was a milestone in the legal recognition of non-normative human relations within the context of a family. The acts granted same-sex couples the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual couples who chose civil marriage and adoption in the United Kingdom. Therefore, the hegemony of the traditional family as unique, natural, and universal was put into question on legal grounds. The act also represented the transition from the family of fate imposed by the collective to families of choice, voluntarily selected by individuals. So, although homosexuality had been dismissed as a ‘pretended family’ earlier, it was later acknowledged in law under a broader and more inclusive definition of family. It is against this backdrop of new ideas about family, that Lessing reimagines family in her fiction.
Overview of Existing Criticism: Lessing and the Family
Scholars agree that family is a major concern in Lessing’s fiction. However, there is as yet no robust account of Lessing’s fictional family in the large body of critical work on her fiction. In 2007, Susan Watkins suggested that family is one of the ‘issues that [is] clearly at the forefront of [Lessing’s] most recent work’.104 In ←55 | 56→2010, Robin Visel issued a call to read Lessing’s novels ‘anew in the twenty-first century’.105 Notwithstanding, the existing criticism on Lessing rests more on how she is critical of the traditional family arrangements. In other words, there has yet not been much attention paid to Lessing’s representation of non-normative families. The tendency in critical studies has been to identify Lessing’s critique of traditional family as an institution that is oppressive to women. This tendency has revealed the ways in which Lessing’s treatment of family has benefited from feminist criticism, largely missing insights from communism, Sufism and postcolonial ecofeminism. This has created the risk of reading Lessing as only critical of the traditional family arrangements, and her fiction as only concerning women’s issues. As such, non-normative families have remained evident but underdeveloped themes in Lessing criticism.
Non-biological and non-normative families have received relatively less critical attention from Lessing scholars. Anthony Chennells and Watkins approached the Lennox family in The Sweetest Dream as a non-biological one. Chennells contends that the presence of two adopted African children means that family ‘is more than a shared genetic inheritance’ in Lessing’s fiction.106 Watkins offers a similar reading of these adopted children, suggesting that their inclusion in the Lennox family signals ‘a new sense of community, family and home.’107 I read the Lennox house within the context of a commune as an alternative to the traditional family arrangements. The kinship relations in the Lennox family evoke forms of blended and biracial families that challenge a single meaning and form of the family. Reading Lessing’s short story “Each Other”, Judith Kegan Gardiner discusses Lessing’s employment of incest rhetoric as a narrative strategy to titillate ‘her readers while exploring […] themes of identity, family, social convention, and sexuality […].’108 This reading is valuable in terms of highlighting Lessing’s reference to non-normative families and human relations. I argue that the rhetoric of incest serves to enhance Lessing’s critique of kinship and blood for the purpose of introducing non-normative families. Lessing employs incest trope in Mara and Dann as a strategy to cross the borders of the traditional family and conventional thinking.
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The significance of non-normative families, kinship and alternative domesticities has recently been recognised by Lessing scholars in MLA 2018, in the panel titled ‘Alternative Domesticities in the Works of Doris Lessing’, followed by the publication of a cluster of articles in volume 36 of Doris Lessing Studies in December 2018. This issue focused on Lessing’s representation of ‘non-biological families, non-normative affiliations, and unconventional households’, chiefly by offering fruitful insights on how her fiction engages with works written by others, such as Jenny Diski, Lara Feigel and Vladimir Nabokov.109 Focusing on Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), alongside Jenny Diski’s memoir, In Gratitude (2016), Susan Watkins introduces the concept of ‘apocalyptic imaginative memoir’ that she observes Lessing and Diski develop as a way to ‘imagine the transformation of conventional mothering and family’.110 Watkins’s comparative reading of their works as examples of such ‘apocalyptic imaginative memoir’, and their concurrent lived experimentations with new images of the mother/daughter relationship, demonstrates how Lessing’s fiction genuinely offers ‘a new form of family’ through ‘a new genre’.111
I examine The Memoirs of a Survivor and Ben, in the World as Sufi novels that illuminate the ways in which Lessing ‘problematises and reconfigures the family’ both at personal and fictional levels.112 I further suggest that ‘the simultaneous presence of Diski and Sufism in Lessing’s life allows her to realign family and parenthood in her fiction’.113 My reading of the novels through a Sufic lens introduces three novel concepts, ‘Sufi family’, ‘Sufi parenthood’, and ‘Su-feminism’, which together demonstrate Lessing’s resistance to ‘social conventions [and] power structures, specifically here, in the example of parenthood and family’, through new forms. Terry Reilly examines the traces of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1995) in and through Lessing’s novella “The Grandmothers” and Diski’s memoir In Gratitude, illustrating how these works intersect in their representations and reworking of alternative and taboo familial relationships. He argues that ‘Lessing ←57 | 58→and Diski are linked in that they reference Lolita as a way to expand the notion of traditional family to include the alternative relationships that they explore’ in their texts.114 Reilly’s article is an example of how Lessing’s fiction is transformative of conventional and taboo family relationships. Taken as a whole, this issue has been key in demonstrating how Lessing’s fictional family transforms ‘conventional ways of thinking and writing’ in a collaborative and bidirectional manner through the works of others.
When family is addressed by critics in Lessing’s fiction, it has mainly been read in relation to ideas from the anti-psychiatry movement. R.D. Laing has been influential for Lessing scholars in understanding the origins of schizophrenia in the family. James Arnett reads the Children of Violence series by employing insights from Laingian family theory and progressive politics to ‘undo the logic of the family.’115 He suggests that ‘fighting so hard to preserve the self’, as Martha Quest does, is indeed a way of preserving historical circumstances that have constructed the self. The solution to the distorting effects of the family lies in the dissolution of oneself by becoming schizophrenic. Therefore, schizophrenia is not to be seen as a problem but a way of escaping from the conventional family. Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) mirrors Laingian family theory. Professor Charles Watkins suffers from a mental breakdown due to being stuck between his family obligations and his own sense of self. Lessing extends Laing’s theory, including men as sufferers of schizophrenia alongside women to suggest that the family is equally oppressive to men and women alike.
The Fifth Child also evokes a Laingian theory of the family when Harriet Lovatt has an unwanted child. She has to decide either to accept her son, Ben, or send him away as the destroyer of the family happiness. Ben’s assumed abnormalities create a tension in Harriet as the mother. Laing wrote: ‘A crisis will occur if any member of the family wishes to leave by getting the “family” out of his systems, or dissolving the “family” in himself. […] Dilemmas bound. If I do not destroy the “family”, the “family” will destroy me.’116 This dilemma creates a conflict for Harriet between either destroying or protecting her family or the family. Rather than destroying the family or letting it destroy her, Harriet dissolves the idea of ←58 | 59→the family in her mind. The conflict is resolved when she saves Ben from the straightjacket he is made to wear in the institution for his assumed abnormality. The fact Ben is transferred between the disciplinary institutions of school and hospitals reveal Michael Foucault’s idea of family as an interlocking disciplinary mechanism.
Lessing scholars have considered The Fifth Child as challenging traditional family
