The Growth Of Matha

Doris Lessing is a remarkable and prolific woman writer in the twentieth-century English literature. Her representative work—Children of Violence—has been enjoying enormous popularity since its publication. On the whole, most critics study Lessing's works mainly from the angles of feminism, sufism, Marxism, colonialism, existentialism, etc. Few researches pay attention to Children of Violence from the angle of the female Bildungsroman. The present thesis sees the novel series as an organic whole and intends to explore how the heroine achieves self-realization and reaches maturity from the angle of the female Bildungsroman.The Bildungsroman is a literary genre that describes the growth of the protagonists from adolescence to maturity. The female Bildungsroman is the sub-genre of the traditional Bildungsrornan. Thus it shares most of the characteristics of the traditional Bildungsroman. The female Bildungsroman also has its own unique characteristics. Instead of the socially sanctioned Bildungsroman narrative, women's novels of development explore the far more limited options open to marginal female figures whose passage to maturity and social acceptance are dislocated and obstructed. One critic contends that in the twentieth century-the novel of development is the most salient genre for the literature of social outsiders, primarily women or minority groups. Thus, it is appropriate for Lessing to employ the genre of the Bildungsroman to depict her heroine in Children of Violence.Lessing tells the story of Martha's growth based on the conflict of African culture and European culture. This novel reveals the white girl Martha's deep love for Africa, alienation from her living environment, her indignation and helplessness confronting the cruel colonial rule over the Africans, her sympathy for the colonized, and also her perplexity of"self", her rebellion against the conventions that obstuct the development of her self, her courage of questing for a "home" and self, her longing for self-identity and happiness.Through analysis of Children of Violence, this thesis ams to argue that through the illustration of the motive of Martha's growth to seek identity and quest for a utopian home and the important roles that the mentors play in the growth of Martha, Lessing succeeds in depicting Martha's difficult odyssey to maturity.First of all, according to the general adolescent theory, this thesis analyzes the motive of adolescents' Bildung. The young adolescents are eager for maturation and an identity. As a colonial white living in South Africa, alienated from her living environment, Martha not only wants an identity but also longs for a home. The novel follows the mode of the traditional Bildungsroman. Martha leaves home at the age of fourteen running away from the country to the city. In the city, with more and more knowledge about society, Martha loses innocence. After her marriage, Martha finishes her adolescence.Then, the thesis analyzes Martha's rebellion against wifehood and motherhood. After marriage, Martha has undertaken to play a secondary and dependent role as a wife and a mother, therefore she enters the stage of womanhood, which is the stage of Bildung unique to the female Bildungsroman. Martha feels unable to break free of this dependency to create her own role and find her own identity. Rebelling against the conventional family life and the demands of colonial bourgeois society imposed on women, Martha abandons the conventional female role and hope to find her own identity and her freedom in politics. In the modern female Bildungsroman, women rebels not only in domestic family but also in society, which is different from the former Bildungsroman.However, though Martha abandons her family for politics, her dream of finding her utopian home and her identity in politics has been disillusioned, for the fact that the political groups, flooded with racism, sexism, and classism, are not her utopian classless and equalitarian society. England becomes symbolic for her of a place where racial, sexual, and class tensions are miraculously absent, and where she will feel naturally "at home", not as an exile as in Zambesia society. Thus she leaves for England and tries to find her identity and her utopian home.Finally, after an epiphany, Martha reaches maturity. Through her insistent spiritual exploration, Martha realizes that her searches for someone or some place that will provide her with the center for her identity are misguided. The "home" she finds is a stage in her personal development, unconnected to her advocacy for a collective utopia. She learns that her identity is constantly being re-invented; because of its being in flux and process, her quest for self-definition will never be completed. Identity cannot be fixed and static. It will be different with the change of time and place.Furthermore, the roles that the mentors play in Martha's Bildung mustn't be ignored.. The mentor is an important characteristic of the Bildungsroman. During the course of observing the social roles of their mentors, the protagonists gradually establish their own roles and make themselves clear about the direction of life. In Children of violence, Martha is given several mentors. Each of them provides important messages for Martha's identity-seeking.From the above analysis, this thesis concludes that Doris Lessing has achieved her aim of writing because Martha reaches maturity and also Children of Violence has widened the horizon and the theme of the Bildungsroman. As the combination of the three marginal characters of female, adolescent and the descendant of migrants, Martha's growth is representative of her time and the development of social outsiders. The adolescents, who have been influenced by two cultures, want to be identified by the dorminant power and find a "home". However, in a society divided by race, class and gender, what they have confronted is indifference, alienation and injustice. Thus, it is a great challenge for all the descendants of emigrants to find the right way to develop in a different culture.