KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION. Selçuk Sentürk

KINSHIP REIMAGINED:FAMILY IN DORIS LESSINGS FICTION - Selçuk Sentürk


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Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism contests the power dynamics that oppress individuals and exploit the environment. Communism critiques the family for its relation to capitalism and sustaining a class-based society, feminism identifies the family as having created gender inequalities and promoting a patriarchal society, Sufism resists any form of prescribed human behaviour on which ←33 | 34→the traditional family relies, and postcolonial ecofeminism illustrates how the patriarchal systems of capitalism, colonialism, and family cooperate not only in oppressing people based on colour, gender, and class but also exploit the environment and other living organisms. In the same way that multiple forms of oppression intersect and sustain what we call ‘the family’, the approaches of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism intersect in Lessing’s fiction to introduce non-normative families. The novelty of my approach lies in the fact that it considers family through an intersecting lens to illuminate the ways in which Lessing critiques and reconfigures the traditional institution of the family.

      The question of whether the family as a concept is functional or dysfunctional has opened contemporary debate. Discussion has developed from two contradicting views: either accepting a single meaning of ‘the family,’ or critiquing the existing form of the family as a way to acknowledge diverse human relations within the context of ‘families’. Ronald Fletcher named the latter group as ‘abolitionists’, claiming that they are ‘radically […] mistaken’ in their view of family and marriage.39 On the other hand, the functionalists’ assertion that the family is an ‘unchanging, biological, heterosexual and natural’ entity has historically been challenged through revolts by new generations who oppose traditional restrictions on sexual behaviour, protests by women against their imprisonment within the wife-mother role, and gay rights movements.40 The development of the Marxist critique of ‘the family’, diverse feminist approaches, and the emergence of radical anti-psychiatry movements have put the functionality of ‘the family’ into question, critiquing it as an instrument of capitalist and patriarchal oppressions and as destructive of individuality. These approaches and movements have critically analysed family as part of their demand for social change rather than taking its existing form for granted. Such discussions have presented ‘the family’ as either all bad or neither good nor bad but in need of reconfiguration against the functionalist’s promotion that the family is all good. The rise of gay and lesbian movements has moved these discussions a step ←34 | 35→further to ask the crucial question about what could be considered a family. This question has been key to the emergence of non-normative families, which have occupied the political agendas of the New Right that defends family values and New Labour, which is in favour of alternative families. Although the family has varied in its forms considerably historically and geographically, I am focusing on the family in the US and the UK in the twentieth century because this was the context in which Lessing was writing, and this is where her work is widely read.

      Changes to the family in the UK came following the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the last year of that decade and into the 1940s. Economic hardships caused family breakdowns not through divorces but abandonments when men either chose to leave to live somewhere else or went off to war. Women had to be both the caregiver and the breadwinner, and the number of female employees in the workforce, especially in clerical and service positions, increased. All of these changes signalled women’s changing roles and hence the perceived changes in the family to follow in later decades. Therefore, the emergence of functionalist family theories were responses to these changes in an attempt to assuage anxiety about social change and reassert the old order. Functionalist theories associated the word ‘family’ with the legal union of a heterosexual couple and the production and raising of biological children, and the preservation of this unit has been linked with social stability. The theoretical definition of the family has been systematised and supported by the functionalist school of thought.

      Functionalism, having its origins in the writings of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, emphasises the importance of stability and consensus for a society to exist. Each aspect of a society, such as education, media, government, economy, religion, and family, is dependent on the others. For example, religion emphasises the importance of establishing families and promotes seniority of individuals when they assume their roles as husband/wife, and further as mother/father. Schools help families to raise children in accordance with dominant values, and in return children are expected to become good citizens by fulfilling their duties in wider society, such as paying their taxes and contributing to a stable economy. Similarly, mothers are considered good citizens as long as they are occupied with their familial responsibilities, including raising well-behaved children who will go on to be the next generation of a stable society. As such, any problem, dysfunction, or even change in any of these aspects is considered ←35 | 36→to affect the overall stability and structure of society. Compared with other social institutions, family has been afforded the utmost importance in functionalist theory, as it is where members of a society are reproduced and ‘equipped’ with their roles before they join the wider world and its institutions.41

      Functionalist theories of family reached the height of their power during the 1940s and 1950s. During these decades the traditional family was promoted as the ideal form for social productivity, integration, maintenance, and continuity. The writings of Talcott Parsons and George P. Murdock shaped traditional family ideologies both in those and later decades to follow. Murdock defined family as including an ‘adult of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted of the sexually cohabiting adults’.42 For a unit to be called a family, according to his definition, is dependent on a sexual relationship approved by society and the existence of children. For Murdock, the family is a universal human institution and should be the same everywhere, as it meets the basic biological and societal human needs such as protection, reproduction, shelter, socialisation, economic support, and regulating relationships between the sexes. Writing in the 1950s, Parsons theorised the gender division of labour with what he termed the ‘expressive’ and ‘instrumental’ roles of women and men, respectively. Occupying the expressive role, women, according to Parsons’s theory, are placed at the centre of the family as homemakers, providing love, affection, care, and all other necessary emotional support for family members. On the other hand, men’s instrumental role as breadwinners is defined in relation to their presumed strength, leading to their occupation of political, economic, and military arenas. Men’s roles, according to Parsons’s theory, are considered to be more challenging and stressful as they require involvement in wider society, necessitating a minimal role in relation to domesticity and childcare.43

      For functionalists, gender roles are ‘natural’ and ‘unchanging’ as a result of perceived biological differences between men and women. For example, women were expected to be carers because of their ability to bear children. Diverse definitions of the family as ‘nuclear’, ‘traditional’, and ‘biological’ refer to the ‘unchanging’, ‘natural’, and ‘universal’ roles women and men are supposed to ←36 | 37→perform in their families. Theories emphasising women’s role as carers also came into being during this period. In 1953, John Bowlby hypothesized the child’s tie to his mother, arguing that infant and mother biologically need to stay in contact with each other. According to his hypothesis, children’s primary attachment is to their mothers, and the former need a stable and secure relationship with the latter if they are to develop personally, emotionally, and physically. Inadequate maternal contact in early infancy, for Bowlby, would cause serious problems in future stages of development. This would mean problematic individuals threatening social stability.44 These theories illustrate that in the same way the family is situated at the centre of all other institutions for social stability, so too are women placed at the centre of the family, with its success positioned firmly on their shoulders. Therefore, from the functionalist perspective, a malfunction or a change in women’s roles would mean a dysfunction or a change in the family, which would in return threaten the


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