solutions to these problems in Lessing’s fiction.
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The significance of the family needs to be appropriately established in order to follow Lessing’s shifts at various stages of her writing between the political and mystical movements of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism. It is through the family that Lessing tests the capacity of these movements in bringing real change. At the same time, Lessing explores the gaps in these movements and suggests the ways in which they can intersect to create equality and a more just society. For example, a focus on the family demonstrates that Lessing’s feminism and Sufism intersect in a way that challenges gender oppression, and creates what I term ‘Su-feminism’. The identification of intersections between these movements enables Lessing’s fiction to be read anew in relation to family, gender and her wider concerns.
The trends and changes in Lessing’s social vision can also be followed through the family. Cornelius Collins suggests that Lessing’s vision ‘grew more radical and her analysis of global conditions more severe’.16 This becomes particularly evident in the context of the family. For example, while Lessing critiques traditional family arrangements in her early writing between the 1950s and 1970s, her evaluation of the family becomes more radical as she explores non-normative kinship from the late 1970s onwards. A focus on family illustrates that Lessing’s vision expands from women to humanity (including men) and then to the environment; she achieves this by revisiting her earlier concerns. While women’s oppression in the family was among Lessing’s earlier preoccupations, this concern, thanks to her involvement with Sufism, expanded towards a consideration of the oppression of humanity in the family and society. The late 1990s, with the publication of Mara and Dann, witnessed Lessing’s increasing environmental concerns. In the novel, the irresponsible occupation of land and exploitation of natural resources threaten all living organisms with extinction. Lessing protests human exploitation of the environment and challenges patriarchal systems to introduce a new family in her utopian continent, called Ifrik.
Critical and Theoretical Approach
Lessing’s ongoing interests in issues of class, gender, mysticism, and the environment justify chapters on communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism, respectively. In the early 1940s, Lessing was a member of the ←25 | 26→Communist party as part of her anti-racist activism in Southern Rhodesia. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed Lessing’s ambivalent relationship with feminism. Although her work, The Golden Notebook, anticipated and promoted the Women’s Liberation Movement before key feminist texts such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Lessing refused it to be labelled a feminist text: ‘But this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation’.17 The late 1960s witnessed Lessing’s dissatisfaction with political movements for their limitations, as she later explained: ‘I have long recognised that the salvation of this world cannot lie in any political ideology’.18 The blind spots in political ideologies led her to explore a non-political philosophy, Sufism, which demonstrated a wider concern for humans as a species rather than particular groups. For Lessing Sufism was a way of escaping from the prisons of conventions, dogmas, and prescribed behaviours to bring about real freedom and change in the family. The idea of the family as a prison parallels Sufi belief, as Lessing mentions: ‘Well, the Sufis say we live in such a prison, and it is their concern to give us equipment to free ourselves’.19 In her collection of essays Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1986), Lessing recalls her interest in different ideas: ‘examining ideas, from whatever source they come, to see how they may usefully contribute to our lives and to the societies we live in’.20 Sufism was one of these ideas in which Lessing became interested, and she employed it in her fiction during the 1970s for the creation of non-normative families and society.
In the 1990s, Lessing expanded the scope and criticism of this ‘prison’ to include environmental problems in her fiction. Contrary to her early depiction of environment as passive and controlled by men in The Grass Is Singing, she empowers environment in such a way that it pays back to human exploitation. The duration between the two novels points at her increasing environmental concern, and it is in line with her expanding vision, namely, a shift in focus from human concerns to planetary ones. At that time, when environmentalism was the concern of critical debates both in the US and Western Europe, Lessing wrote Mara and Dann, exploring corresponding environmental problems and debates. This book explores Lessing’s interest in communism, feminism, Sufism, and ←26 | 27→postcolonial ecofeminism, along with aspects of her dissatisfaction with each through a focus on the family as she employs these theories and philosophies in her critique of this institution.
In her fiction, Lessing tests the capacity of communism in eradicating social injustices and bringing real change to families. The communist vision of the future family was adopted by Lessing during her active membership in the Communist Party and later in her writing. In Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, she mentions her enthusiasm for a new form of family: ‘[M];y first duty is to my new family, my real one, and they really care for me, they understand me, but my former family did not really love me and understand me.’21 Here, Lessing makes a distinction between her biological family and her ‘new’ family. While the former represents a prison to escape, which Lessing viewed as collaborating with evil systems of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, her new family is a way of fighting against these systems.
Lessing’s views on the family are more in line with those of Karl Marx than Friedrich Engels. Marx is in favour of a realigned family, whereas Engels seeks the abolition or dissolution of the family through a communal way of living in the communist society.22 In her fiction, Lessing neither abolishes nor dissolves the idea of the family, but rather imagines its reconfiguration in the best form possible. While Alice Mellings in The Good Terrorist abandons her own bourgeois family in the hope of creating a new type of family in a political commune, the Lennox family of The Sweetest Dream is gradually transformed into a commune, accommodating individuals and political figures to create a new sense of family. In 1982, Ferdinand Mount argued that ‘the appearance of communes, squads and kibbutzim is a new development which may bring about the collapse or transformation of the family’.23 Lessing’s novels, those that I call her communist texts, present communes as alternatives to the traditional family. In The Good Terrorist, Alice, the squatter, tells her mother: ‘we are going to pull everything down. All of it. This shitty rubbish we live in. It’s all coming down (italics original)’.24 The pronoun ‘we’ stands for Alice’s new friends, while ‘it’ denotes the ←27 | 28→traditional family and the ‘shitty rubbish’ women’s traditional roles in it. Like Lessing, Alice abandons her biological parents and pursues the dream of a new family through communism.
The ways in which communism offers an alternative form of the family also calls its limitations into question. The idea that a communist family would follow the overthrow of the existing economic system means ignoring ongoing women’s oppression in the family and inequalities in wider society. Lessing, rather than waiting for this overthrow, experiments with the communist family in her fiction by exploring whether a woman’s condition would differ in new family arrangements. Engels writes about the situation of women in The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State (1884), suggesting that ‘the modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed slavery of the wife’.25 In this slavery, while the husband represents the bourgeois, his wife stands for the proletariat. Man’s control of woman, ‘is rooted in the fact that he, not she, controls the property’.26 Lessing is quick to see the gap between theory and practice in the communist view of the family. In The Good Terrorist and The Sweetest Dream, she highlights how communism fails to put theory into practice when it comes to women and family. Both Frances and Alice, the protagonists of the respective texts, are burdened by heavy domestic responsibilities for the sake of ‘revolution’. Their conditions confirm the concerns of feminists in
