On The Borders Of Genres: Doris Lessing’s Alfred And Emily

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse some of Doris Lessing’s life writings to show how the process of identity formation through autobiography is realised through the prisms of memory, history and narrativization. The investigation of Lessing’s sense of selfhood in her autobiographical and fictional works will focus on Alfred and Emily, her last book, as well as on Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 and Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography 1949 to 1962. The study will highlight the autobiographical nature of Lessing’s fiction and the fictionality and constructed nature of her autobiography, in order to demonstrate that she constantly crosses the borders of genres in her life-long process of identity formation. As the autobiographical act is a rereading of one’s past, I will argue that for Doris Lessing it is a process that relies heavily on the memory of experiences that have shaped her identity. Memory and identity are intimately related, in a way that becomes integral to the very construction of the writer’s self. The process of self-representational writing enables Lessing to sustain a dialogue with her past in an attempt to heal inner divisions and traumatic experiences. Rather than a simple process of self-reflection, her writings under scrutiny here also turn out to be a potential source of self-invention and self-revision of the conventional views on authorial identity.