earticle

영어

A Severed Head by Murdoch is a satire of the sexual escapades and identity issues of 20th-century British middle-class intellectuals. In the work, Murdoch humorously portrays the distorted knowledge and desires of the characters, including the protagonist Martin, using a primitive and mythic perspective represented by the character Honor Klein. The constant swapping of partners by these characters stems from their lack of identity, and Martin himself struggles to find an object that can shape his own identity. The Freudian perspective, which they mainly rely on for their identities, is distorted and perverted by the characters’ personal desires. As an alternative to the distorted relationships between men and women in modern society, Murdoch explores new alternatives for identity and gender relationships through the combination of Martin’s masochism and Klein’s primitive power. Therefore, this paper examines the issue of identity presented in The Severed Head through the relationship between mythic imagination and masochism.