brother, Harry, benefited from the privilege of exploring the outside world, her mother was confined to the domestic sphere and denied the same privilege enjoyed by men. Lessing, too, was exposed to sexism early on, as she mentions in her autobiography: ‘[W];hat I remember is hard, bundling hands, impatient arms, and [my mother’s] voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, she wanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me’.10 Therefore, Lessing not only experienced sexism as part of women’s assumed inferior status in the settler society of Southern Rhodesia, but she also encountered it from another woman, her mother.
In the patriarchal, colonial settler society of Southern Rhodesia, where Lessing lived both as a child and adult, women were discriminated against through gender dynamics in the family. As both family and colonialism are sustained through male hegemony, giving birth to a male won women social approval. While her brother was loved unconditionally, Lessing’s acceptance in the family and society was conditional upon her adoption of feminine traits such as passivity, care, nurture, tolerance and compassion. Emily tried hard to mould ←21 | 22→Lessing into the image of a ‘proper’ daughter, but she refused to be an extension of her mother. Lessing initially did this by exploring the African landscape during her childhood, a privilege denied to women. The African bush, a space forbidden for white women represents Lessing’s early contact with the natural world and rebellion against gender limitation. She writes: ‘I used to prop the door with a stone, so that what went on in the bush was always visible to me’.11 She then dropped out of her girls’ school at the age of fourteen in Salisbury, and finally left her biological family behind at the age of fifteen for an independent life. These departures indicate that Lessing was willing to contest the limits of gender in practice, which was later reinforced through her writing. Lessing could not change the biological condition of being a woman, but through her writing she could subvert the familial and social conditions that make women inferior in family and society.
Lessing deviated from the conventions of the traditional family in her marriages, too. At a time when divorce was understood as evidence of a woman failing to be a proper wife and mother, and therefore threatening social stability, Lessing nevertheless survived two family breakups, successively in 1943, leaving her children Jean and John with their father, Frank Wisdom, and in 1949 from her communist husband, Gottfried Lessing, becoming a single mother forever.12 These years also marked the golden age of the traditional family, which defined women in relation to their roles as wives and mothers, homemakers and responsible for raising obedient children. Her divorces can be read as indicative of her challenge to prevailing ideas about gender. Moreover, her radical decision to leave her two small children behind while moving to London in 1949, which she defined as ‘committing the unforgivable’, also revealed that what is promoted as a haven was indeed a prison for women. Lessing, as she mentions in her autobiography, had no choice other than to escape from this prison in order to achieve freedom as a writer:
For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn’t the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother.13
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Unlike her mother and the majority of women who accepted family as their fate and motherhood as their reward, Lessing resisted convention and chose instead to pursue a career. She escaped from the dominant ideologies of family and motherhood to ‘recreate herself as a writer’.14 As such, her concern was not to protect the family ideology and properly raise children in a family situation, but instead to create a family liberated from traditional ideologies and establish a more equal society for all in her fiction. She states:
It was the way of life I had to leave … I explained to the babies that they would understand later why I had left. I was going to change this ugly world, they would live in a beautiful and perfect world where there would be no race hatred, injustice and so forth … I carried, like a defective gene, a kind of doom or fatality, which would trap them as it had me, if I stayed. Leaving, I would break some ancient chain of repetition.15
This passage is key to following Lessing’s critique of family ideology and her celebration of non-normative families, which would later emerge in her fiction. Although Lessing literally left her children behind, the passage clearly indicates that her intention was to leave ‘the way of life’ in which power dynamics of race, class, and gender distorted individuals’ lives and created an unjust society. The irony of the ‘defective gene’ she mentions implies a social construction of motherhood, which functions as the key determinant of children’s lives, with daughters positioned as extensions of their mothers and sons of their fathers. Family ideology promotes mothers as a means of shaping the future in accordance with societal expectations, yet Lessing leaves this ideological responsibility behind to assume a new responsibility: changing the world and family for the better, not as a mother but as a writer.
Lessing’s interest in communist politics instilled in her a new sense of family, both on fictional and non-fictional levels. Her new family meant a unit of people who gathered for a common cause in a non-hierarchal manner. Contrary to the taken-for-granted definition of the family, which implies the legal union of a heterosexual couple who live in a common residence with their genetic offspring, this new family was not restricted by any residence, legal union, or biological ties. Lessing had experienced this new type of family when she assumed responsibility for Jenny Diski, the classmate of her son, Peter. This relationship was later represented in Lessing’s novel The Memoirs of a Survivor, which introduced ←23 | 24→the idea of non-gendered parenthood in place of gendered motherhood. In this novel, Emily Cartright is left as a teenager with an unnamed narrator, who assumes responsibility for her. The pair have a non-biological, non-hierarchical, and non-gendered relationship, reflective of the non-normative mother/daughter relationship between Lessing and Diski. This illustrates that it was the ideology of motherhood, not parenthood, which Lessing abandoned when she left her family, which is eventually reconfigured in her fiction.
Once free from the traditional family on a personal level, Lessing was able to critique its ideology and promotion of inequalities. Through her writing, Lessing explores the ways in which family ideology can be subverted and reconstructed to the benefit of individuals and society. Writing about the family signalled Lessing’s shift from being a subject of the family to making it a subject of her work. Therefore, Lessing’s fiction not only mirrors the troubles of her own personal family life but also shows how family relates to wider social problems engendered by patriarchy.
The Family in Lessing’s Fiction
By focusing on the family, this book illuminates Lessing’s wider themes, concerns, and broader social critique. It is through the family that Lessing comments on social inequalities and environmental degradation in her fiction. For example, the families in The Grass Is Singing, the Turners and the Richards, reveal how hierarchies of gender and race sustain the patriarchal systems of colonialism and the family. Single parent families in The Golden Notebook illustrate that women can find diverse means of personal fulfilment beyond the family, such as in a career. The family in The Summer Before the Dark suggests that the situation in the 1970s still has not improved for women who participate in wider society as they are still not released from the oppression of domesticity. Alternative family arrangements are employed in The Good Terrorist to counter the New Right’s call for a return to ‘family values’ during the 1980s. The Lovatt family in The Fifth Child reveals the ideological interconnectedness between family and educational and medical institutions in stigmatising and oppressing individuals through bodily norms and gender roles. The novel also explores societal expectations of what is considered normal and abnormal. Mara and Dann details how patriarchal systems not only distort the human mind but also cause environmental degradation. The Lennox family in The Sweetest Dream explores the inadequacy of left-wing politics to represent womanly concerns. A
