who […] challenges normative family values […].’118 The Fifth Child is a key feminist text that shows how the family situation can be oppressive to men and children beyond women. By depicting Harriet’s relationships with her children, husband and parents, Lessing illustrates how the ideology of the family cannot accommodate difference and is oppressive to its members. Jeanie Warnock argues that the mother-daughter relationship is a recurring theme in Lessing’s fiction whereas critical studies overlook father-daughter relationships which could offer new readings, especially considering Lessing’s conflicts with her own father.119 In my reading of The Fifth Child I illustrate that Ben is not an extension of his father, which challenges the patriarchal ideology and its continuance.
Several Lessing scholars have discussed Sufism in Lessing’s fiction and the ways it has influenced her style, technique and language. Muge Galin’s Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing (1997) is the first complete critical assessment of Sufism in Lessing’s fiction. For Galin, Sufism sheds a new light on Lessing’s work. She suggests that it is thanks to Sufism that Lessing writes with ‘self-assurance’, and becomes ‘more didactic’ in her writing.120 Following communism and feminism, Lessing employs a non-political philosophy of Sufism in ←59 | 60→her fiction that adds novelty to the content of her writing and style. Contrary to her ambivalent relationships with communism and feminism, Lessing expresses an open interest in Sufism. However, Galin’s assertion that Lessing becomes ‘more didactic’ contradicts the very nature of Sufism which avoids didacticism to enable individuals’ potential for self-learning. As shown in Chapter Three, this is evident in Memoirs and Ben, in the World in which Emily and Ben follow the Sufi way as free from any prescribed behaviour and conventional thinking.
Galin proposes that Sufism ‘will not only complicate our understanding of [Lessing’s] work but also reshape our assessments of its quality’.121 In a similar fashion, Nancy Topping Bazin celebrates Lessing’s move into Sufism, suggesting that her ‘ideas have been nourished and clarified through her interest in Sufism’.122 This book offers ways of reassessing Lessing’s work and Sufism within the context of non-normative families.
There have been several discussions of Memoirs as a Sufi novel, but these do not link Sufism to the family. For example, Roberta Rubenstein reads the novel as a breakthrough in Lessing’s fiction ‘rendering […] the mystical path of self-transcendence’.123 Muge Galin takes The Memoirs of a Survivor as a Sufi novel which ‘traces the steps a would-be Sufi takes toward enlightenment’.124 When Memoirs is read in relation to the family, there is no connection made between family and Sufism in the novel. Watkins suggests that ‘the narrator experiences the collapse of civilized society and the nuclear family’.125 For Sunita Sinha, the novel demonstrates Lessing’s ongoing interest in alternative groups to the nuclear family structures, and ‘the degeneration of atmosphere, the collapse of law and order and material infrastructure led to the breaking of stable, biologically related families’.126Although critics spot the representation of the family either as Lessing’s view of the family or her interest in the alternative structures, there has yet not been a reading that examines the connection between Sufism and Lessing’s representation of the family. Gerald’s commune functions within the context of a non-normative family that reflects Sufi principles. Therefore, Sufism enables a shift from the collapse of the nuclear family to Lessing’s creation ←60 | 61→of non-normative families in the novel. A focus on the family also contributes to studies of Sufism as there has yet not been any detailed studies or theories of how Sufism deals with the institution of the family. This is because, unlike political movements, which prescribe certain behaviours within the family, Sufism avoids any form of prescriptive behaviour in order not to limit individual development.
There have also been readings that unpack the relationship between patriarchal systems of colonialism and family. Reading The Fifth Child, Debrah Raschke highlights the ‘domestic scene […] as a breeding ground for colonial domination’.127 The book employs employ Raschke’s argument to reveal an ideological interconnectedness between family and colonialism in The Grass Is Singing. It is shown that, in the same way that the colony is domesticated by the empire, women and people of colour are domesticized through family. Anthony Chennells, a notable postcolonial critic of Lessing’s work, explores Lessing’s connection to African land, stating ‘the empty country, untouched by man, has capacity to offer men and women new relationships […]’.128 In Mara and Dann, Lessing creates her own utopian African continent, Ifrik contrary to the one dominated by colonial activity as a way to reconfigure human relations within the context of non-normative families. Though being a recurring theme, the significance of the family has not yet been adequately established in the existing criticism.
The book offers a rationale of reading family within three phases as political, mystical and planetary throughout Lessing’s fiction. In this way, the family illuminates Lessing’s legacy and ever broadening perspective from woman to human then to the planet. The ways in which Lessing critiques and reconfigures family in her fiction offer solutions to problems that threaten humans and the planet. The pull between individuals’ desire to achieve a full human identity and their need to feel a part of the collective is negotiated through Lessing’s reformulation of the family. This book also extends existing criticism by showing that Lessing’s fiction suggests more than her critique of traditional families, introducing non-normative families and kinship with alternative domesticities. Moreover, Lessing’s fictional family is shaped by her environmental concerns and interest in mysticism. Critics have addressed these themes without linking them to family. The inclusion of these themes in exploring Lessing’s representation of the family shows how Lessing’s fiction can be reassessed. Such a reading, ←61 | 62→for instance, acknowledges that Lessing seeks to liberate the family from ideology rather than individuals from the idea of family.
Chapter One, Communism and the Family, considers Lessing’s representation of communes in the context of non-normative family arrangements. Communist ideology offers such arrangements in theory, including communal kitchens, shared raising of children, and relationships outside the sanction of marriage, all of which have the potential to subvert the conventional family ideology and its oppression, especially in relation to women. Alice in The Good Terrorist and Frances in The Sweetest Dream test the capacity of communism to introduce these arrangements in practice. However, Lessing illustrates that communism fails to liberate women from domesticity even in non-typical family settings. In these political communes, women are ironically represented as the proletariat while men, who are comrades, are portrayed as capitalists who benefit from women’s labour.
Chapter Two, Feminism and the Family, takes the conventional family as a locus of gender oppression and the source of other inequalities in wider society. It focuses on the main elements of the family, such as marriage, reproduction, motherhood, child-rearing, and domesticity, employing insights from feminist critique of the family. The chapter also problematises the family as, to borrow from Foucault, a disciplinary institution that ideologically cooperates with wider disciplinary institutions, such as schools and medical establishments.129 The chapter illustrates that Lessing’s ambivalence towards feminism can partly be explained by her interest in other forms of oppression upheld by the family. Lessing writes about feminist issues, but she is not just a feminist writer, as her explorations include other forms of oppression such as bodily norms besides gender, as can be seen in the example of Ben Lovatt. The chapter positions The Fifth Child and The Summer Before the Dark as key post-1970s feminist texts. Although they have been overshadowed by The Golden Notebook, these novels offer equally strong critiques of women’s oppression in society and, more specifically, in the family.
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