for the ←17 | 18→benefit of individuals and society. Thus, this study establishes the importance of the family in Lessing’s fiction, and proposes that Lessing introduces non-normative families without being anti-family. The term non-normative family is employed to refer to the ways in which Lessing’s family deviates from the established norms of the traditional family such as biological connectedness, gender and hierarchal relations.
The book also considers Lessing’s literary explorations of the family in the context of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism. It is divided into four main chapters that address these themes. The chapters are arranged in a thematic order that chronologically reflects Lessing’s relationship with political movements, mysticism and the environment. In this sense, the theme of the family is discussed in relation to issues of class (communism), gender (feminism), mysticism (Sufism), and the environment (postcolonial ecofeminism) by focusing on two novels per chapter. Chapter One on communism analyses The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Sweetest Dream (2001); Chapter Two on feminism examines The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988); Chapter Three on Sufism considers The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Ben, in the World (2000); Chapter Four on postcolonial ecofeminism explores The Grass Is Singing (1950) and Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999).
The novels examined in each chapter share common themes but were written in different decades. The rationale through this pairing is, firstly, to follow changes in Lessing’s representation of family over time; secondly, to explore if her standpoint in relation to communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism also changes between the two texts; and, thirdly, to demonstrate how these changes affect her treatment of the family. The book focuses on a novel from the period in which she first engages with a set of ideas, or a philosophy or a political movement, alongside a later novel. This approach to studying Lessing’s work is in line with Roberta Rubenstein’s argument that ‘[e];ach of Doris Lessing’s novels is both a movement forward and a return to the concerns of her earlier fiction at deeper levels of meaning and complexity’.4 The book moves ‘forward and backward’ between the early and late novels to explore the evolution of Lessing’s treatment of family. The selected texts cover the period from the early 1950s, when Lessing published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, up until the late 2000s when she produced one of her last novels, The Sweetest Dream. The eight novels analysed in the book reflect developments in Lessing’s representation of ←18 | 19→the family, covering a fifty-year period of interest in this concept. Together, they demonstrate how Lessing reflects and anticipates socio-historical and political developments in the history of the family, and suggest how her fiction extends theories and views of family rather than just mirroring them.
This work focuses on texts in which family emerges as a central theme. Thus, it focuses on Lessing’s literary fiction rather than her science fiction and short stories. It also focuses on novels that have received relatively little scholarly attention in relation to communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism, especially compared to the Children of Violence Series (1952–1969) and the novel for which Lessing is most famous, The Golden Notebook (1962). I aim to illustrate that each of the chosen novels offers an equally strong engagement with these political and philosophical movements. In Chapter One, I offer a reading of The Good Terrorist and The Sweetest Dream within the context of communist/Marxist theories of family, as these novels feature communes as alternatives to the traditional family. In Chapter Two, I show how The Summer Before the Dark and The Fifth Child present a vigorous critique of women’s oppression in society and the family, yet they have not received attention from feminist critics to the same extent as The Golden Notebook. In particular, The Fifth Child shows that the oppressiveness of the family extends beyond women to children. In 1987—two years after the publication of The Fifth Child—Barrie Thorne observes that ‘children remain relatively invisible in most sociological and feminist literature’.5 She further argues that ‘our ways of thinking about children reflect adult interest and limit understanding of children’s experiences and actions.’6 The fact that the novel is not only about a mother but also about a child contributes to re-visioning feminist scholarship, acknowledging children’s agency and subordination in the family. While The Fifth Child foregrounds women’s ongoing oppression in relation to domestic and childrearing responsibilities, The Summer Before the Dark illustrates how domestic oppression is translated into wider society, making women invisible in the relative absence of their domestic responsibilities.
The Memoirs of a Survivor has been referred to as one of Lessing’s first Sufi-themed novels. However, in Chapter Three I introduce Ben, in the World as another essential Sufi novel to expand discussions on Lessing and Sufism. Even the title of this novel evokes the Sufi teaching ‘Be in the world but not of it’ that warns individuals against the falseness of social roles and materialism. In Sufism, ←19 | 20→the human being is considered to be limited by the particular dimension and conventions they live in. ‘Be in the world but not of it’ is a way of illuminating the mind of its potentials and of the existence of multi-layered dimensions that the human mind if not the physical body can travel to. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, the act of penetrating through the walls, as practiced by the unnamed narrator, can be an example of this. Reading Lessing’s early and late Sufi novels in relation to the family reveals what I call the ‘Sufi family’ and ‘Sufi parenthood’. These terms denote non-normative families, as the Sufi relationships deviate from mainstream definitions of the family and gendered parenthood. The ways in which these terms contribute to the emergence of Sufi theories of family illustrate how Sufism benefits from Lessing’s fiction.
Lastly, Chapter Four offers a postcolonial ecofeminist reading of Lessing’s early and late postcolonial novels, The Grass Is Singing and Mara and Dann, in terms of the family. Such an analysis asserts the significance of the environment in Lessing’s fiction, as these novels have benefited from postcolonial criticism in relation to issues of race, gender, and colonialism at the expense of an analysis of the effect of the environment on Lessing, who lived in close contact with the natural world.7 A postcolonial ecofeminist reading illustrates that the changes in Lessing’s attitudes towards the environment initiate changes in her representation of the family. This chapter shows that Lessing’s treatment of family moves from dystopia (in The Grass Is Singing) to utopia (in Mara and Dann). With this move, Lessing transforms the oppressive family ideology into an egalitarian and non-normative one.
Lessing and the Family: From the Personal to the Political
Lessing’s critique of the family was shaped by her childhood and adulthood long before it became one of the core themes in her novels. The familial problems Lessing experienced in her personal life influenced the ways in which she problematized the family in her fiction. Lessing experienced different forms of family at different stages of her life. The first one was the biological family into which she was born; the second was her conjugal family established via marriage, divorce, and the bearing of children; the third was her political family, created through her involvement in communism; and the fourth was the family created by her decision to become a single and adoptive parent. In each of these ←20 | 21→families, Lessing faced different problems in various roles, including daughter, wife, mother, and single parent. On a personal level, Lessing transgressed family conventions, and traditional family values by not being what was considered a proper daughter, nor later a good mother and wife, and even within her political family she was not a communist enough.
The family into which Lessing was born was an ideal example of a traditional 1950s family, one marked by a gendered division of labour: her father, Alfred Taylor, was the breadwinner, whilst her mother, Emily Taylor, was the homemaker. Lessing, was not happy in her own biological family, as she explained in an interview: ‘My position in the family was such that I was very critical, and fairly early on’.8 She contested traditional family as practiced by her parents: ‘I cannot remember a time when I did not fight my mother. Later, I fought my father too’.9 During her childhood, Lessing witnessed that gender dynamics introduced two different images of family, firstly as a haven for men from the outside world, and secondly as a domestic
