“At my age, you live in your mind”Reviewing the past in Bruno´s Dream by Iris Murdoch

  1. Soláns García, Mari´´angel 1
  1. 1 Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
    info

    Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

    Madrid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02msb5n36

Journal:
ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies

ISSN: 2531-1654 2531-1646

Year of publication: 2019

Issue: 40

Pages: 33-55

Type: Article

DOI: 10.24197/ERSJES.40.2019.33-55 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDialnet editor

More publications in: ES Review. Spanish Journal of English Studies

Abstract

This paper analyses the way in which the ageing Bruno, the central character of Iris Murdoch´s Bruno´s Dream (1969), approaches his death and confronts the meaning of finitude. His last stage of life is understood as a time of reminiscence that brings up past conflicts. This study offers an opportunity to explore the moral and psychological aspects of guilt, regret and forgiveness, which trigger the process that Robert N. Butler called “life review.” It also aims to examine Murdoch’s philosophical concepts about love and her idea of unself.

Bibliographic References

  • Baars, Jan. “Critical Turns of Aging, Narrative and Time.” International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, vol. 7, no. 2, 2013, pp. 143‒65.
  • Beauvoir, Simone de. The Coming of Age. 1970. Trans. by Patrick O’Brian, Norton, 1996.
  • Bloom, Harold. Iris Murdoch. Chelsea House, 1986.
  • Browning, Gary K. Why Iris Murdoch Matters. Bloomsbury, 2018.
  • Butler, Robert N. “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged.” Psychiatry, vol. 26, no. 1, 1963, pp. 65‒76.
  • Charmaz, Kathy. “The Body, Identity, and Self: Adapting to Impairment.” The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 1995, pp. 657‒80.
  • Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch: A Life. Kindle ed., Harper Collins, 2010.
  • DeFalco, Amelia. Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative. Ohio State UP, 2010.
  • Erikson, Erik H, and Joan M. Erikson. The Life Cycle Completed. W. W. Norton, 1998.
  • Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. “The Fourth Age and the Concept of a ‘Social Imaginary’: A Theoretical Excursus.” Journal of Aging Studies, vol. 27, no. 4, 2013, pp. 368‒76.
  • Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall, 1963.
  • Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of Midlife. U of Virginia P, 1997.
  • Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Aged by Culture. U of Chicago P, 2004.
  • Hall, William. F. “Bruno’s Dream: Technique and Meaning in the Novels of Iris Murdoch.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 1969, pp. 429‒43.
  • Hockey, Jenny and Allison, James. Social Identities across the Life Course. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
  • Holloway, Richard. On Forgiveness: How Can we Forgive the Unforgiveable? Cannongate, 2002.
  • Kaplan, E. Ann. “Trauma and Aging: Marlene Dietrich, Melanie Klein, and Marguerite Duras.” Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, edited by Kathleen M. Woodward, Indiana UP, 1999, pp. 171‒93.
  • Kaufman, Sharon R. The Ageless Self: Sources of Meaning in Late Life. U of Wisconsin P, 1986.
  • Kenyon, Gary M. “Telling and Listening to Stories: Creating a Wisdom Environment for Older People.” Generations, vol. 27, no. 3, 2003, pp. 30‒33.
  • Krasner, James. “Accumulated Lives: Metaphor, Materiality, and the Homes of the Elderly.” Literature and Medicine, vol. 24, no. 2, 2005, pp. 209‒30.
  • Laforest, Jacques. Introducción a la gerontología: el arte de envejecer. 1989. Trans. by Maria Colom de Llopis, Herder, 1991.
  • Luprecht, Mark. “Death and Goodness: Bruno’s Dream and The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”. Iris Murdoch and Morality, edited by Anne Rowe, Palgrave, 2010, pp. 113‒25.
  • Murdoch, Iris. Bruno’s Dream. 1969. Kindle ed., Vintage Classics, 2011.
  • Murdoch, Iris. “The Sublime and the Good.” Chicago Review, vol. 13, no. 3, 1959, pp. 42–55.
  • Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. 1970. Routledge, 2001.
  • Myerhoff, Barbara. “Rites and Signs of Ripening: The Intertwining of Ritual, Time, and Growing Older.” Age and Anthropological Theory, edited by David I. Kertzer and Jennie Keith, Cornell UP, 1984, pp. 305‒30.
  • Nussbaum, Martha. “Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual.” Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, edited by Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, U of Chicago P, 1996, pp. 29‒53.
  • Öberg, Peter. “The Absent Body—A Social Gerontological Paradox.” Ageing and Society, vol. 16, no. 6, 1996, pp. 701‒19.
  • Olsson, Anna Lova. “A Moment of Letting Go: Iris Murdoch and the Morally Transformative Process of Unselfing.” Journal of Philosophy of Education, vol. 52, no. 1, 2018, pp. 163‒77.
  • Ruth, Jan-Erik, and Anni Vilkko. “Emotion in the Construction of Autobiography.” Handbook of Emotion, Adult Development, and Aging, edited by C. Magai and S. H. McFadden, Academic Press, 1996, pp. 167‒81.
  • Sherman, Edmund, and Joan Dacher. “Cherished Objects and the Home: Their Meaning and Roles in Late Life.” Home and Identity in Later Life: International Perspectives, edited by Graham D. Rowles and Habib Chaudhury, Springer, 2005.
  • Shield, Renée Rose, and Stanley M. Aronson. Aging in Today's World: Conversations between an Anthropologist and a Physician. Berghahn Books, 2003.
  • Thomson, P. W. “Iris Murdoch's Honest Puppetry: The Characters of Bruno's Dream”. Critical Quarterly, vol. 11, no. 3, 1969, pp. 277‒83.
  • Turner, Nick. Post-war British Women Novelists and the Canon. Continuum, 2010.
  • Westerhof, Gerben J., and Ernst T. Bohlmeijer. “Celebrating Fifty Years of Research and Applications in Reminiscence and Life Review: State of the Art and New Directions.” Journal of Aging Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, 2014, pp. 107‒14.
  • Wittmann, Mark, and S. Lehnhoff. “Age Effects in Perception of Time.” Psychological Reports, vol. 97, no. 3, 2005, pp. 921‒35.
  • Woodward, Kathleen M. Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Indiana UP, 1991.
  • Woodward, Kathleen M. Telling Stories: Aging, Reminiscence and the Life Review. Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 1997.