The Dual Nature of the World in The Bell

The Bell has proven to be one of the most enduringly popular of Iris Murdoch's twenty-six novels. It was a critical and popular success from its first appearance in 1958, earning its author plaudits as the foremost writer of her age. This tale of a lay community housed in a country house beside an Anglican abbey is also one of the most apparently conventional of her works, taking place in a recognizable contemporary Gloucestershire that is peopled by a cast of recognizably human and fallible characters in search of salvation from worldly troubles. Beneath the apparently “ordinary” world depicted in The Bell, however, we find that it is a novel filled with doubles that often form contrastive pairs, representing a world of opposites, of duality. The superficial or the “apparent” is often different from “reality,” the secular life contrasts with the sacred, hatred is opposed to love, the unconscious mind knows truths that the conscious mind either is unaware of or is reluctant to admit, and the agonies of the human drama are played out against the backdrop of a physical world characterized by beauty and change. The Bell is Murdoch's first novel to be fuelled by Platonism, in which “Good substitutes for God”. This “Good” supersedes the apparent dualism of the world and its sets of contrastive pairs. Plato had posited two sets of reality: the world of “being” and the world of “becoming”. “Good” belongs to the eternal, to the world of “being”, while the finite and the temporal are manifestations of “becoming”, of the deceptive reality that humans perceive through their senses. “Good” is love, the ultimate teacher and the perfect healer, and the novel's bell is a symbol, albeit a deliberately clumsy one, of Murdoch's main idea that “Eros [Love] is mixed and requires patient purification”. Notes1Lewis, 477.2Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 423.3Quoted in Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 248.4Murdoch, 137.5Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 250.6Ibid., 247; Murdoch, 82.7Ibid., 83.8Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 420.9Murdoch, 82.10Ibid., 42.11Ibid, 83.12Ibid., 180.13Ibid., 283.14Ibid, 54.15Ibid., 208.16Ibid., 209.17Ibid., 283.18Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 419.19Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 143.20Ibid., 148–9.21Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 422.22Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 152.23Quoted in Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 252.24Quoted in Conradi, The Saint and the Artist, 29.25Ibid.26Wilson, 176.27Masong, 12.28Murdoch, 270.29Ibid., 223.30Ibid., 139.31Quoted in Winsor, 121.32Quoted in Masong, 19.33Wilson, 176.34Murdoch, 191–2.35Ibid., 237

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