Earticle

In Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbor (1983), the protagonist, Jane Somers, attempts to be reconciled with her mother as well as to play a role as a good daughter opposite to the female characters who, in Lessing’s early novels, always struggle with their mothers. Such a change of Jane can be seen in her inner world, particularly described in her diary, related to the relationship of Maudie Fowler and herself. So it is possible to read this novel from an analytical psychology, especially with Neumann’s theory of the terrible mother. Neumann says that the terrible mother, who personifies the destructive and devouring aspect of the unconscious, sometimes helps the ego to achieve centroversion or sometimes prohibits the ego from trying to do it. The terrible mother in The Diary of a Good Neighbor is embodied as death, for the journey of Jane toward centroversion is mainly developed in overcoming the fear of death or, literally, death, such as, her husband’s and mother’s and Maudie’s deaths. Through the three deaths, Jane comes to accept the dark side of her life and is changed from ego-centrism to altruism, leading her to help her niece. As a result, it is believed that she can solve her problem that she has no affection for others resulting in being isolated from her family. Accordingly, Jane perceives life as more important, realizing how precious it is to love each other.

This paper aims to examine that the protagonist in Doris Lessing’s Love Again(1996) undergoes spiritual growth through her experiences of love and death. In Love, Again, Sarah Derham, a sixty-five-year old writer and founder of a theatre, falls in love with three younger men, leading her to face into her inner erotic desire. Sarah commissions a play of Julie Vairon who is a beautiful and wayward nineteenth-century mulatto woman. The play captivates all who come into contact with it, and dramatically changes the lives of all who take part in it. For instance, Stephen, co-writer of the play, kills himself out of his pain of love to the dead Julie. Also, Sarah finds herself erotically reawakened and uncontrollably attracted to several men, such as, Bill, Henry, and Stephen, virtually all of whom are young enough to be her sons. But Sarah’s couplings with the three men happen only in her imagination, which thus brings her to enlightening rather than delighting. So after these imaginary experiences, Sarah reflects about the pain caused by unrequited love and death, and spends many moments of meditation on her past memories related to her mother and herself. Her psychic journey into the past leads to her spiritual growth, that is, the acquisition of some measure of detachment, in Sarah’s case from her aging body, obsessive romantic emotions and unmet childhood needs. This painfully acquired space allows her to accept the coming to age.

Doris Lessing’s 39th novel, The Fifth Child, portrays one British family from the 1960s to the 1980s. This novel has been analysed from various perspectives, such as conservative family ideology, Victorian family and the country house, maternal postpartum depression, surveillance and control, and drug addiction. In a focal point of the novel, however, there is a couple—David Lovatts and Harriet Lovatts-who are excessively obsessed with a Victorian ‘happy’ family. The ‘happy’ family falls apart after the ominous baby, handicapped Ben, is born. This paper traces how the microcosm of Victorian values, consisting of a family and maternal nature, disintegrates in the face of an unexpected obstacle, and how the “transgressive Other” within a family reproduces an Other through overlapping Ben with the mother, Harriet. Furthermore, this paper reflects on the question of whether a family “now and here” may be based upon real intimacy rather than just family ideas.

In Lessing’s On Cats, the narrator describes various cats who have shared the narrator’s life on an African farm and flats or houses in London. Fascinated by domesticated cats, the narrator grows to really love the grey cat, Lufus, and especially El Magnifico. However, the narration reveals that however pleasant and lovely they might be, cats are likely to be abandoned or battered by their previous owners. Even, the narrator decides to neuter and spay her cats for her own sake. With these experiences, the narrator confesses that it is very cruel to do these operations on the silent cats; moreover, she realizes that the cats can suffer bad and wrong treatment. Considering that they are scapegoats controlled by men’s sovereign power, the cats can be represented as Agamben’s bare life which has a double exception that may be killed but not sacrificed, not in the humane world nor in the divine world. There is still controversy about the narration in On Cats, but it is worthy of re-considering Lessing’s message that the narrator counters a tendency among people to destroy cats without thinking. That is, Lessing reminds us of how painful it is to kill animals in this way, and therefore points out our responsibility for the bare life in our society.

This paper is to study Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child through family trauma. According to E. Ann Kaplan, the family trauma is trauma of loss, abandonment, rejection and betrayal related to whatever the accidents are about. Deidre Barrett points out that the family trauma is related to common events that are potentially or inevitably encountered in the course of a normal life. The family trauma, which is called common or quiet trauma, can be dramatic and soul-destroying. In The Fifth Child, Ben is rejected by his parents as well as his siblings because of his unique appearance and personality. He is said to be a throwback, who might find his place in a primitive era, not in a modern society. In fact, he looks like a troll, shows anger whenever he is banned from doing what he wants, roars to show his discontent and, what is worse, is suspected of killing animals. The problem is that his family cannot accept him as their family member, nor does he get into the family. However, he makes friends with dropouts from school and becomes a leader of the group that is sure to hang around the back streets. He seems to be a shadow/dwarf, where, as Lorelei Cederstrom argues it, the family projects qualities they do not wish to see in themselves. Therefore, Ben terrorizes them as they are not ready to confront him while with a sense of alienation the family makes Ben feel frightened and moreover insensitive to the sufferings of others.

This paper aims to examine the relationship of mother-son in “The Grandmothers” in light of Erich Neumann’s theory of the terrible mother and their son-lover. The terrible mother acts as a good mother when the son-lover is weak and dependent on her, but starts to show her antagonism against the son-lover who tries to be independent since the son-lover has his nature that he has to differentiate himself from the mother. Sometimes the son-lover can be manifest as a struggler or a man-killer who is under the control of the mother and at the same time as her destructive consort. These images are in parallel with the developmental process toward centroversion, which can be explained as self-realization. The forbidden relationship between mothers and her best friend’s only sons in “Grandmothers” is closely related to the absence of fathers in the family. Fathers or husbands are fleeting, which causes their sons to be fixated upon their mothers who block the sons’ psychological development. This brings to mind Lessing’s complicated relationship with her parents, in particular, her father who used to suffer from depression and anger with his amputated leg after World War Ⅰ. He was like a sort of shadow in the family until his death. Therefore, such absence of fatherhood is repeatedly reflected in the negative images of fathers in “Grandmothers,” including her other novels.

Doris Lessing’s Landlocked is the fourth book in the Children of Violence Series, which follows the internal development of the heroine, Martha Quest. Doris Lessing has explored the theme on the individual conscience in relation with the collective in her works. To deal with this theme properly, Doris Lessing has used multiple techniques. The three books in the series present Martha Quest as divided by society. She is presented with realism while she struggles to achieve self. In The Four-Gated City, the fifth and the last of the series, Martha is presented with mysticism in the course of her development. However, this tendency emerges from Landlocked. In Landlocked Martha directs her development inward with Sufism. Sufism is a kind of mystic religion from Islam. In the West, it became a philosophy rather than a religion. It stresses pursuing, perfecting, and becoming more evolved human beings. The focus is perceived to be primarily on the self. These aspects of Sufism interest Lessing. So she accepted it as a means of unifying Martha’s divided self. Following Thomas Stern’s guidance Martha tries to find her inner self. In doing so she acquires awareness of herself, history and the universe. Sufism invites the use of irrational elements such as intuition, madness, and extra sensory perception to recover the divided self lost in rationalism and becoming a whole being.

“Madness and Healing: Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent Into Hell.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 37.4 (2011): 19-43. According to Michel Foucault, madness is something to be feared and ignored in the Western world, and so a madman, as the other, is excluded from ordinary society. However, in Briefing for a Descent Into Hell Doris Lessing shows madness is not a disease to be avoided, and rather it connects to another reality or another view of life. For Lessing, madness can be therapeutic rather than destructive. Unlike the female protagonists in other novels, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell begins with the story of a madman who is hospitalized at the Central Intake Hospital in London. The doctors attend this man, later identified as Charles Watkins with two sons, with conventional treatments and medicine, and regards him as a patient not a human being. Others including his wife, Felicity, think of him as the other, mentioning that he has shown something strange or inappropriate in daily life. This otherness might be caused with the matter of the lack of mutual understanding between individuals, which drives him into an inner-space journey. In his dream, he confronts and experiences incomprehensible accidents, such as a fantastic and genocidal war which may be occurring in our civilization. This dream makes him realize the difference between madness and sanity, dream and reality. Coming out of his dream, he gains the vision of unity in which one can embrace each other’s otherness and promote harmony in them. Like this, in Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, through madness Charles Watkins’s urge to heal the schism of his self-division is well represented by Lessing who emphasizes that madness is a cultural label that permits the potential for vision or self-healing to be nullified by the very institutions that ostensibly promote recovery. (Chungwoon University)

Park, Sun Hwa. “Autobiographical Writing and Reconstruction of the Past: Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 38.4 (2012): 21-46. Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) has raised controversy related to the genre of the book. It has been argued whether this book is an autobiography, a fantasy, or science fiction. The book is set in the future during a world crisis, when an anonymous narrator lives in an abandoned house in a city. Here, despite the setting and events, this paper reads this book as Lessing’s autobiography. It is obvious that Emily’s childhood is a re-creation of Lessing’s own childhood with one thing and another. As the destructive aspect of parent-daughter relationships is a recurring theme in Lessing’s autobiographical and fictional texts, The Memoirs of a Survivor seems to be another confession of Lessing, who seeks for reconciliation and harmony towards her father. As Lessing puts it in Walking in the Shade, there has lingered “a hiatus, a lack, a blur and it was to do with my parents” (16) and the implied author in The Memoirs of a Survivor tries to fill “a hiatus, a lack, a blur” with an opening in the wall. Therefore, this paper shows that in journeying into her most painful childhood memories, Lessing attempts to recover her lost and unsaid past, providing the power of the narrative for the implied author. (Konkuk University)

Doris Lessing sympathizes with contemporary human conditions, cultural situations and prevalent thoughts of her age and tries to describe them in her works. In “The Small Personal Voice”, Lessing asserts that a writer is “an architect of the soul”(7) who creates the new vision in the age of disruption of culture and society. She is concerned about the future society with a point of view of a prophet and tries to show the way of possible solution to many problems happening in the world. In Martha Quest(1952), Martha sets off in quest of identity away from the unchanging reality of the white colony. The period from her awakening in adolescence to her first marriage is covered here. From the closed Anglo-colonial society she takes a hard journey toward her ‘ideal city’ where there is ‘no hatred or violence’. Therefore, this study shows the improvement of human relationships through the change of internal consciousness of human beings and disrupts selfishness, indifference and disbelief which are problematic in modern society.

자본주의 체제에서 재생산노동과 돌봄노동은 억압과 전유, 착취의 대상이 된다. 자본주의의 신자유주의 심화는 이 구조적 불평등 문제를 손질하기는커녕 더욱 심화시킨다. 이 글은 억압과 착취의 대상이 되는 돌봄노동을 ‘자본주의적-돌봄노동’으로, 이에 대비되는 보편적 돌봄을 ‘비(非)자본주의적-돌봄’으로 명명한다. 전자에 관해서는 이반 일리히(Ivan Illich)의 ‘그림자 노동’ 논의를 통해 이것이 어떻게 ‘인간 생활의 자립과 자존을 위한 활동’과 대비되는지 고찰한다. 그리고 자본주의적-돌봄노동의 신자유주의적 심화 현상과 관련해서는 윤재원의 ‘돌봄위기의 경험구조’ 논의를 참조하여 고찰한다. 상기 이론적 논의는 「19호실로 가다」(“To Room Nineteen”)를 비롯한 도리스 레싱(Doris Lessing)의 단편들을 함께 읽음으로써 문학과의 교차적 상상력과 논의의 풍성함을 도모한다. 신자유주의 2기로의 이행기에 쓰인 레싱의 1950~60년대 작품들은 ‘자본주의적-돌봄노동’의 억압적 성질을 극적으로 재현하는 한편, 자립과 자존의 활동으로 나아가기 위한 대안—다시 돌봄, 그리고 연대—을 제시하며, ‘비(非)자본주의적-돌봄’ 실천을 상상해야 할 오늘날 과제에 대한 일말의 해답을 제시한다.

In the capitalist system, reproductive labor and care work are subjected to oppression, appropriation, and exploitation, and neoliberalization exacerbates these structural inequalities rather than addressing them. This article identifies care labor within capitalism as “capitalist-care labor” and contrasts it with “non-capitalist-care” that represents universal care practices. The former is explored through Ivan Illich's concept of “shadow work,” highlighting its opposition to “subsistence.” The neoliberal intensification of capitalist-care labor is then analyzed with reference to Jaewon Yoon's discussion on the “structure of experience of the care crisis.” These theoretical discussions are accompanied by readings of Doris Lessing's short stories, including “To Room Nineteen,” which enrich cross-disciplinary imagination and discussions. Written during the transitional period to neoliberalism, Lessing's works from the 1950s~60s vividly depict the oppressive nature of capitalist-care labor while proposing universal care and solidarity as alternatives, offering a hint toward addressing the contemporary challenge of the care crisis and pursuing the practice of non-capitalist care.

This paper aims to read Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950) in light of Erich Neumann’s theory of the Great Mother and the Struggler. According to Neumann, the struggler tries to get out of the mother’s dominance only to fail, and as a result the struggler is destroyed by her. The protagonist, Mary Turner, in The Grass is Singing embodies the struggler and a black servant, Moses, embodies the Great Mother. In a struggler, the fear for the Great Mother is the first sign of ego stability. This fear expresses itself in various forms of flight and resistance. Mary is seen as a struggler who attempts to get out of her poor marriage (flight) and to control Moses with power (resistance), and who is murdered by Moses. In this, Mary seems to be a failure. However, this paper attempts to maintain that, despite some critics’ argument for her failure, the female protagonist resists society and marriage system, not surrenders to them. Therefore, Mary's death can be considered as a means to get to the highest stage of ego development, that is, centroversion.

A major concern of a Marxist-feminist approach deals with the material, historical structure that limits sexuality and gender. In “To Room Nineteen,” Susan Rawlings’ oppression and self-destruction can be explained by materialist feminism. I want to show that Susan is a victim of a family mode of production determined in capitalist society. In the first part of this paper, I elaborate that the family set-up in “To Room Nineteen” is part of what is known as the sexual division of labor to which the patriarchal ideology of maternity is attached. The second part deals with the process of the protagonist’s buying maternity and domestic labor with money and how the sexual divisions of labor eventually repress the heroine, leading her to retreat from the confinement and controls represented by society. The last part is allotted to explain the symbolism of the room and the heroine’s death in feminist perspective. Ultimately, I construct an adequate materialist-feminist view of woman’s oppression to the extent to which relationships between men and women are ultimately determined by the logic of capitalism and patriarchy.

This paper tackles with a question of what Lessing is doing with the complex and unconventional form of The Golden Notebook by drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of rhizome. Lessing’s concern with form as a literary, personal, political, ideological, and historical problem in the novel reflects her striving for a new form or order after the disillusionment with the old orders of phallogocentrism throughout the two world wars and beyond. The pursuit of a new form necessarily involves a collapse of the established order that Lessing defines as “a weeding-out system” which operates by the principle of “false dichotomies and division.” Lessing’s endeavor to move beyond the dominant mold and to construct a new order free from the oppressive binary thinking of phallogocentrism in the The Golden Notebook is resonant with and is a literary articulation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizome that they elaborate as a new image of thought alternative to a hierarchical tree-system of thought. The Golden Notebook is a rhizome which is an assemblage of heterogeneous elements without a centralizing unity, and this new form is related to a new concept of the subject as a complex assemblage of different selves. Specifically, I examine what motivates the pursuit of a new form, how the heterogeneous elements of the novel are connected to comprise a nonhierarchical and nonlinear assemblage which is not subordinated to homogeneous unity, and then how its form reflects a new concept of subjectivity as a multiplicity which is composed of differences in terms of the principles of rhizome.

Doris Lessing’s 1962 short story “To Room Nineteen,” depicts the life of an increasingly unstable protagonist, Susan, in her home. In critiquing the fact that women are confined to the space of a home embodying patriarchal ideology and order, this story reveals that they are forced to adopt only a limited number of cultural identities that society has idealized for the female sex: in this cultural climate, they are restricted to performing the gender roles, rather than creating other identities beyond gender. This story can therefore be considered a social allegory suggesting one way in which a woman who occupies the ideological space of home ? the realm constructed by male desires ? inevitably fails in her attempt to discover her true self and to obtain a sense of freedom. This article argues that patriarchal forces are what constantly tie the story’s heroine to the space of home and frustrate her various attempts to escape it. To show how the narrative unfolds the violent impacts of home upon the woman, despite her struggle to escape the physical boundaries of her home, this article first examines the story’s presentation of the home as a constructed space by considering critical thoughts on space and ideology, then examines each of Susan’s attempts to escape from the space of home. Each attempt shows how the space of home, with the ideology of patriarchy embedded in it, frustrates the heroine’s efforts to free herself.

This paper investigates Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass Is Singing in terms of the counter-pastoral narrative and the debilitating impact of colonial violence. The novel shows the colonized subalterns’ subjugation and suffering inextricably linked to the depletion of their larger environment. By drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism in analyzing the colonial farm as an enclosed anthropocentric space, this paper examines the ways in which the control of the natural environment, the domination of indigenous people, and the struggle over geographical space influence and mutually reinforce each other. Lessing’s novel as an ecological elegy mourns for the dehumanization of human beings and the deterioration of the natural world, both of which are inseparably intertwined. In exploring the significance of Lessing’s novel as a form of ecological elegy, this study delves into the complex interweaving of nature, socio-sexual politics, and power in Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing and reveals the sinister, invisible operations of hegemonic ideologies behind a seemingly “accidental” incident, the murder of Mary Turner by her black servant Moses.

This paper aims to explore how Doris Lessing in her novel Mara and Dann (1999) embodies the female body of Mara and nonhuman bodies intra-actively co-constituted in the times of severe droughts, inviting the readers to perceive droughts affectively and cognitively, and suggests that like a refugee girl, Mara, human species should be able to identify themselves as migrants or refugees equipped with the decision to leave and the courage to travel for their survival in the era of climate change. Furthermore, it examines the way Mara and Dann envisions the human civilization beyond the Anthropocene and women combining professional expertise and response-ability qualified for leading new communities after the climate change. The novel proposes new heterarchical posthuman communities supported by companionship and caring, resisting the hierarchical society of Eurocentrism in the past. In this novel both human and nonhuman bodies including inorganic bodies such as stones and cities, manifest themselves as material narratives which tell their stories eloquently. Mara and Dann provides extraordinarily vivid descriptions of sufferings caused by drought and thirst, and draws particular attention to the fact that in underdeveloped countries, women and girls suffer disproportionately in severe water shortages. These water-related injustices and discrimination that women face are tacitly reported in the novel. By tracing the growth of Mara as cartographer and storyteller, Lessing implies that the Anthropocene literature is a sort of cartography which helps the readers to imagine the incalculable scales of the Anthropocene through the shift of spatial-temporal scales even though it requires their deciphering the signs on the map.

This paper aims to examine Doris Lessing’s commitment to communism represented in The Golden Notebook along with Lessing’s archive which has been open to the public since her death in 2013. In particular, among Lessing’s five notebooks including “The Free Women,” this paper focuses on the “Black” and “Red” notebooks because these two notebooks reveal Lessing’s personal emotion and political activities in her early days in Southern Rhodesia and then London. Even though The Golden Notebook was published in 1962, Lessing had already insinuated her disillusionment and skepticism about communism, especially by using her letters to three British cadets, John Whitehorn, Coll MacDonald, and Leonard Smith, who stayed in Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s, and her involvement in the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1950s. In this way, it is interesting to see Lessing’s conflict between her commitment to politics and her willingness to write for the autonomy of art. For instance, Anna, Lessing’s double in The Golden Notebook, is reminded of her experiences at the Mashopi Hotel in Southern Rhodesia with comrades who counteract their belief about the colour bar. Later in London, Anna encounters cynicism and contempt from the core members of the Party, which leads Anna to decide to leave the Party. In follow-up research where I try to highlight Lessing’s commitment to the autonomy of art, I will utilize her two biographies, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, as well as her archives, to deepen our understanding of her early days and related works as a humanist.

본 논문에서는 도리스 레싱의 「낙원에 뜬 신의 눈」에 재현된 전후 공산주의와 연관한 레싱의 글쓰기 정치학을 살펴보고자 한다. 레싱의 아카이브에 따르면, 사회를 개혁할 수 있는 수단으로 보았던 공산주의에 대한 믿음이 두 번의 세계대전을 거치며 흔들리기 시작했음이 드러난다. 1950년대 초 독일 방문과 1952년 소련 방문에 대한 그녀의 소감을 밝힌 자료는 그러한 공산주의에 대한 열성이 스러지기 시작했음이 감지된다. 또한 지인이나 주변의 작가들과 주고받은 편지에서도 공산주의 활동과 자신의 글쓰기를 구분하고 있음이 나타난다. 따라서 레싱의 아카이브를 중심으로 「낙원에 뜬 신의 눈」에 구현된 독일 의사들이 보여주는 체제에 대한 종교적 무아지경 상태를 고찰하는 작업은 레싱의 글쓰기 정치학을 이해하는 데 유용할 것이다.

This paper examines Doris Lessing’s politics of writing related to her Communism represented in her post-war writing of “The Eye of God in Paradise.” According to Lessing’s archives, Lessing’s belief that Communism can change existing society begins to be shaken after the two World Wars. In her personal records, however, she reveals her complicated disappointment about Communism after visiting Germany in the early 1950s and then Russia (then the USSR) in 1952. In addition, her letters with acquaintances and writers show that she distinguishes her writing from her political commitment. With this, to consider German doctors’ religious ecstasy in “The Eye of God in Paradise” will be useful in understanding Lessing’s perspective of Communism related to her politics of writing.

This paper aims to re-consider Doris Lessing’s politics of writing after some relevant British archives of her letters have been open to Lessingians and scholars. This initiative is correlated to the international conference with the title of ‘Doris Lessing at 100: The Writer’s Quest’ hosted by the University of East Anglia in England in 2019. In particular, Matthew Taunton, Nonia Williams, Henry Stead, Pamela Thurschwell, and James Arnett contribute to activating discussion about Lessing’s letters and her approaches toward Communism and anti-Communism that are likely to affect her writing. According to the letters, it seems that Lessing already had doubts about Communism before moving to England in 1949, but she joined the Community Party of Great Britain in 1952. Nevertheless, this paper suggests that Lessing is not committed to the party activity of CPGB in the way a believer complies with religious doctrines in a trance. Instead, the letters show that from her early political experience, she is a skeptical individual who trains or develops her writing with her eyes open to Communism. Through a training in skepticism, she attempts to investigate “the individual conscience in its relations with the collective” as represented in her essay, “The Small Personal Voice.” For her main theme, she emphasizes that a writer must take responsibility for other human beings by sharing certain values in their works. With this, this paper follows her argument that a novelist should never be involved in any party policy, and that the novelist should talk in a small personal voice while asserting artistic autonomy.