The Fiction of Doris Lessing: Re-Envisioning Feminism by Ratna Raman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fiction of Doris Lessing: Re-Envisioning Feminism by Ratna Raman Carmen García-Navarro THE FICTION OF DORIS LESSING: RE-ENVISIONING FEMINISM, by Ratna Raman. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2021. 317 pp. $76.50 hardback. The general theoretical approach offered in The Fiction of Doris Lessing: Re-envisioning Feminism by Ratna Raman applies feminist thinking to Doris Lessing's narrative work. The volume's structure comprises an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, all richly annotated, including a bibliography and index. The book's narrative unity allows readers to enjoy its subtleties, which are made with precision and acuity, and to explore the most significant advances made in the field of Lessing research in India. Raman refers to her own status as a woman, academic, and connoisseur of Lessing's works, beginning with her excitement as a young reader who discovered threads of connection to Lessing's writings, as both women writers grappled with a British colonial past. Against this background, Raman places Lessing as a significant figure in India's literary and cultural life. Raman's feminist perspective highlights Lessing's importance as a key writer in and outside of the European context, not only in terms of the development of form but also because her texts reflect her concern for a world that was vanishing. As Raman notes in her insightful introduction, Lessing witnessed the tensions of colonial and postcolonial relations in the country of her youth, Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). These life circumstances gave Lessing the chance to observe and participate in the twentieth-century cultural landscape and, at the same time, exercise a critical distance from Eurocentric socio-political viewpoints—distance that became essential to her writing (p. 13). As Raman explains in the first chapter, entitled "Lessing and Feminism," the contributions of Lessing's position on feminism have been the subject of much critical debate, particularly since the publication of The Golden Notebook (1962). Lessing expressed a desire to break with an ancient structure that had been assimilated from many symbolic and material positions, a structure for which feminism was an obstacle (pp. 28-29). The first chapter also provides a brief history of Lessing's life in Zimbabwe, her family and love relations, her desire for education, and her need to write. With her move to London, Lessing carried the remnants of historical events such as World War I that had a lasting impact on her parents, the gradual fall of the British Empire and the colonial state, followed by the interwar period, the advent of World War II, and the emergence of a new world order. Thus, Raman's work springs from the need to revise and adjust old notions and reaffirm the place of writers like Lessing, who was a young woman asking for recognition from a specific postcolonial cultural and geographical space. [End Page 364] The second chapter of the book, entitled "The Interrogation of Liberal White Feminism," is devoted to Lessing's novel The Grass is Singing (1950) and examines the role of women in the context of African colonialism. According to Raman, this role needs to be reconsidered in light of the ambiguous stance of some white feminists who benefited from racial privilege despite having to be content with gendered limitations (p. 75). In this regard, the place of Asian, Indian, and Black women, who have been marginalized by a segment of feminism that has been slow to question the patriarchal, imperialist, and racist state's silence regarding them, is one of the concerns that white liberal feminism still needs to address (p. 89). The third chapter focuses on The Golden Notebook. Raman is drawn to Lessing's inquiries into the issues that women faced in mid-century politics, the knowledge they identified with, and the voices represented in the novel. She also emphasizes the importance of the foreword Lessing wrote for the 1971 edition, which focuses on how knowledge about women is created, shared, and received, as well as on the changes needed to ensure that women's authority is recognized. In Raman's view, Lessing drew on this authority when creating a "cultural matrix" composed of the five novels in The Children of Violence (1952...