Mirroring Hamlet in Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Mirroring Hamlet in Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince: Abstract: Iris Murdoch, an Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher, showed in many of her novels her great admiration for Shakespeare. One of her works where it is most detectable is The Black Prince, written in 1978 for which she was awarded James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The plot is full of references to Hamlet and frequent quotes made by the main protagonist and narrator, an aging unsuccessful writer Bradley Pearson. His soliloquies resemble Hamlet´s meditations on life’s horrors. Bradley longs to escape to the countryside before his family and friends who suffocate him but their constant calling in prevents him from leaving and write his intended bestseller. However, his plans are finally changed by falling madly in love with a twenty-year-old and sexually ambiguous Julian during a private tutorial on Hamlet. He is particularly sexually aroused when she dressed up as Hamlet. Julian is a daughter of his friend and a literary rival Arnold Baffin. Bradley is an egotistic, paranoid, jealous person who loses his identity in love and needs to be powerful. The tragedy follows. This paper will analyse Murdoch's mirroring of Hamlet in this work. As it is obvious in this brief exposition of the plot, the novel is full of transgressive characters and problematic relations, which are also criss-crossed with complicated and twisted power-gendered relations. Canonical Anxiety is evident in the novel too. But, also, my paper will explore how the representation of Hamlet's tormented dramatic world is mirrored in the novel, the transgression (if this is so) affected by Iris Murdoch. |
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