Anyone else frustrated by Hartley in Irish Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea?

[Duskiestsunset]

I’m just reading this and I know Charles Arrowby is awful but does anyone also feel frustrated and angry about Hartley?

In many ways, she seems equally terrible to me. She leaves him when she’s young with no explanation and then decades later says she can’t remember. She agrees to meet him and tells him things but then acts inane and without any agency. I just found her hugely annoying by the end but can see very little written about her.

is it just me?

Yes, being annoyed really does seem to be beside the point.

I loved The Sea, The Sea I think The Good Apprentice is my favourite Murdoch novel, followed by The Green Knight, but The Sea, The Sea comes in third.

As for Hartley, I see what you mean. To be honest, I found Arrowby's obsession kind of odd and not particularly convincing. I also found her a rather weakly drawn character. The whole relationship was weird, actually. For me, it was the other characters who brought the novel alive. That and the wonderful descriptions of the sea.

I have read a lot of Murdoch and absolutely adore her. My one criticism is that she overdose the romance. Her characters are always falling madly in love with one another, to the point where you want to laugh out loud. It's hard to believe that a rather selfish, arrogant man like Arrowby would pursue a childhood sweetheart so relentlessly – especially after so many years and so much success.

I thought that the point is how vacuous and unappealing Hartley seems to the reader, how little Charles ever understood her and how Charles eventually starts to feel as bullying as Ben.

I hated the Sea, the Sea so YANBU.

I found her just rather pathetic, but I also felt sorry for her. Arrowby was awful to her, so was her husband.

My favourite Iris Murdoch is The Philosopher's Pupil.

But I just didn't find his obsession with her convincing. It didn't fell authentic.I guess he was in love with the memory of her – with the past. In other words, it wasn't the physical Hartley, the woman in front of him, that he loved but what she symbolised (his lost youth and innocence).

That's how I understood it too. Charles loved an idea of Hartley which wasn't even much like the real Hartley at the time. Obsession can be like that, as with a stalker who believes a total stranger loves him.

I think Arrowby's obsession was really with a desire to recapture his youth, and Hartley was just a vessel for that.

I haven’t read it for some time but I thought that Hartley was the only woman who’d rejected him, before his ego became so inflated? The fact that he still calls her by her maiden name shows that he’s harking back to his memory of her years ago, rather than the actual person she is now - which he disregards anyway. He’s purely focussed on this weird notion that rescuing her will restore him to a time when he was happy.

That’s an interesting observation. I hadn’t thought of that. I mean about her being the only woman who rejected him. But then he seems such an arrogant loner. He is also, clearly, an attractive man. Many of the women in the novel seem to want him, including a teenage girl! Or is Arrowby an unreliable narrator?

Just a few more thoughts:

• Arrowby himself doesn’t seem much interested in sex. He says at one point that “the women I have loved never really satisfied me in bed.”
• He never consummated his relationship with Hartley. Is that why he has this obsession?
• Murdoch makes it clear that Hartley is no longer sexually attractive. Presumably she stresses the point for a reason - maybe that Arrowby isn’t actually interested in her as flesh and blood woman but as a symbol.
• I’m tired and hot and can’t think atm, but the book has a wonderfully Buddhisty ending. I guess the novel is about karma and letting go, etc. Maybe that’s the key to understanding the Hartley obsession? You know, if you crave and cling you suffer and you make others suffer.

Yes this was my read of it too. I actually found him very convincing because I have a female friend who is very similar who develops these intense obsessive loves and refuses to keep healthy boundaries and reinterprets every sign from a perspective that suits her. She’s also very successful but quite pompous in a similar way so I found it unnerving in that regard.

but I find Hartley interesting as a character in it but when googling so few people focus on her.

This is interesting. I hadn’t considered that she might be made to be deliberately vacuous and unappealing to show how ridiculous it was. I just couldn’t get my head around how she couldn’t keep her story straight, dithered around and couldn’t even have the gumption to leave his house when there were plenty of people sitting around who would’ve helped her. I never felt that he would be violent to her and that if she had actually made an attempt to leave she would’ve been allowed to.

in some ways, my mother is quite similar in manner too which is why I keep thinking about it. She hints that he was bossy and that’s why she left but that also she wanted him to go to university. It all seems so muddled. I was as confused as Charles as to how she felt about him
back then. I suppose in that regard I felt sorry for him.

I think the person I like the most and am most intrigued by is his cousin James.

Interesting about your mum being a bit similar in manner!
Hartley seemed so confused and cowed by Ben but never seemed to regreat leaving Charles and ending up with him. I don't think that Charles would have been physically violent to her, but he was starting to shout and boss her about after a while, and I think the reader is meant to see her as exasperating, as well as a totally innocent victim of Charles's obsession.
Yes, James is great. I quite like Peregrine as well, and Lizzie.

Hartley is fought over by two men, yet she doesn't have a single redeeming quality. We are told she is no longer attractive, plus she's boring, meek, passive, whiny and dim.

But she 'belongs' to each of them, and she only gets more desirable because of the competition. I think it's a masterpiece.

What @SusanJJ said. It’s a study of male self-delusion. Hartley is just a screen Charles projects onto — she’s an ordinary, stupid, passive, ground-down old woman, married to an ordinary domestic bully. Only in Charles’ mind does she function as a kind of goddess and symbol, even as he’s congratulating himself on not minding that she’s no longer beautiful (given that he’s so vicious on female ageing elsewhere). Her being so unappealing is the point. He thinks every woman he’s ever been involved with has remained profoundly marked by her relationship with him, and fondly imagines she’s shy at re-encountering him because he’s been a successful theatre director, only to discover she barely gave him a thought until Ben became fixated on Titus being Charles’s son. She actually prefers her banal husband to Charles, with all his fame and glamour.

The whole ghastly comedy is in the ever-widening gap between Charles’ idea of himself as sensitive and tender, and his actual pomposity, self-delusion, cruelty and arrogance. He’s toxic. He ruins everything he touches. He kidnaps a woman. He’s responsible for the death of a young man because he’s too arrogant to let himself look vulnerable by admitting how dangerous the sea is.

(Hartley being so ordinary and passive, apparently unworthy of all the scheming and drama engaged in by so many characters, is rather like Hannah in The Unicorn. )

@Unblushingly Did you believe that right at the end, Charles has changed somewhat? I did. Not that he's totally different, but a little less wrapped up in himself and a little more tolerant of other people.

I felt at the ending that Charles hadn't changed at all, he was going to take all his demons forward with him. He'd left the theatre world to change himself and really learned nothing but there was a certain positivism in the way he would keep blundering forward blindly through his life - as we mostly do, really.

In other words, he’s an unreliable narrator. I wonder if Murdoch intended to make him unreliable, or whether the character took on that shape as she wrote.

Thinking about it, I suppose all narrators are unreliable, from Bertie Wooster to David Copperfield - just as no one we meet can be 100% relied on to tell us what has happened in their life. We’re all deluded. We all think we’re cleverer or stupider than we really are. People often think they were unpopular at school, and then meet an old school friend who tells them they envied their popularity. I have even known people who were bullied at school and then met ex-schoolmates who accused them of being a bully.

is he unreliable though? we get a pretty good understanding of him.

What i found intriguing about the whole cast of characters is that they are all so ridiculous in their own ways - the fawning, the preening, the prentensions - but as I've grown older, I see so many people like that that it actually feels quite realistic amongst some groups!

I do think Hartley is very frustrating in her own way and actually quite depressing when I take a step back and view how passive she's been in her own life (maybe most of us are). the letter or postcard at the end from Australia felt even more depressing, a sad veneer over it all.

I agree. But the more I think about it, the more conscious I am that we see them all through Charles' eyes. Murdoch was a formidable intellect. She was the sort of person who read Proust in French and Homer in Greek. She must have been aware that she was presenting these people to us as seen by a rather arrogant loner – a man who naturally assumes women are madly in love with him. Lizzie never seemed quite real to me. Was she really obsessed with him? Or is he telling us how she appears to his eyes?

I wonder how conscious Dickens was of his narrators? When he wrote David Copperfield and Great Expectations, was he conscious that David and Pip had different ways of seeing and interpreting events? That what the reader is told is filtered through two different minds.

Totally unreliable. He thinks he’s giving us the real story behind the popular myth of him being a theatre monster of arrogance and monomaniac whose manipulation of other people are legendary — so that we see he’s a simple, ascetic, gentle soul. But once we learn to read between the lines of what he tells us about himself, and see how he treats other people in the ‘now’ of the plot, the joke is that he’s even more of a monster than he’s popularly believed to be. The real Charles is a self-deluded, misogynistic bully.

I enjoyed The Sea The Sea. They both annoyed me!

Yes that’s true! It is all through his viewpoint. Although I tend to believe him when he quotes what they say and their actions and then see the gap between his and my perception of the situation. Do you think he is not being truthful when he portrays people’s words?