BEYOND ENCHANTMENT: CHARACTER AND POWER IN THE NOVELS OF IRIS MURDOCH AND JOHN FOWLES

As novelists involved in the exploration of modern sources of power and their relationship to the individual, Iris Murdoch and John Fowles have developed remarkably similar ways of talking about power. This thesis examines the characters who wield power in their novels and the relationship of these individuals to other characters, to the author and to the reader. In the novels of both authors, the power-figures are of three basic types: the "jailor," who, resorting to physical imprisonment of his victims, is himself imprisoned by his fantasies about them; the "sleeping princess," who, often beginning as the jailor's prisoner, acquires power by consciously or unconsciously accepting her audience's limited perception of her; and the "magician," who, surpassing the perceptual framework of his or her audience, becomes instrumental in leading that audience beyond the limitations of its usual vision. These three types help to define the individual's possible responses to power, which range from extreme self-enclosure to complete self-sacrifice.; Both Fowles and Murdoch advocate a response that balances self-assertion with a moral selflessness that attends to the reality of other people. They often describe the difficulties of maintaining this response by placing characters in a setting beyond the range of their accustomed power sources in which they must strive to achieve this balance. Ultimately the power relationships in their novels reflect the relationship between the novelists themselves, their characters and their readers. Suspicious of their own authorial power, Fowles and Murdoch confront a conflict between moral and aesthetic goals, which they try to resolve by loosening the dominating structures of their work in order to reveal the autonomy of their characters and in order to make the reader contemplate his own relationship to "authorial" structures in art and in life. As they more consistently in their later work expose the metaphor of the novelist underlying the "enchanter," they come closer to reflecting their moral vision in their art.