of power. These findings challenge and expand existing interpretations of their writing and in other cases develop new approaches to interpreting their work. Rather than simply representing Canetti’s alleged demonic nature, the power figures in Murdoch’s fiction embody the philosophical legacy of the post-Kantian Enlightenment against which both she and Canetti were writing. On the strength of the literary and philosophical comparison which it presents, the thesis rejects the conventional view of an opposition and argues, instead, that Murdoch and Canetti may be viewed as intellectual allies.