A Study Of The Anti-feminist Ideas In Lessing's Works

Doris Lessing,the grandmother in British literary world,who won Nobel prize for literature in 2007 owing to her representative work The Golden Notebook,has been hailed as the greatest female writer after Virginia Woolf.No sooner had The Golden Notebook been published in 1962 than it was regarded as “the bible of feminists”.Meanwhile,Lessing has also been considered as a vanguard and idol of feminism.According to the researches on Lessing and her works at home and abroad,the researchers mostly adopt the feminist theory to analyze her works.Lessing has been treated as a banner of the feminist movement by feminists,so her works are mostly deemed as the feminist writing.However,taking the feminist movement as a waste of energy,Lessing has repeatedly refuted and criticized feminism and refused to be labeled as the representative of the feminist movement in many interviews.By close reading of Lessing's The Golden Notebook and other masterpieces,this thesis explores Lessing's anti-feminist ideas from four aspects: her contempt toward feminist culture,her irony of political fanaticism in women's liberation,her refusal to advocate sexual freedom in emancipation of women,her promotion for the harmonious interdependence and coexistence between the male and the female.The study shows that Lessing is a non-feminist who writes about the harmonious coexistence and cooperation of men and women.Lessing denies the radical and exclusive political behaviors of the feminist movement.She bitterly satirizes some feminists' deeds in the novels.For instances,feminists trend toward a politicization and left-wing agenda in feminist movement,despising stay-at-home motherhood,looking down upon any non-leftist persons etc.By describing the female characters who pursue sexual freedom but eventually suffer the immense physical and mental agony and even entrap themselves in the verge of mental breakdown,Lessing criticizes the shortsightedness and the narrow target of radical feminists.Besides,through citing examples to illustrate how men and women develop the harmonious relationship and work into collaboration to achieve genuine communication in the novels,Lessing's anti-feminist ideas are gradually manifested.She claims the complementary cooperation,interdependence and harmonious coexistence between male and female by mutually reinforcing and highlighting their own gender advantages.