As yet another perspective on homosexuality, Murdoch provides the character of Toby with a more enlightened (though still not accepting) attitude, “In so far as he had up to now reflected on this propensity at all he had regarded it as a strange sickness or perversion, with mysterious and disgusting refinements, from which a small number of unfortunate persons suffered”. There’s something destructive in them, a sort of grudge against society’”. In describing his feelings towards Nick Fawley, James is nothing short of homophobic, displaying stereotypical attitudes reflective of 1950s English society, “‘He looks to me like a pansy,’….‘They’re always trouble-makers, believe me. Murdoch provides the common societal attitude toward homosexuality through the character of James Tayper Pace. Indeed, in some curious way the emotion which fed both arose deeply from the same source”. Despite this understanding, Michael is acutely aware of his inability to separate his sexuality from the rest of his being, especially his religion, “It scarcely occurred to him that his religion could establish any quarrel with his sexual habits. Michael is inherently, though limitedly, affected by society’s perception of his sexuality, “Michael Meade at twenty-five had already known for some while that he was what the world called perverted”. Firstly, there is the firsthand perspective of Michael Meade. In The Bell, Murdoch presents homosexuality through the context of several different characters. Murdoch does not write of Michaels feelings towards Nick or Toby as dirty or twisted but just as a different kind of love.

Imber is in turn set against a convent of Benedictine nuns across the lake, a “buffer state” between the abbey and the real world in which Murdoch stages a clash of ideals: religious yearning, sexual passion, and the role of spirituality in a materialist era.Ĭonsider, this novel was written in 1958 when homosexuals were whispered about, and called ‘pansies’ or ‘queers’. The book depicts the portentous arrival of two visitors: a schoolboy, Toby, “greatly attracted by the idea of living and working, for a while at least, with a group of holy people who had given up the world” and Dora, the errant wife of a scholar who is returning penitently but reluctantly to her stultifying marriage. This is a 1958 novel about a lay community sheltering in the grounds of a country estate.Įx-teacher Michael Meade sets up a secular-religious enclave at his house, Imber Court in Gloucestershire, whose assorted inhabitants seek a “refuge from modernity”, which “with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure” offers “no home to these unhappy souls”. This was all the rage when I was an undergraduate.

The bell iris