Doris Lessing Research Articles

Suffering with Style

Suffering with Style

Mobility and the Experiences of Loss—Gender and Identity Crisis in Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark

Mobility and the Experiences of Loss—Gender and Identity Crisis in Doris Lessing’s The Summer before the Dark

The Dilemma of Maternity between Need and Duty: A Feminist Reading of Doris Lessing's the Fifth Child

Doris Lessing is widely known as one of the most celebrated contemporary female writers in English literature. Unlike other feminist writers who advocate equality between women and men, Lessing’s feminism is mainly concerned with defending women in the context of the different social pressures they are exposed to in a given society. The Fifth Child is one of Lessing novels in which she adopts the implicit feminist approach in portraying the character of Harriet Lovatt. Harriet Lovatt wants to lead a free life disregarding the conventions of marriage and maternal life in the sixties by getting married to David and having a large family. Therefore, she is scapegoated by her society for deviating from the prevailing norms. The main aim of the study is to analyze The Dilemma of Maternity between need and obligation, based on the Feminist Reading of Doris Lessing's the Fifth Child. The study demonstrates that how Harriet has to adapt to her adverse situation and, in doing so, she has to overcome a lot of hardships in the process of constructing a new self. In a word, Lessing wants to underscore how the condition of any woman who wants to live on her own is worsened just because of deviating from the prevailing norms in her community. Moreover, in this study, we attempt to point out the maternity dilemma in today’s society, and finally, draw some conclusion.

Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War by Kathleen Riley

Reviewed by: Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War by Kathleen Riley Marina Mackay (bio) IMAGINING ITHACA: NOSTOS AND NOSTALGIA SINCE THE GREAT WAR, by Kathleen Riley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xiii + 331 pp. £30.00 cloth. Imagining Ithaca is not primarily a book about literary responses to the Odyssey, and thus it is not much concerned with Ulysses, the subject of a paragraph in the introduction and a few passing mentions thereafter. Rather, Kathleen Riley's declared theme is "the contemplation of Home from a distance" (21), and her book consists of readings of a wide range of films, novels, plays, poems, and memoirs that appeared between 1918 and 2017. Aside from the introduction and epilogue, the book is arranged in six parts, incorporating nineteen numbered chapters. The text's first part is about homecoming in the context of the world wars, and it consists of separate accounts of Great War novels by Rebecca West and Erich Maria Remarque,1 of William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives,2 and of David Malouf's historical novel Fly Away Peter.3 The shorter second section addresses three works that incorporate explicitly Odyssean allusions: John Ford's The Long Voyage Home, Njabulo S. Ndebele's The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and English writer Tamar Yellin's short story "Return to Zion."4 There follows a section on exile and nostalgia consisting of chapters on memoirs by Vladimir Nabokov and Doris Lessing and on two Alan Bennett plays. The fourth part is on ideas of spiritual displacement and discusses work by Carson McCullers, Woody Allen, and Doris Pilkington Garimara; the fifth part addresses nostalgia for childhood in works by George Orwell, John Van Druten, and John Logan. The Telemachus figures of the book's final section, "Voyages Round the Father," are Seamus Heaney, Daniel Mendelsohn, and politician-turned-television-presenter Michael Portillo, whose work on the life of his late father Luis Portillo, a poet, center-left intellectual, and Spanish Civil War refugee, is credited early in Riley's acknowledgments as among the inspirations for her book (vii). It would be difficult to make any programmatic argument from so heterogeneous a body of work—so many differences of medium, genre, and form, and of historical, cultural, and national context—and Imagining Ithaca does not attempt one. Rather, Riley's interest is in the sheer pervasiveness of yearning for real or imaginary homes, and if the book has a general orientation, as distinct from a specific argument, it is that nostalgia is more usefully understood as a feature rather than a failing of modern literature, theater, and film. She proposes that, contrary to the new set of pejorative associations that nostalgia has accrued from recent exploitation by right-wing opportunists—promising various impossibilities about the recovery of American greatness or British sovereignty—nostalgia implies no [End Page 549] particular politics. Side by side sit chapters on Speak, Memory and the then-Communist Lessing's Going Home, a reflection on expatriation almost contemporary with Nabokov's.5 Because the chapters are almost entirely self-contained, such juxtapositions go unremarked. The book's chapters range in length from just over four pages, in the case of the one on Yellin, to over thirty deeply researched and absorbing pages centered on the episode of the BBC's Great Railway Journeys that Portillo wrote and presented about a journey from Granada to his father's beloved Salamanca. The book's usual allowance is approximately ten or eleven pages per chapter, and much space is necessarily given to the exposition of plot and situation for the benefit of new or forgetful audiences of each work. The range of material surveyed is compelling in its own way, but the short chapters mean that the local analysis, which is invariably astute and well informed, sometimes feels squeezed by the need to contextualize and summarize the text under consideration. For example, the section titled "John Van Druten's The Widening Circle (1957)" spends much more space on the nineteenth-century transformation of West Hampstead from a literally Keatsian rural idyll into a bourgeois NW6 suburb than on Van Druten's actual book, a volume of autobiography...

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Mental Writing and Mental Health and Cultural Identity in Doris Lessing's Science Fiction.

As one of the most outstanding female writers in post-war Britain, Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has a strong spirit of the times in her works. In order to further understand the characteristics and spirit of the times in Doris Lessing's novels, Doris Lessing's science fiction is taken as the research object in this study, through in-depth research on novel storytelling, philosophical psychology, thematic forms, etc., from the perspective of emotional psychology model, to deeply analyze the characteristics of psychological writing, mental health, and cultural identity in their science fiction. Doris Lessing's science fiction reflects the political, cultural, and historical background of the times, and on this basis, it reflects humanitarian concerns through characters' psychological writing and cultural identity. It is shown in the results of the study.

"The Other" and Cultural Identity in Doris Lessing's Martha Quest

Doris Lessing is a white colonist from Britain with both Diaspora and marginal identity which gives her a special inspiration for writing the novel Martha Quest. The protagonist, Martha's painful experiences and tangled emotions are the real portrayal of Lessing's childhood. This article presents an in-depth analysis of "the Other" and the identity of culture, which reveals the exile, especially for white women are isolated from both colony and patriarchal society and are considered as "the Other" excluding from the European culture even African culture. It can be seen that the pursuit of cultural identity, freedom and independence in the context of heterogeneous culture is the spirit of this novel, and the writer, Lessing.

Racial explosion in post war era: In aspect of Doris Lessing’s narratives

Racial explosion in post war era: In aspect of Doris Lessing’s narratives

Significant Family Space in the Fifth Child

The masterpiece-----the fifth child produced by Doris Lessing is of great characteristics. The family spatial descriptions are the most prominent feature encompassing the big house with the Victorian garden, the kitchen, the spacious bedroom as well as the four rooms provided for the children. It can be seen that almost the activities of the characters are conducted in the capacious house. According to the space theory, space is the social product, the producing materials and the political instruments. It can be produced and consumed as well as permeated with all kinds of ideologies. The thesis focuses on the spatial delineations and combine the space theory to research its specific significance on the marital relationships and family members behind the static building which is closely related with power and oppression, embodying in the way that the family space exerts a potential effect on the patriarchal control over the female characters and the fetters on the children.

BEYOND THE ‘HUMAN’: THE EXTRA-HUMAN QUALITIES IN DORIS LESSING’S “THE FIFTH CHILD”

The paper focuses on exploring Doris Lessing's novel 'Never Let Me Go' using the theme of posthumanism. The objective would be to make an analogy between humanism and posthumanism and concentrate upon the shifting of focus or decentering from the human to the other non- human entities and study through different perspectives other than the human. The persistent shifting of borders to include a greater number of beings in the network or web of existence is the key matter running throughout the paper. The ever plying transcendence towards the frontier or periphery and no concrete demarcation between the ontological boundaries is the aspect that we need to give light to and make our subject of study. How Lessing's novel does so even without making use of the very term posthumanism is to be looked upon with an amazing sense of wonder. What draws more attention is how schools of thought resemble highlighting a similitude and cutting borders.

Doris Lessing’s Our Friend Judith as a Projection of Liberal Feminism

Doris Lessing’s Our Friend Judith as a Projection of Liberal Feminism

Climate Fiction, Climate Theory: Decolonising Imaginations of Global Futures

The international politics of climate change invokes the imagination of various potential global futures, ranging from techno-optimist visions of ecological modernisation to apocalyptic nightmares of climate chaos. This article argues that most dominant framings of the future in climate policy imaginaries tend to be depoliticised and linear visions of universal, homogenous time, with little spatio-temporal or ecological plurality. This article aims to convince IR scholars of climate politics that Africanfuturist climate fiction novels can contribute to the decolonisation of climate politics through radically different socio-climatic imaginaries to those that dominate mainstream imaginations of climate futures. The Africanfuturist climate fiction novels of authors such as Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes and Doris Lessing imagine different spaces, temporalities, ecologies and politics. Reading them as climate theory, they offer the possibility of a more decolonised climate politics, in which issues of land and climate justice, loss and damage, extractive political economies and the racialised and gendered violence of capitalism are central.

THE NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE OF DORIS LESSING’S TO ROOM NINETEEN AND ITS EFFECTS

The short story, To Room Nineteen, created by British writer, Doris Lessing, mainly tells the story concerning the difficulties encountered by the protagonist, Susan, in her life, and she tries her best to solve the difficulties, but, at last, she has no choice but to end the pain through suicide. The theme reflected in the story is thought-provoking to its readers and is worth analyzing. In the field of narratology, narrative perspective reflects how a story is constructed, which also, to some extent, reflects the writing techniques of a writer. Therefore, the author of this paper believes that the analysis of the narrative perspective and its effects are of great significance in the interpretation of the story, To Room Nineteen.

In Doris Lessing's Novel "The Fifth Child", a Father's Role is Explored

The tale focuses on David and Harriet Lovatt and their ordinary existence as a family in the 1960s. They value family life and marriage more than job advancement and the sexual revolution of their day. The story is narrated by a woman who seems to be a feminist, and she isn't the only one in the book who does so. Sex relations resemble those between a parent and a kid when the male sex role during contact is compared to the female sex role. While it may seem that male and female sex roles are complementary in the context of sexuality, there is in reality a hierarchical link between them. He's dead set on seeing it through. When Ben, the fifth child, arrives home, things immediately go worse. The distance between them grows to unbridgeable proportions as Harriet withdraws from David and, in effect, pushes him away from her. After learning that Harriet is often angry, puts her own health before that of the newborn, and treats the child as if it were not fully human, David feels even more alone.

Reading A Story about Abjection in The Fifth Child: Monstrous Child and Monstrous Mother

This paper aims to explore how the process of abjection affects an individual’s psychological reality by reading Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child from a Kristevan perspective. At the individual level, Ben, a retarded child born with deformity, is deprived of opportunities to enjoy the experience of semiotic chora, which will help him accept the law of language in the Symbolic. As an abjected monster, he reveals the process of the mother’s abjection operating in both inter-subjective and intra-subjective relationships. At the level of the social unconscious, Harriet, who gave birth to this monstrous child, is an embodiment of the archaic mother, who is essential to but potentially disruptive of the patriarchal order with its uncontrollable generative power. Despite societal suppression she suffer, Harriet shows the ethics of a mature subject based on maternal love by reinstating Ben into their home in spite of family’s disapproval, and by admitting that the monstrous child’s foreign otherness exists not outside but within ourselves.

To See and to Tell: Lessing’s Criticism of Ageism in The Diary of a Good Neighbor

The Diary of a Good Neighbor is one of a series of works concerning age problems in the contemporary western society written by the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing. Through the record of the last days of Maudie Fowler, a ninety-two-year-old lower-class woman by a middle-aged professional Jane Somers, Lessing questions the modern social care system and criticizes the hidden social prejudice against the elderly. Lessing observes the defect of the modern social care institutions in oppressing individual choice and excluding aged people, and points out the professional service they provide cannot really comfort the aged individuals, which constructs a dilemma for both the institutions and the aged group. Different from the ageist neglect of the aged group, Lessing gives a detailed exhibition of both Maudie’s daily life and her inner world, which builds a personal connection between the old and the young and draws this isolated group close to the public. Lessing also explores the taboo topic of old age, sickness and death and gives a full display of Maudie’s tenacious wrestling with death, which shows the sublime of human life and challenges the ageist view of the co-decaying of spirit and body.

The Writer’s Action Group (WAG) and the Fight for Public Lending Right (PLR)

In 1972, the experimental writers Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy came together with three friends to found the Writer’s Action Group (WAG). The group aimed to improve the financial lot of British writers, being inspired by an article in the Bookseller stating that the average author earned less in 1971 than they had done in 1966 even before taking into account the rapid inflation of the new decade. Within a year, they had published 17 articles arguing for writers to unionise and fight for Public Lending Right (PLR), a small royalty fee to be paid every time a writer’s book was borrowed from a public library. Other writers flocked to join WAG including B.S. Johnson, Giles Gordon, Eva Figes, Ted Hughes, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing and Raymond Williams. The fight for Public Lending Right was won in 1974 when the Public Lending Right Act was voted through the Commons. It is a story of high passions, entrenched beliefs and internecine conflicts. In particular, the group’s struggle with the Society of Authors involved a dramatic escalation from initial cordiality, through each side trashing the other in the press, to a final, dramatic showdown during the Society’s 1973 AGM. The conflict represented a core contention at the heart of post-war British writing: are writers to be seen as workers or as aesthetes? Using materials sourced from a wide range of archives alongside interviews with participants, this paper charts the rise of WAG from a personal passion project through to a radical movement and finally into a mature campaigning body.

Little Monsters: Austerity, Anxiety, and the Monstrous Child in Doris Lessing’sThe Fifth Child

AbstractThe popular imagination of the 1970s and 1980s was a fertile breeding ground for monstrous children who proliferated within a political climate where austerity was becoming a central concept in Thatcherite thinking. In this article, I argue that, despite their neoliberal positioning as possessing certain modes of capital, children become “monstrous” in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child through their association with precisely the kinds of excess which austerity politics condemns, constituting a corporeal and economic threat. I read these “little monsters” as articulations of the social anxieties about lack and scarcity upon which austerity is based and which it subsequently generates and, more broadly, as inscriptions of the ambivalent position of the child within Thatcherite policy and rhetoric.

Body as a Metaphor in Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”

Body as a Metaphor in Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”

Memory, Affectivity and Intimacy in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and Rosa Montero's La carne

This article discusses the literary approaches used by Doris Lessing in Love, Again (1995), and Rosa Montero in her novel La Carne (2016), emphasising the parallels between these writers' interest in women’s ageing experiences and the role that both of these novels’ main characters play in the contemporary cultural scene. Of particular interest in this article is the experience of these female authors who write these novels between the 1990s and the two first decades of the 21st century, historical periods which were marked by major social and economic upheaval, I suggest that their respective productions problematise the notions of memory, affectivity and intimacy, and notably showcase the contributions made by women in the process of ageing as creative agents of social and cultural changes in contemporary Europe.