Between private and public space: The problem of writing personal history in the novels of Lessing, Lawrence, Joyce and Fowles

This dissertation shows how Doris Lessing, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce and John Fowles write personal history in cultures that have seen a vast rethinking of theories of history and personality. After problematic encounters with humanism, individualism, identity theory and totality; each of these novelists evolves an experimental form for writing personal history.; Lawrence is deeply tied to individualism, yet writing fiction that progressively challenges individualist precepts as his novels develop. Joyce confronts traditional concepts of identity at levels that afford rich historical, narrative, and psychological readings. Lessing's struggles with pre-twentieth century narrative technique revolves around her preoccupation with humanism. As a thinker trying to evolve a world view beyond Marxist humanism, Lessing journeys from postmodern philosophy to Sufism, Laingian psychology, and science fiction. She ultimately recreates humanism in ways that are appropriate for reflecting twentieth century experience. Fowles is haunted by the need for totality, which is to say, a totalizing perspective from which to reflect on the experiences of an individual life and see them in a meaningful whole. The impossibility of finding a totalizing view governs Fowles's transition to experimental fiction and his ultimate embrace of existential humanism at the close of Daniel Martin.; These four novelists each write a conventional tale of personal development early in their careers, only to soon after each produce a complex, experimental novel chronicling subjective formation. This dissertation investigates their general transition from history to mythic narrative frameworks for interpreting the meaning of personal experience. Countering critical perceptions that find these authors escaping from history into myth and fantasy, I suggest that each of them attempts to reconceptualize the nature of historical understanding, and that in so doing, each broadens critical concepts of how personal growth and formation can be represented in narrative. Drawing on Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and hermeneutic arguments, I argue that Lessing, Lawrence, Joyce, and Fowles subvert traditional dichotomies separating myth and history to represent a self or subject existing in interrelationship with the historical world.