What is the symbolism in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea?

There's the classic water symbolism (chaos, rebirth, etc.) but what else is there? The food concept is sticking in my mind, but I can't figure it out--same with the sea monster. Can anyone help me?

What is the symbolism in Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea?
Here's an article on the whole book. Hope this helps.



The Sea, The Sea, explores the attempt by two cousins, Charles and James Arrowby to renounce “magic” and reach a spiritual identity. Their respective journeys allow Murdoch to explore the nature of power, obsession, illusion and self-delusion, which, in this novel, become dangerous and murderous. The book won The Booker Prize in 1978 and is one of Murdoch's masterpieces in the representation of the deluded consciousness of the unreliable narrator, Charles Arrowby. A retired theatrical writer/actor/director and habitual womaniser, he has, throughout his life, conducted a succession of callous and destructive love affairs and most recently nursed his lover, Clement, through a long and painful death due to cancer. As the story opens, he is to abjure his life of egoism and is to seek out a spiritual identity: “the final change of magic into spirit” (39). Having secluded himself in his house, Shruff End, close to the sea, to achieve the task, he finds again his lost childhood sweetheart, Hartley, and believes that only she now has the power to save him. Hartley has been married for thirty years to Ben Fitch, but Charles is determined to find evidence of an unhappy marriage from which he can “rescue” Hartley and claim her as his own. When Hartley resists, Charles resorts to kidnapping her and imprisoning her in the “red room” at Shruff End. Only the wisdom of Charles's Buddhist cousin, James, saves the situation and Charles returns Hartley to Ben, makes peace with the women with whom he has been emotionally warring and returns to London on James's death.



The novel deals with the dark area of consciousness between darkness and enlightenment that is indicated throughout by the image of the sea. A sea demon also emerges from the depths to symbolise the voracious egocentric depths of Charles's character. Not only does his emotional voracity make Charles literally blind (Hartley is now a plump, moustachioed, old woman but he still sees the long leggy teenager of his youth) but he also dangerously transforms reality to suit his desires: “she became my Beatrice” (85). He egotistically assumes that Hartley has spent her life regretting the loss of the now famous man she renounced in her youth (“she must regret it so much, the wrong choice” [120]), when in fact, she has lived her life without giving Charles any real thought at all. James realises that Charles has “built a cage of needs and installed [Hartley] in an empty space in the middle” (422), and understands that this kind of obsession has lethal power: “the worshipper endows the worshipped object with real power, not imaginary power [...] but this power is dreadful stuff. Our lusts and our attractions compose our God” (445). Even Charles realises that he has “awakened some sleeping demon, set going some deadly machine” (310), and one of the truths the novel seeks to convey is that invisible emotional forces can have palpable, sometimes tragic, consequences. Charles's obsession directly causes agonising pain for Hartley and Ben, very nearly causes Charles's own death and is implicitly the cause of the death of Titus, Hartley and Ben's adopted son.



When Charles is pushed into Minn's cauldron by Peregrine, the husband of Rosina, one of his conquests, he is miraculously saved from drowning by a super-human feat of strength on the part of James who rescues him: “my cousin had rescued me by those powers which he had so casually spoken of as 'tricks'” (468-9). James is so advanced on the Buddhist path to enlightenment that he is a bodishattva, one so adept at the perfection of meditation that he is able to perform “magic”. James's saving of Charles forces Charles himself to recognise that it is own life-long envy of James that has forged his negative opinion of James, not the actions of James himself. The consequent understanding that James is a good man, has always loved him, not persecuted him, paves the way for a further growth in Charles's character that has positive moral repercussions for all the other characters in the “theatre” that constitutes his life. The philosophical heart of the book lies in the revelation that power resides not only in the way characters perceive others but also in the way that they allow themselves to be perceived. The attractive, demonic, enchanter figures, such as Charles, can only cast their spells if they are endowed with the power by the objects of their attention: demons cannot exist without the complicity of their victims. Redemption can be achieved with a reorientation of vision.



The story is told through a mixture of intense realism, magical realism, supernatural and gothic, and all the narrative devices are intended to elucidate the deluded quality of consciousness of the narrator, the causes and consequences of which are the philosophical and moral thrust of the novel. The motif of the sea-demon that Charles imagines he sees emerging from the depths at the start of the novel, is a detail from Titian's Perseus and Andromeda which features in the novel. The image of the sea demon, “a crested snake's head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to see teeth and pink exterior” (19) proliferates throughout and works on the consciousness of both reader and character alike: Charles recognises the image in the painting on a visit to the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, and it repeatedly creeps into his actual perception of the world to bring a partial awareness of the voracity of his own emotional appetite. Murdoch constructs the image so that it works simultaneously on readers to educate them about Charles's repressed fears and the emotional damage that both informs and refines their discriminatory faculties. The novel is one of Murdoch's most successful attempts at marrying philosophy and story, and also at integrating her experimentation with images as tools for expanding the representation of quality of consciousness into the form of the novel.



Published 23 May 2003



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