KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
Criticism: Lessing and the Family
Chapter One Communism and the Family
The Revolutionary Possibilities of the Commune/Communism
‘Latent Slavery’: ‘Natural’ Division of Labour in the Family
Dependant Men: The End of Male Supremacy
The Limitations of Communism and Marxist Theory: Gender Blindness
Domesticity and Women: Invisible Labour and the Alienated Proletariat
‘Pretended’ or Alternative Family: New Right and New Labour
Lesbians and Homosexuals: Invisible Groups in the Revolution
Women in the Revolution
Delusions and Sweet Dreams
Conclusion
Chapter Two Feminism and the Family
Lessing and Feminism
The New Right and Feminism
Women and the Family
Work as a Hobby Rather than a Career
Romantic Notions of Love and Marriage
Sexual Relationship
Reproduction
The Myth of the Perfect and Happy Mother
Illusions of the Happy and Stable Family
Public Patriarchy
Kate and Maureen: Feminist Sisterhood of the 1970s
Maternal Ambivalence: A Feminist Struggle
Other Forms of Oppression
Conclusion
Chapter Three Sufism and the Family
Lessing and Idries Shah
Lessing and Jenny Diski
The Sufi Family
Sufi Parenthood
Habit (Un)Learning
Schooling
Lessing’s Sufism and Feminism: Su-feminism
The Sufi Liberation: The Walls
Conclusion
Chapter Four Postcolonial Ecofeminism and the Family
Lessing, Postcolonialism and the Environment
Gendered and Exploited Spaces: Family and the Environment
The True Self and the Social Self
The Environment: From ‘Singing’ to ‘Dying’
Feminist Exploration (Eco-centric) vs Masculinist Exploitation (Ego-centric)
Environment and Women
Non-Normative Families in Mara and Dann
Incest as a Trope
The Farms
The Family: From Dystopia to Utopia
Conclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Introduction: Lessing and the Family
Family has been a central concern in the work of Doris Lessing since she published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950). This book explores the treatment of family in selected fiction by Lessing. It looks at how Lessing’s relationship to political and mystical philosophies shapes her representation of the family and considers the ways in which she problematises the family and celebrates alternative families. In her fiction, the family is represented as an ideological construct rather than a biological relationship, and through her work she reveals this ideology by illustrating that the family shapes and is shaped by the interests of the wider society in which it is found. Lessing’s fiction challenges the promotion of traditional family values, presenting them as concepts that ‘discipline’, in a Foucauldian sense, individuals into gendered roles and hierarchal relations.1 Performance of gender roles, specifically men as breadwinner and women as homemakers, heterosexual marriage, raising children as obedient individuals are some of the traditional family values. These values are equated with social stability, shaping the ways in which wider society is organised. However, Lessing’s fictional family challenges this stability, celebrating individual demands and choices.
Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer argue that ‘Lessing’s fiction and non-fiction demand a reformulation of some of our most taken-for-granted assumptions about the contemporary world and how we relate to that world’.2 In this work, family is shown to be one of the taken-for-granted institutions that Lessing seeks to reformulate in her fiction. Overall, this book suggests that Lessing celebrates varied forms of family. In this way, Lessing’s fiction challenges the limitations and a single meaning of ‘the family’.3 In a broader sense, she is preoccupied with family in her fiction not as an institution to be discarded, but rather as a social concept to be critiqued and reconfigured for the ←17 | 18→benefit of individuals and society. Thus, this study establishes the importance of the family in Lessing’s fiction, and proposes that Lessing introduces non-normative families without being anti-family. The term non-normative family is employed to refer to the ways in which Lessing’s family deviates from the established norms of the traditional family such as biological connectedness, gender and hierarchal relations.
The book also considers Lessing’s literary explorations of the family in the context of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism. It is divided into four main chapters that address these themes. The chapters are arranged in a thematic order that chronologically reflects Lessing’s relationship with political movements, mysticism and the environment. In this sense, the theme of the family is discussed in relation to issues of class (communism), gender (feminism), mysticism (Sufism), and the environment (postcolonial ecofeminism) by focusing on two novels per chapter. Chapter One on communism analyses The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Sweetest Dream (2001); Chapter Two on feminism examines The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988); Chapter Three on Sufism considers The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Ben, in the World (2000); Chapter Four on postcolonial ecofeminism explores The Grass Is Singing (1950) and Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999).
The novels examined in each chapter share common themes but were written in different decades. The rationale through this pairing is, firstly, to follow changes in Lessing’s representation of family over time; secondly, to explore if her standpoint in relation to communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism also changes between the two texts; and, thirdly, to demonstrate how these changes affect her treatment of the family. The book focuses on a novel from the period in which she first engages with a set of ideas, or a philosophy or a political movement, alongside a later novel. This approach to studying Lessing’s work is in line with Roberta Rubenstein’s argument that ‘[e];ach of Doris Lessing’s novels is both a movement forward and a return to the concerns of her earlier fiction at deeper levels of meaning and complexity’.4 The book moves ‘forward and backward’ between the early and late novels to explore the evolution of Lessing’s treatment of family. The selected texts cover the period from the early 1950s, when Lessing published her first novel, The