I think I’m happy, she thought, but am I real?

Abstract

I am interested in the possibilities of redressing the absence of feminine subjectivity in the discourses surrounding Iris Murdoch’s philosophical and fictional writing. @cartography_for_girls is an Instagram account set up to share some of the expressions of feminine subjectivity sourced from within Murdoch’s 26 novels, originally published between 1954 and 1995. Murdoch’s incorporation of her particular metaphysical thinking into the reflections, deliberations and doubts of her fictional women characters made me wonder how these philosophically loaded impressions might fare on the affect- and information-driven social networking platform Instagram. ‘I think I’m happy, she thought, but am I real?’, for example, is an interior thought that resonates in ways more than metaphysical against the backdrop of Web 2.0, and is one of 100 posts shared daily from 21 October 2017 to 23 January 2018.