Doris Lessing's subject (Zimbabwe)

Readers and reviewers have always experienced a love-hate relationship with Doris Lessing's characters. Praised and derided, condoned and condemned, her vivid women and men have stormed their language-mediated way from the South African "outback" to the far corners of uncharted galaxies. These same figures have also been identified with their author's many and varied enthusiasms, held up as examples of (or traitors to) Communist commitment and sexual equality, twentieth-century angst and Sufi serenity.; Critics, however, have made little attempt either to place Lessing's protagonists in a narrative continuum or to determine the techniques she so skilfully employs to "flesh out" her ideas and ideals. Although she has never claimed loyalty to any school or theory, her characters reflect the twentieth-century controversy that has raged around the concept of the "S/subject" as scholars and artists have attempted to reconfirm (or at least redefine) humanity's position in a world seemingly devoid of both philosophical and verbal authority. Their discussions have also been closely related to changing literary trends and Lessing's stylistic development mirrors the fall and rise of realism, modernism, and the often-contradictory methods and motives espoused by the postmodernists, in particular their concern with the complex relationship of the subject, power, and language.; This study places Lessing's protagonists in the context of these subjective and stylistic concerns. Following a summary review of Lessing criticisms and controversies, Chapter One examines modernism's irrational assault upon both author and character in The Grass Is Singing, an attack that impelled Lessing's realistic retreat in "The Children of Violence" and Golden Notebook. It was only after the "transforming" conclusion of The Four-Gated City that she finally rejected mimetic restrictions for Charles Watkins' modernist delirium in Briefing for a Descent into Hell (Chapter Two) and Kate Brown's search for Lacanian "significance" in The Summer Before the Dark (Chapter Three). She then ventured into the alien societies of Memoirs of a Survivor and The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Chapter Four), where her postmodern protagonists struggle to escape depersonalizing oppressions of both word and world. Returning to twentieth-century London in The Diaries of Jane Somers and The Good Terrorist (Chapter Five), Lessing continued her increasingly dark examination of language's subjective influence as Janna and Alice both succumb to verbal repression in the parodic contexts of Harlequin romance and revolutionary thriller. The final chapter draws conclusions about the position of each novel in Lessing's narrative and "subjective" development.