KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk
eight novels analysed in the book reflect developments in Lessing’s representation of ←18 | 19→the family, covering a fifty-year period of interest in this concept. Together, they demonstrate how Lessing reflects and anticipates socio-historical and political developments in the history of the family, and suggest how her fiction extends theories and views of family rather than just mirroring them.
This work focuses on texts in which family emerges as a central theme. Thus, it focuses on Lessing’s literary fiction rather than her science fiction and short stories. It also focuses on novels that have received relatively little scholarly attention in relation to communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism, especially compared to the Children of Violence Series (1952–1969) and the novel for which Lessing is most famous, The Golden Notebook (1962). I aim to illustrate that each of the chosen novels offers an equally strong engagement with these political and philosophical movements. In Chapter One, I offer a reading of The Good Terrorist and The Sweetest Dream within the context of communist/Marxist theories of family, as these novels feature communes as alternatives to the traditional family. In Chapter Two, I show how The Summer Before the Dark and The Fifth Child present a vigorous critique of women’s oppression in society and the family, yet they have not received attention from feminist critics to the same extent as The Golden Notebook. In particular, The Fifth Child shows that the oppressiveness of the family extends beyond women to children. In 1987—two years after the publication of The Fifth Child—Barrie Thorne observes that ‘children remain relatively invisible in most sociological and feminist literature’.5 She further argues that ‘our ways of thinking about children reflect adult interest and limit understanding of children’s experiences and actions.’6 The fact that the novel is not only about a mother but also about a child contributes to re-visioning feminist scholarship, acknowledging children’s agency and subordination in the family. While The Fifth Child foregrounds women’s ongoing oppression in relation to domestic and childrearing responsibilities, The Summer Before the Dark illustrates how domestic oppression is translated into wider society, making women invisible in the relative absence of their domestic responsibilities.
The Memoirs of a Survivor has been referred to as one of Lessing’s first Sufi-themed novels. However, in Chapter Three I introduce Ben, in the World as another essential Sufi novel to expand discussions on Lessing and Sufism. Even the title of this novel evokes the Sufi teaching ‘Be in the world but not of it’ that warns individuals against the falseness of social roles and materialism. In Sufism, ←19 | 20→the human being is considered to be limited by the particular dimension and conventions they live in. ‘Be in the world but not of it’ is a way of illuminating the mind of its potentials and of the existence of multi-layered dimensions that the human mind if not the physical body can travel to. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, the act of penetrating through the walls, as practiced by the unnamed narrator, can be an example of this. Reading Lessing’s early and late Sufi novels in relation to the family reveals what I call the ‘Sufi family’ and ‘Sufi parenthood’. These terms denote non-normative families, as the Sufi relationships deviate from mainstream definitions of the family and gendered parenthood. The ways in which these terms contribute to the emergence of Sufi theories of family illustrate how Sufism benefits from Lessing’s fiction.
Lastly, Chapter Four offers a postcolonial ecofeminist reading of Lessing’s early and late postcolonial novels, The Grass Is Singing and Mara and Dann, in terms of the family. Such an analysis asserts the significance of the environment in Lessing’s fiction, as these novels have benefited from postcolonial criticism in relation to issues of race, gender, and colonialism at the expense of an analysis of the effect of the environment on Lessing, who lived in close contact with the natural world.7 A postcolonial ecofeminist reading illustrates that the changes in Lessing’s attitudes towards the environment initiate changes in her representation of the family. This chapter shows that Lessing’s treatment of family moves from dystopia (in The Grass Is Singing) to utopia (in Mara and Dann). With this move, Lessing transforms the oppressive family ideology into an egalitarian and non-normative one.
Lessing and the Family: From the Personal to the Political
Lessing’s critique of the family was shaped by her childhood and adulthood long before it became one of the core themes in her novels. The familial problems Lessing experienced in her personal life influenced the ways in which she problematized the family in her fiction. Lessing experienced different forms of family at different stages of her life. The first one was the biological family into which she was born; the second was her conjugal family established via marriage, divorce, and the bearing of children; the third was her political family, created through her involvement in communism; and the fourth was the family created by her decision to become a single and adoptive parent. In each of these ←20 | 21→families, Lessing faced different problems in various roles, including daughter, wife, mother, and single parent. On a personal level, Lessing transgressed family conventions, and traditional family values by not being what was considered a proper daughter, nor later a good mother and wife, and even within her political family she was not a communist enough.
The family into which Lessing was born was an ideal example of a traditional 1950s family, one marked by a gendered division of labour: her father, Alfred Taylor, was the breadwinner, whilst her mother, Emily Taylor, was the homemaker. Lessing, was not happy in her own biological family, as she explained in an interview: ‘My position in the family was such that I was very critical, and fairly early on’.8 She contested traditional family as practiced by her parents: ‘I cannot remember a time when I did not fight my mother. Later, I fought my father too’.9 During her childhood, Lessing witnessed that gender dynamics introduced two different images of family, firstly as a haven for men from the outside world, and secondly as a domestic prison for women, resulting in two unequal experiences. Whereas Alfred and Lessing’s brother, Harry, benefited from the privilege of exploring the outside world, her mother was confined to the domestic sphere and denied the same privilege enjoyed by men. Lessing, too, was exposed to sexism early on, as she mentions in her autobiography: ‘[W];hat I remember is hard, bundling hands, impatient arms, and [my mother’s] voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, she wanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me’.10 Therefore, Lessing not only experienced sexism as part of women’s assumed inferior status in the settler society of Southern Rhodesia, but she also encountered it from another woman, her mother.
In the patriarchal, colonial settler society of Southern Rhodesia, where Lessing lived both as a child and adult, women were discriminated against through gender dynamics in the family. As both family and colonialism are sustained through male hegemony, giving birth to a male won women social approval. While her brother was loved unconditionally, Lessing’s acceptance in the family and society was conditional upon her adoption of feminine traits such as passivity, care, nurture, tolerance and compassion. Emily tried hard to mould ←21 | 22→Lessing into the image of a ‘proper’ daughter, but she refused to be an extension of her mother. Lessing initially did this by exploring the African landscape during her childhood, a privilege denied to women. The African bush, a space forbidden for white women represents Lessing’s early contact with the natural world and rebellion against gender limitation. She writes: ‘I used to prop the door with a stone, so that what went on in the bush was always visible to me’.11 She then dropped out of her girls’ school at the age of fourteen in Salisbury, and finally left her biological family behind at the age of fifteen for an independent life. These departures indicate that Lessing was willing to contest the limits of gender in practice, which was later reinforced through her writing. Lessing could not change the biological condition of being a woman, but through her writing she could subvert the familial and social conditions that make women inferior in family and society.
Lessing deviated from the conventions of the traditional family in her marriages, too. At a time when divorce was understood as evidence of a woman failing to be a proper wife and mother, and therefore threatening social stability, Lessing nevertheless survived two family breakups, successively in 1943, leaving her children Jean and John with their father, Frank Wisdom, and in 1949 from her communist husband, Gottfried Lessing, becoming a single mother