Cartography for Girls, An A - Z of Orientations identified within the Novels of Iris Murdoch, attempts to identify and to map, without hierarchy, all of the experiences of consciousness by women characters in all of Iris Murdoch’s 26 novels, originally published between 1954 and 1995.
Whilst there are many ways of thinking about what might constitute women's experience, in this instance, and responding to the author’s warnings about the dangers of classification, the strategy used to compile Cartography for Girls was to apply Iris Murdoch’s philosophical thinking to her particular fictional depictions of gendered subjectivity. Readers are invited to engage with this subjectivity on their own terms...
These experiences relate to love, a major focus of Dame Iris’s work, and for whom truth and love are very much connected. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), she describes loving as “an orientation, a direction of energy, not just a state of mind.” Individual consciousness, she tells us, is ultimately truth seeking, therefore “what we attend to, how we attend and whether we attend” is an integral part of moral activity. Whilst the author clarifies that not all states of consciousness are evaluating (or can be evaluated), it is the thoughts of her female characters that have been collated as ‘orientations’ in Cartography for Girls.
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