communal eating arrangements […] might simply mean moving a woman from her small, private, individual kitchen into a large, public communal one’.27 The Good Terrorist and The Sweetest Dream illustrate that gender roles remain unchanged in what is supposed to be a radically new household that is not controlled by men in the form of private property. Lessing highlights the gender-blind aspect of Marxist/communist theory, suggesting that the new family remains a utopia, or ‘the sweetest dream’, as the title of the later novel hints. In this way, she problematises both the traditional family and communist theory. Lessing critiques the bourgeois family and imagines new forms of kinship in her fiction. However, her critique of communism also presents the ←28 | 29→communist family as hypocritical, as it recognises the plight of women yet fails to liberate them from domesticity.
Lessing’s ideas about family became more radical through her gender-based critique of the institution in the early 1960s. Her exploration and analysis of the family coincides with the rise of second-wave feminism. Although Lessing was ambivalent towards this movement, her novels align with a feminist critique of women’s oppression in the family and exclusion from politics and society. Her long-celebrated novel, The Golden Notebook, was regarded as a key feminist text in terms of illustrating that women can contribute to politics and have a career, and they can sustain a family without needing men. The novel was also an important text in terms of reflecting Lessing’s ideas about non-normative family arrangements, as it details the lives of two single parents, Anna Wulf and Molly Jacobs. Such families were considered to be deviant and even a threat to social stability at that time. The novel explores educated, middle-class women rejecting the image of the happy housewife, a myth that was further subverted the following year when Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.28
Feminist theory presented a systematic critique of the family by analysing multiple overlapping factors such as marriage, reproduction, child rearing, domesticity, parental roles, and childhood. Lessing, too, is critical of family as a patriarchal institution that reproduces conservative gender roles. Like feminists such as Friedan, she takes traditional family as the main source of inequalities in society. The link between family and society in regards to the equality that Lessing persistently represented in her fiction early on was later pronounced by contemporary feminist family critics such as Susan Moller Okin: ‘Without just families, how can we expect to have a just society?’29 Lessing’s ambivalence towards feminism is also reflected in her view of the family that at some points contradicted radical feminists. While Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer focused on opting out of family and asserted separatism as solutions to the problems of patriarchy, Lessing writes about the liberation of the ←29 | 30→family from the patriarchal ideology and social politics, rather than the liberation of women from the idea of the family altogether.30
Unlike communism and feminism, Sufism does not have an established theory of family. Therefore, Lessing’s representation of the family benefits from Sufi thought indirectly, hinting at ways in which Sufi principles and tenets could be employed to critique traditional family arrangements and to introduce non-normative ones. For example, gender plays a significant role in creating and sustaining the family ideology. It is due to gender that women and men are regarded as two different beings in a hierarchy. In contrast, Sufism suggests that although ‘in this world of duality we may find ourselves in different forms, ultimately there is no male or female, only Being’.31 The ultimate point one can reach in Sufism is to recognise one’s own capacities as a Being regardless of social roles and constructions. In Sufism traditional family, political parties, parenthood, and group minds of all kinds are regarded as the ‘constrictive collective’. Humans experience the loss of identity in these roles, what Sufis call ‘the false self’.32 Sufism stresses the importance of individualism in order to reach the real self, and in this regard, women are no different from men. Just as ‘male attributes of strength and determination also belong to women’, so too do ‘the feminine attributes of receptivity and beauty also belong to men’.33 The non-hierarchical and non-gendered nature of Sufism inspires Lessing’s creation of non-normative families.
Lessing’s novels highlight the intersection of feminist and Sufi concerns. This intersection gives rise to ‘Su-feminism’.34 In The Female Eunuch (1970), Germaine Greer talks about the ‘organic family’, which destabilises the relationship between biological parents and children to critique the role biology has in ←30 | 31→sustaining the traditional family: ‘[t];he point of an organic family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being the extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves’.35 Lessing represents this ‘organic family’ in her personal life with Jenny Diksi, and her Sufi themed novels, The Memoirs of a Survivor and Ben, in the World. In the first novel, protagonists, Gerald and Emily establish a commune where they raise unrelated children, destabilising the tie between child and parent. The sense of ‘organic family’ is hinted at through their deviations from social conventions. There are not any hierarchies or gender divisions between these children as they have not lived within traditional family arrangements before. She introduces Ben as a Sufi in the latter novel. As a victim of the traditional family as represented in The Fifth Child (1988), Ben’s journey towards self-actualisation is accompanied by Mrs. Ellen Biggs, standing as a non-biological parent in his life. Therefore, Lessing’s fictional children in these novels do not internalise the gender roles of their parents, as highlighted by Greer. To borrow a phrase from Greer, Ben and the children in Gerald’s commune ‘initiate their own capacities’, which is in line with Sufi teaching. This is an example of the intersection of Lessing’s Sufism and feminism.
The term Su-feminism indicates that Lessing’s Sufism expands her feminist critique of the family by providing a new form of arrangement in which gendered parental roles are minimised. The labour motherhood involves was considered to be the main source of women’s oppression in the family and of their disadvantage in the society. For example, Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) argues that new reproductive technologies and shared childcare would free women from the burden of pregnancy and birth, and a maternal role that guaranteed female oppression. Analysing the traditional family from a Sufi perspective brings a strong critique of hierarchies and parental roles in the family and reveals ways in which non-normative family arrangements could emerge. Sufism prioritises the idea of unity and oneness, without any discrimination. In this way, Lessing’s Sufism, I suggest, expands and contributes to her desire to eradicate gender-based segregation in both family and society. This suggests that her ambivalent relationship with the Women’s Liberation Movement can be reconciled through exploring the ways in which her feminism and Sufism intersect.
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Postcolonial Ecofeminism and the Family
Lessing’s increasing interest in environmental politics during the late 1990s also shapes her representation of the family. Growing up in the colony at Southern Rhodesia, she witnesses overlapping connections between unjustified subordination of women and destruction of environment. Both environment and women are controlled and exploited through gender with the former feminised, and the latter’s roles naturalised within the patriarchal systems of colonialism and the family. Lessing’s treatment of the environment links to her reconfiguration of the family and women’s domination. A comparative reading of her early and late postcolonial novels, The Grass Is Singing and Mara and Dann suggest that Lessing recovers environment from its submissive and exploited position, which in return enables her to challenge patriarchal systems and reconfigure her non-normative family. In Mara and Dann, Lessing creates a utopian continent, Ifrik, and looks for reasons for and solutions to environmental problems. Derek Wall, in Green History, argues that
the concept of ‘utopia’,
