Moral philosophy and the novel: The struggle between good and evil in Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” and Iris Murdoch’s “A Fairly Honourable Defeat”

It is a commonplace observation that good characters are the most difficult for an artist to make interesting. This was the basis of one of Plato’s arguments against art: the “fretful temper”, he wrote in The Republic, “gives scope for a great diversity of dramatic representation; whereas the calm and wise character in its unvarying constancy is not easy to represent, nor when represented is it readily understood.”

Perhaps for this reason many novels are about not fundamentally evil characters, but imperfect people, often young, whose progress towards maturity claims the interest of the reader, and who at the end are presumed to have reached the less interesting state of “calmness and wisdom”. A writer who does not wish to glamorise evil may choose to write this kind of bildungsroman instead of trying to present a character who is morally exemplary from the start. The more difficult path is to place in the foreground a “good” character who must deal with vicissitudes which form the interest of the novel.