TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH DISORDER: A STUDY OF THE FICTION OF DORIS LESSING

This thesis explores the way that Doris Lessing depicts the colonial order in her fiction by juxtaposing a discussion of her portrayal of colonialism with an examination of several descriptive analyses of the colonial situation and with a summary of Rhodesia's development as a colony. Looking at her work in the light of these socio-political and historical materials reveals that Lessing in her portrayal of colonialism concentrates on the way authoritarian bonds are forged and maintained. Her fictions represent family situations involving whites and African servants where relations based on domination comes to seem normal, ordinary and inevitable. Racial and sexual oppression reinforce and support one another, combining to form a peculiar form of inconsistent paternalism which stultifies whites and undermines African resistance. Within her work as a whole, Lessing's portrayal of colonialism is important not only because it recreates a vivid sense of a particular historical situation, but also because it represents a typical example of a complex authoritarian system. Lessing is preoccupied with revealing both the tenacity of the social order, which persists because its assumptions are internalized and form the individual consciousness, and the efforts of individuals to transcend society's constraints. Lessing has her characters explore the two modes of human liberation offered in the twentieth century: socialism and psychoanalysis therapy. In the Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook we see the failure of political organizations whose aim is to revolutionize society and free the human spirit. These groups take account only of political and economic oppression and ignore the domain of human subjectivity. However, institutionalized psychotherapy also fails in her novels, for it is uncritical of the system into which it attempts to reintegrate individuals, and with its narrow, ideological view of sanity, it repressively isolates and destroys those who refuse to accept its norms. In both these works Lessing suggests that a complete recovery of the irrational elements of the human mind which are repressed in a civilization dominated by instrumental reason is both possible and necessary. Her work does not merely exalt the irrational, however, for she structures her novels dialectically. The open-ended form of her more ambitious fiction provokes the reader to an imaginative response which takes him beyond the text, even beyond actuality, to consider alternative social possibilities.