Green movement. Greens would argue that to solve ecological problems requires the transformation both of institutions and of the individual, resulting in the creation of a new society.36
Lessing’s fiction mirrors the link between utopia and the Green movement. At the end of Mara and Dann, Lessing introduces her utopian family that adopts an eco-centric farming method with its members in neither hierarchal relations nor mastery over the environment. The Empire, which once ruled Africa on behalf of the British Royal Family, as shown in The Grass Is Singing, is contested and replaced by a utopian environmental family in Ifrik. The fact that Mara, the feminist explorer, rejects the idea of getting married to her brother to revive the Royal family implies that she challenges colonial and hegemonic control of the environment in Ifrik. Lessing’s modifications in her representation of the environment, from The Grass Is Singing to Mara and Dann, are translated into modifications in her representation of the family. Using these two novels, a postcolonial ecofeminist reading can provide fresh insights that acknowledge the significance of Lessing’s representation of the family in postcolonial literature.
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Intersectionality in Lessing’s Fiction
The combination of postcolonial and ecofeminist concerns in The Grass Is Singing highlights the intersectionality that characterises Lessing’s fiction. The family is a locus where hierarchies of race, class, and gender converge as different but intersecting forms of oppression. Family can then be defined as a complex ideological construction in which various forms of social hierarchies are performed and spread to the rest of society. A single critical approach to the family fails to recognise intersecting power relations that disadvantage particular groups of people. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 theory of intersectionality suggested that the oppression of black women can only be understood by looking at the intersection of womanhood and blackness.37 The intersecting lens, as understood from Crenshaw’s perspective, warned scholars and social movements that ‘address[ing] injustice towards one group may end up perpetuating systems of inequities towards other groups’.38 In her 1985 novel The Good Terrorist, Lessing addressed the intersection of inequalities long before Crenshaw’s theory, highlighting that communist/Marxist theory is gender-blind because it focuses on the oppression of the proletariat, a term used for men. As in the example of Alice Mellings, women are not considered a social class and therefore are excluded from the communist critique of a class-based system, though capitalism benefits enormously from their labour and oppression. The intersectional approach establishes the significance of family in understanding multiple sources of oppression in Lessing’s fiction, such as gender, sexual orientation, class, race, and bodily norms. Lessing’s fiction intersects political theories of communism, feminism, environmentalism and Sufi mysticism to address if not unpack entwined forms of oppressions in the family.
Exploring the family through the intersections of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism contests the power dynamics that oppress individuals and exploit the environment. Communism critiques the family for its relation to capitalism and sustaining a class-based society, feminism identifies the family as having created gender inequalities and promoting a patriarchal society, Sufism resists any form of prescribed human behaviour on which ←33 | 34→the traditional family relies, and postcolonial ecofeminism illustrates how the patriarchal systems of capitalism, colonialism, and family cooperate not only in oppressing people based on colour, gender, and class but also exploit the environment and other living organisms. In the same way that multiple forms of oppression intersect and sustain what we call ‘the family’, the approaches of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism intersect in Lessing’s fiction to introduce non-normative families. The novelty of my approach lies in the fact that it considers family through an intersecting lens to illuminate the ways in which Lessing critiques and reconfigures the traditional institution of the family.
Overview of Key Thinkers and Theories: ‘The Family’ and Families
The question of whether the family as a concept is functional or dysfunctional has opened contemporary debate. Discussion has developed from two contradicting views: either accepting a single meaning of ‘the family,’ or critiquing the existing form of the family as a way to acknowledge diverse human relations within the context of ‘families’. Ronald Fletcher named the latter group as ‘abolitionists’, claiming that they are ‘radically […] mistaken’ in their view of family and marriage.39 On the other hand, the functionalists’ assertion that the family is an ‘unchanging, biological, heterosexual and natural’ entity has historically been challenged through revolts by new generations who oppose traditional restrictions on sexual behaviour, protests by women against their imprisonment within the wife-mother role, and gay rights movements.40 The development of the Marxist critique of ‘the family’, diverse feminist approaches, and the emergence of radical anti-psychiatry movements have put the functionality of ‘the family’ into question, critiquing it as an instrument of capitalist and patriarchal oppressions and as destructive of individuality. These approaches and movements have critically analysed family as part of their demand for social change rather than taking its existing form for granted. Such discussions have presented ‘the family’ as either all bad or neither good nor bad but in need of reconfiguration against the functionalist’s promotion that the family is all good. The rise of gay and lesbian movements has moved these discussions a step ←34 | 35→further to ask the crucial question about what could be considered a family. This question has been key to the emergence of non-normative families, which have occupied the political agendas of the New Right that defends family values and New Labour, which is in favour of alternative families. Although the family has varied in its forms considerably historically and geographically, I am focusing on the family in the US and the UK in the twentieth century because this was the context in which Lessing was writing, and this is where her work is widely read.
The Functionalists: The Stable Family
Changes to the family in the UK came following the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the last year of that decade and into the 1940s. Economic hardships caused family breakdowns not through divorces but abandonments when men either chose to leave to live somewhere else or went off to war. Women had to be both the caregiver and the breadwinner, and the number of female employees in the workforce, especially in clerical and service positions, increased. All of these changes signalled women’s changing roles and hence the perceived changes in the family to follow in later decades. Therefore, the emergence of functionalist family theories were responses to these changes in an attempt to assuage anxiety about social change and reassert the old order. Functionalist theories associated the word ‘family’ with the legal union of a heterosexual couple and the production and raising of biological children, and the preservation of this unit has been linked with social stability. The theoretical definition of the family has been systematised and supported by the functionalist school of thought.
Functionalism, having its origins in the writings of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, emphasises the importance of stability and consensus for a society to exist. Each aspect of a society, such as education, media, government, economy, religion, and family, is dependent on the others. For example, religion emphasises the importance of establishing families and promotes seniority of individuals when they assume their roles as husband/wife, and further as mother/father. Schools help families to raise children in accordance with dominant values, and in return children are expected to become good citizens by fulfilling their duties in wider society, such as paying their taxes and contributing to a stable economy. Similarly, mothers are considered good citizens as long as they are occupied with their familial responsibilities, including raising well-behaved children who will go on to be the next generation of a stable society. As such, any problem, dysfunction, or even change in any of these aspects is considered ←35 | 36→to affect the overall stability and structure of society. Compared with
