KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
period in which the New Right came to power was marked by changes in the way families were perceived and formed. In particular, traditional family values were challenged by the rise of the Gay Liberation Movement, radical feminists’ attack on family values, easier access to divorce and cohabitation, advanced birth control methods, and technologically assisted reproduction. Thus, the claim that the nuclear family is a natural and unchanging unit came under scrutiny. The New Right was alarmed by these changes and declared that the family was in a state of crisis, one that was likely to cause wider social problems. Rather than acknowledging underlying causes of social problems in the economy, education, and health sector, the New Right pointed to the family as the site where social problems could be solved. For example, Thatcher stated, ‘You have to accept that these problems will occur, but it is best to have them solved within the family structure and you are denying the solution unless the family structure continues’.99 According to the Tories, individuals were threatened with social instability if they were not part of a family. Under the New Right, the family once more functioned as a disciplinary institution where women and ←53 | 54→children could be controlled by men in an attempt to avoid social problems such as AIDS.
In the 1980s, the New Right defended their notion of ‘family values’ by actively discouraging homosexuality through the education system. Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) prohibited the endorsement of homosexuality, stipulating that ‘a local authority shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.100 Homosexual parents and their children were reconfigured as a ‘pretended family’, a stance that dismissed of possibility of an alternative family. Cheshire Calhoun explains the ideological motif behind targeting a specific group and accusing them of destroying family values:
In periods where there was heightened anxiety about the stability of the heterosexual nuclear family because of changes in gender, sexual, and family composition norms within the family, this anxiety was resolved by targeting a group of persons who could be ideologically constructed as outsiders to the family.101
The New Right was unsettled by homosexuality not because it was a threat to the well-being of families and individuals, but rather because, in their view, it had the potential to dissolve the traditional family ideology that structures social, economic, and governmental systems. Thatcher declared that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’.102 Her emphasis on ‘individual men and women’ hints at their roles in the gendered system of family required for social stability. Homosexuality was seen as a danger to the gendered roles of individual men and women, in part because gay men were perceived to be ‘feminine’ and lesbians as ‘masculine’, thus subverting preconceived notions of masculinity and femininity.
In 1991, the New Right’s insistence on a single form and meaning of the family was opposed by the Labour Party, when Labour MP Harriet Harman called for recognition of alternative families in family and public policies:
Family policy needs to recognise that families come in all shapes and sizes… to claim one kind of family is right and others wrong can do considerable harm by stigmatizing ←54 | 55→those who live in a non-traditional family setting. Public policy cannot alter private choices, but it can mitigate the painful effects of change.103
Harman maintained that the formation of a family depends on individual choices. The state’s responsibility, for her, was to support these choices rather than impose a monolithic form of the family that disregarded individuality and variety. Her speech also acknowledged the stigmatisation of individuals who live outside the traditional family arrangements. Harman’s emphasis on choice as a criterion for family formation was key to countering this stigmatisation and introducing further legal steps for chosen families.
The years 1994 and 2000 witnessed developments in the rights of chosen families. The legal age of consent for men engaging in homosexual acts, previously set as 21 in 1967, was lowered to 18 by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and finally to 16 by the amendment to the Civil Partnership Act 2000. The equalisation of the age of consent illustrated that chosen families started to gain the same rights as traditional families. In particular, the Adoption and Children Act (2002) and the Civil Partnership Act (2004), introduced by New Labour and supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, was a milestone in the legal recognition of non-normative human relations within the context of a family. The acts granted same-sex couples the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual couples who chose civil marriage and adoption in the United Kingdom. Therefore, the hegemony of the traditional family as unique, natural, and universal was put into question on legal grounds. The act also represented the transition from the family of fate imposed by the collective to families of choice, voluntarily selected by individuals. So, although homosexuality had been dismissed as a ‘pretended family’ earlier, it was later acknowledged in law under a broader and more inclusive definition of family. It is against this backdrop of new ideas about family, that Lessing reimagines family in her fiction.
Overview of Existing Criticism: Lessing and the Family
Scholars agree that family is a major concern in Lessing’s fiction. However, there is as yet no robust account of Lessing’s fictional family in the large body of critical work on her fiction. In 2007, Susan Watkins suggested that family is one of the ‘issues that [is] clearly at the forefront of [Lessing’s] most recent work’.104 In ←55 | 56→2010, Robin Visel issued a call to read Lessing’s novels ‘anew in the twenty-first century’.105 Notwithstanding, the existing criticism on Lessing rests more on how she is critical of the traditional family arrangements. In other words, there has yet not been much attention paid to Lessing’s representation of non-normative families. The tendency in critical studies has been to identify Lessing’s critique of traditional family as an institution that is oppressive to women. This tendency has revealed the ways in which Lessing’s treatment of family has benefited from feminist criticism, largely missing insights from communism, Sufism and postcolonial ecofeminism. This has created the risk of reading Lessing as only critical of the traditional family arrangements, and her fiction as only concerning women’s issues. As such, non-normative families have remained evident but underdeveloped themes in Lessing criticism.
Non-biological and non-normative families have received relatively less critical attention from Lessing scholars. Anthony Chennells and Watkins approached the Lennox family in The Sweetest Dream as a non-biological one. Chennells contends that the presence of two adopted African children means that family ‘is more than a shared genetic inheritance’ in Lessing’s fiction.106 Watkins offers a similar reading of these adopted children, suggesting that their inclusion in the Lennox family signals ‘a new sense of community, family and home.’107 I read the Lennox house within the context of a commune as an alternative to the traditional family arrangements. The kinship relations in the Lennox family evoke forms of blended and biracial families that challenge a single meaning and form of the family. Reading Lessing’s short story “Each Other”, Judith Kegan Gardiner discusses Lessing’s employment of incest rhetoric as a narrative strategy to titillate ‘her readers while exploring […] themes of identity, family, social convention, and sexuality […].’108 This reading is valuable in terms of highlighting Lessing’s reference to non-normative families and human relations. I argue that the rhetoric of incest serves to enhance Lessing’s critique of kinship and blood for the purpose of introducing non-normative families. Lessing employs incest trope in Mara and Dann as a strategy to cross the borders of the traditional family and conventional thinking.
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The significance of non-normative families, kinship and alternative domesticities has recently been recognised by Lessing scholars in MLA 2018, in the panel titled ‘Alternative Domesticities in the Works of Doris Lessing’, followed by the publication of a cluster of articles in volume 36 of Doris Lessing Studies in December 2018. This issue focused on Lessing’s representation of ‘non-biological families, non-normative affiliations, and unconventional