‘All the World's a Stage’: Theatricality, Spectacle and the Flâneuse in Doris Lessing's Vision of London

Abstract

Doris Lessing has lived in London since she first arrived there in 1949, from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Lessing has always expressed her passion for the city of London, which has been turned into the setting for most of her novels and short stories. In addition, in her fictional and autobiographical texts the author reveals her love for theatregoing and play-acting, as well as her perception of life as a stage. This article strives to link these two ideas (the city and the theatre) in Lessing's recent fiction, which shows an increasing interest in the image of London as a theatre, whereby the female protagonist happens to become a spectator of snippets and sketches of real-life scenes, as she strolls around the city. In the act of observing these scenes from everyday life, these twentieth-century female flâneurs render London as a potential space, a space of creativity, where mutual bonds are established between the flâneuse/spectator and the performers. In this sense, psychoanalytic criticism – for example, the concept of transitional space as defined by D. W. Winnicott – will prove to be useful in the analysis of Lessing's fiction.