Character Analysis
Christian who?
This lady's had a lot of different surnames. Born Christian Marloe, she becomes Christian Pearson when she marries her first husband, Bradley Pearson. Next, she becomes Christian Evandale when she marries her second husband, and, by the time she writes her postscript to Bradley Pearson's "The Black Prince," she has married a third husband and taken the name Christian Hartbourne.
For our purposes as readers of The Black Prince, Christian's birth name is the most significant, as it closely resembles that of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare's fellow Elizabethan playwright, and the person with whom Shakespeare is said to have had a healthy professional rivalry. The two names—Christopher Marlowe and Christian Marloe—even share the same initials, CM, and we eventually learn that Bradley's nickname for Christian has always been "Chris."
These ain't coincidences, folks.
This little detail is a major wink wink, nudge nudge on Iris Murdoch's part, as it both amplifies and casts a comedic light on the adversarial feelings that Bradley Pearson has towards his ex-wife, whom he thinks of as a "witch," a "death-bringer," and a "destroyer." Since Bradley is not-so-subtly aligning himself with Shakespeare throughout The Black Prince, it makes sense that one of his antagonists would be a contemporary revenant of Marlowe.
Of course, Murdoch wouldn't be content to create a one-dimensional character just so that she could throw another jokey allusion into her novel. Christian is way more than just a pretty face and a literary shout-out.
One of Those Things That Gets Sweeter with Time
Take a look at what Bradley Pearson tells us about the moment when he saw Christian again for the first time in roughly thirty years:
I think I would not have recognized her at once. She looked slimmer and taller. She had been a bunchy sensuous frilly woman. Now she looked more austere, certainly older, also smarter, wearing a simple dress of mousy light-brown tweed and a chain belt. Her hair, which used to be waved, was straight, thick, longish, faintly undulating, and dyed, I suppose, to a reddish brown. Her face was more bony, a little wrinkled, the faintest wizening effect as on an apple, not unpleasant. The long liquidy brown eyes had not aged or dimmed. She looked competent and distinguished, like the manager of an international cosmetic firm. (1.10.6)
As Bradley goes on to describe Christian, even his vaguely critical comments suggest that she has become more confident, skillful, and sure of herself with time:
The way she used her body and eyes was not new, was however more conscious, as if taken up into the amused ironical persona of an older and more elegant woman. The older woman flirts with a self-controlled awareness which can make her assaults much more deadly than the blind rushes of the young. And here was a woman for whom to be conscious was to flirt. […] When she was young there had been simpering, involuntary silliness, in her coquetry. This was quite gone. She had mastered her instrument. Perhaps it was all that Zen Buddhism. (1.10.22)
As we readers get to know Christian a little more—always remembering that we're learning about her through Bradley's words, of course—we see that age has made her more masterful in other areas, too. She's become more comfortable and less ashamed of her Jewish heritage, despite growing up with an anti-Semitic father who despised that heritage, and she has developed entrepreneurial skills that she intends to put to good use in London.
Foiled Again
On the whole, becoming a middle-aged woman seems to have worked wonders for Christian, and it's useful to keep that in mind when you compare her to the other middle-aged women in Bradley Pearson's life.
Given the fact that these ladies continuously interfere with Bradley's plans and set him off course (from his point of view, anyway), Christian, Priscilla Saxe, and Rachel Baffin form a trio that bears a subtle but significant resemblance to the infamous witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth. If we cast our lines even further back into literary and mythological history, we'll find that they resemble the Three Fates in Greek mythology, too.
The correspondences between Christian, Priscilla, and Rachel and the witches in Macbeth are something that Murdoch is having a bit of fun with, and rather than examining those correspondences too closely, we readers can relax and have fun with them, too. That said, it's worth taking a closer look at the very different ways in which Christian, Priscilla, and Rachel live out their lives as middle-aged women.
Christian enters her middle age with a bang, not a whimper, and she's by far the most positive representation of a middle-aged woman that we see throughout the novel. When she's faced with a bad marriage, Christian looks out for number one and prospers as she does so.
Compare that to what Rachel and Priscilla do: whereas Rachel desperately reaches out to a sorta-sympathetic friend and then murders her husband in a rage (in Bradley's version of events, anyway), and whereas Priscilla descends into grief and then kills herself, Christian lives happily ever after…again and again.