KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
postcolonial critic of Lessing’s work, explores Lessing’s connection to African land, stating ‘the empty country, untouched by man, has capacity to offer men and women new relationships […]’.128 In Mara and Dann, Lessing creates her own utopian African continent, Ifrik contrary to the one dominated by colonial activity as a way to reconfigure human relations within the context of non-normative families. Though being a recurring theme, the significance of the family has not yet been adequately established in the existing criticism.
The book offers a rationale of reading family within three phases as political, mystical and planetary throughout Lessing’s fiction. In this way, the family illuminates Lessing’s legacy and ever broadening perspective from woman to human then to the planet. The ways in which Lessing critiques and reconfigures family in her fiction offer solutions to problems that threaten humans and the planet. The pull between individuals’ desire to achieve a full human identity and their need to feel a part of the collective is negotiated through Lessing’s reformulation of the family. This book also extends existing criticism by showing that Lessing’s fiction suggests more than her critique of traditional families, introducing non-normative families and kinship with alternative domesticities. Moreover, Lessing’s fictional family is shaped by her environmental concerns and interest in mysticism. Critics have addressed these themes without linking them to family. The inclusion of these themes in exploring Lessing’s representation of the family shows how Lessing’s fiction can be reassessed. Such a reading, ←61 | 62→for instance, acknowledges that Lessing seeks to liberate the family from ideology rather than individuals from the idea of family.
Chapter One, Communism and the Family, considers Lessing’s representation of communes in the context of non-normative family arrangements. Communist ideology offers such arrangements in theory, including communal kitchens, shared raising of children, and relationships outside the sanction of marriage, all of which have the potential to subvert the conventional family ideology and its oppression, especially in relation to women. Alice in The Good Terrorist and Frances in The Sweetest Dream test the capacity of communism to introduce these arrangements in practice. However, Lessing illustrates that communism fails to liberate women from domesticity even in non-typical family settings. In these political communes, women are ironically represented as the proletariat while men, who are comrades, are portrayed as capitalists who benefit from women’s labour.
Chapter Two, Feminism and the Family, takes the conventional family as a locus of gender oppression and the source of other inequalities in wider society. It focuses on the main elements of the family, such as marriage, reproduction, motherhood, child-rearing, and domesticity, employing insights from feminist critique of the family. The chapter also problematises the family as, to borrow from Foucault, a disciplinary institution that ideologically cooperates with wider disciplinary institutions, such as schools and medical establishments.129 The chapter illustrates that Lessing’s ambivalence towards feminism can partly be explained by her interest in other forms of oppression upheld by the family. Lessing writes about feminist issues, but she is not just a feminist writer, as her explorations include other forms of oppression such as bodily norms besides gender, as can be seen in the example of Ben Lovatt. The chapter positions The Fifth Child and The Summer Before the Dark as key post-1970s feminist texts. Although they have been overshadowed by The Golden Notebook, these novels offer equally strong critiques of women’s oppression in society and, more specifically, in the family.
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