An Analysis of Feminist Narrative in Doris Lessing's The Story of a Non-Marrying Man

Abstract

British novelist Doris Lessing was born in 1919 and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007. She is also known as the "greatest female writer since Virginia Woolf". Her The Story of a Non-Marrying Man was published in 1972, and this short story was first published in The London Magazine. The story takes place in the second half of the last century and tells the first-person narrative of the life of a white man who adventures in South Africa and his love-hate entanglement with several local women. This short story has very different narrative characteristics from previous feminist literary works. The author criticizes the oppression of females by males and the self-restraint of women in traditional patriarchal marriages through a circular narrative method and a unique narrative voice. By analyzing Lessing's narrative methods in this short story, this paper interprets the feminist ideas she intends to express through her work. Thus, it is concluded that Lessing believed that a significant portion of women's suffering came not only from male oppression, but also from their own constraints and paralysis of themselves.