The Bell
Murdoch's 1958 novel — a lay religious community at a country house, the burial and resurrection of an ancient bell, and the moral lives of imperfect seekers
Tradition: Twentieth-century British philosophical fiction
The ancient bell rises from the lake — and so do the buried desires of the lay community gathered beside the Imber Abbey
The Bell is Murdoch's fourth and first fully mature novel. It is set at Imber Court, a lay religious community founded as a halfway-house between the secular world and the enclosed Anglican community of Imber Abbey across the lake. The community awaits the installation of a new bell to replace the medieval bell rumoured to have been thrown into the lake by a guilty nun in the fourteenth century. The arrival of two new visitors — Dora Greenfield, who has come to attempt a reconciliation with her domineering husband Paul, and Toby Gashe, a young man preparing to enter Oxford — sets in motion a sequence of moral catastrophes: the homosexual founder Michael Meade's lapse, the dredging up of the medieval bell, and the suicide of the postulant Catherine. The novel embodies in fictional form the moral concerns Murdoch developed philosophically in The Sovereignty of Good: the egoistic self's constant work of fantasy, the difficulty of just attention to others, the role of religious frameworks in keeping the moral imagination open. Foundational for the contemporary tradition of British philosophical novel (A. S. Byatt, John Banville, Marilynne Robinson).
Author
Editions cited
- The Bell (Chatto & Windus, 1958; Penguin pb 1962; Vintage Classics 2004 with introduction by A. S. Byatt)
School Embodiments
The novel embodies Murdoch's Platonist moral psychology: the egoistic self distorts perception; only attention to what is real (other persons, the ancient bell, the natural world) frees the soul.
"There is a hand which holds her in being, and to fall is to fall into the hand of that other." (The Bell, ch. 22)
Realist in the technical novelistic sense (careful particularity of scene and character) and in the moral-philosophical sense (the persons and situations have moral features that attention discovers).
"Reality is not a given whole. An understanding of this, a respect for the contingent, is essential to imagination." (The Bell, ch. 17)
The Imber community is a non-monastic, lay Anglican experiment; the novel treats religious seriousness with neither sentimentality nor dismissal — Murdoch was an atheist who took religious lives extremely seriously.
"The chief requirement of the good life is to live without any image of oneself." (The Bell, James Tayper Pace's sermon, ch. 9)
Close descriptive attention to interior states — Dora's muddled goodness, Michael's tormented self-knowledge, Toby's adolescent confusion — gives the novel its phenomenological texture.
"It is impossible to dwell consistently upon any 'higher' subject. The mind quickly returns to its present occupations and its present pleasures." (The Bell, ch. 13)
The bell motif and the contemplative-monastic background draw on the broader Christian mystical tradition, including the Eastern Christian emphasis on silence and attention.
"A great bell, which is hung high in a tower and gives out a sound when struck, is not a kind of bell — it is the bell." (The Bell, ch. 16)
Murdoch was a serious analytic philosopher and the novel's preoccupations — the structure of intention, the nature of moral perception, the philosophy of love — engage Anscombe, Hampshire, and the mid-century Oxford milieu.
"In the case of human beings a kind of pride or self-confident impatience often makes us reluctant to attend to anything carefully and patiently." (The Bell, ch. 19)
The motif of the buried bell rising again from the lake is a Neoplatonic emblem of moral resurrection — what is buried and forgotten returns when attention is restored.
"The serious good is the good." (The Bell, James Tayper Pace, ch. 9)
Internal Tensions
Critics divide on whether The Bell is great literature or a philosopher's novel — too schematically organised around moral lessons. Defenders (Byatt, Conradi, Antonaccio) argue Murdoch's mastery of free-indirect-style consciousness and the novel's formal closure rebut the charge. The treatment of Michael Meade's homosexuality is sensitive for 1958 but has been read as both compassionate and limited by subsequent gay readers.
I. Time
The slow novelistic time of moral observation; the long historical time of the medieval bell that links the lay community to its monastic past.
Attributes
II. Space
The Imber estate — country house, abbey across the lake, lake itself — as the geographically and morally specific setting in which the community's moral life unfolds.
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III. Matter
The bell itself — the buried medieval bell and the new bell awaiting installation — as the material symbol that organises the novel's moral plot.
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IV. Observer
Dora and Michael as the two central consciousnesses through which the moral action is rendered — neither heroic nor monstrous, both struggling.
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V. Energy
The repressed sexual and religious energies that the bell's rising releases; the moral energy of attention against fantasy.
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VI. Information
The community's sermons, the medieval legend, the contingent particulars of personality that the novel patiently records.
Attributes
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Bell resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.