AGAINST OCCUPANCY:
MARTHA QUEST’S MULTIPLE FORMS OF RESISTANCE
IN DORIS LESSING’S CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE
By
Brea Michelle Thomas
Submitted to the
Faculty o f the College of the Arts and Sciences
of American University
in Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for the Degree of
Master o f Arts
In
Literature
Chair:
Roberta Rubenstein
Marianne Noble
5^ — •• Dean
Date
2005
American University
Washington, D.C. 20016 8005
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1425718
INFORMATION TO USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.
® UMI
UMI Microform 1425718 Copyright 2005 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ©COPYRIGHT
By
Brea Michelle Thomas
2005
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. To God, my Family, Jared, and ever-faithfiil Friends
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. AGAINST OCCUPANCY: MARTHA QUEST’S MULTIPLE FORMS OF RESISTANCE
IN DORIS LESSING’S CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE
By
Brea Michelle Thomas
ABSTRACT
From the onset of the Children o f Violence series, Martha Quest is mobile; she wanders from home,
meanders among racially and politically charged landscapes, sneaks into town, and visits friends’ homes—
despite the absence o f parental consent. Her earliest mission becomes defiance against her parents and
resistance against conventional notions o f womanhood. Interested in establishing a new identity, Martha
quests for freedom. Her relationships, professions, residences, and female biology threaten to “occupy”
her; and in the series, she fights against many “isms”— racism, sexism, agism and classism. I maintain that
she resists these various forms of “occupancy” in order to radically reshape herself in liberating terms.
Ultimately, I contend that she transcends restrictive roles and creates a progressive model of intersubjective
female identity.
ii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Everlasting gratitude to American University for the opportunity; to my primary advisor,
Roberta Rubenstein, for the hours, the wisdom, the patience, and the positive model of
womanhood she offers; to my secondary advisor, Marianne Noble, for always saying, in
poetic and brazen words, that which my soul needs to hear; to my mentors Keith Leonard
and Mari Evans, and the Root they eternally manifest.
iii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CONTENTS
ABSTRACT...... ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... iii
INTRODUCTION...... 1
Chapter
1. AGAINST FAMILIAL OCCUPANCY...... 9
2. AGAINST PROFESSIONAL OCCUPANCY...... 18
3. AGAINST MATERNAL OCCUPANCY...... 37
4. AGAINST SEXUAL OCCUPANCY ...... 53
5. AGAINST RESIDENTIAL OCCUPANCY ...... 85
6. AGAINST SELF OCCUPANCY...... 124
7. CONCLUSION...... 143
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 146
iv
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION
Within the canon of women’s literature, Doris Lessing has developed her own
canon, documenting at least three generations of female experience as well as capturing
the multitudinous intricacies and nuances of the female psyche and Woman’s emotional
and physical components. With a distinctive authorial voice that interrogates the
intersection between the objective truth and the subjective individual experience, she
wrestles with the disparities between tradition and innovation in women’s lives as well as
in literary art. In Children o f Violence, she advocates for an encompassing notion of
female experience. The protagonist, Martha Quest, must “go through” a process of self-
growth and identity formation that involves adopting, then shedding, archaic models of
womanhood. Articulating, in this sense, what Mary Wollstonecraft defended as the
“rights of woman” to the entirety of human experience, Lessing in this five volume series
entertains the possibility of infinite possibilities and personal liberation.
The scholar who attempts to introduce Doris Lessing and her pentalogy, Children
o f Violence, faces a daunting task as Lessing, with her authorial dexterity and ideological
extraordinariness, truly requires more than a mere biographical sketch or a succinct
summation of the series. Indeed, while focusing specifically on her fiction, one
recognizes the degree of difficulty that such focus requires, for the wealth and range of
her work are impressively immense and masterful. Coupled with her noteworthy
1
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2
biography and the multitudinous themes of her work, the task of theorizing about
Lessing’s provocative and revolutionary fiction is daunting. Yet the patient and astute
reader-critic is undoubtedly rewarded by Lessing’s inimitable and captivating fiction, as
well as allured by the sheer complexity of the ideas she poses. In questing for
overarching meanings, symbols, and themes in her work, a reader will find that Lessing
has a quest of her own: to challenge conventional narrative techniques and aesthetics of
fiction.
By writing across the spectrum of literary genres, including fiction,
autobiography, nonfiction, drama, poetry, and science fiction, Lessing has resisted and
continues to resist codification as a two-dimensional artist. A sampling of her work leads
one to conclude that she is prolific as well as expansive; in her fiction alone, one finds
free women, abnormal children, sadistic lovers, desperate housewives, psychic and
telepathic communicants, and even felines. Moreover, Lessing’s fiction (and specifically
Children o f Violence) explicitly embraces historical, social, political, psychoanalytic,
philosophical, and gender issues, as well as offers nuanced portrayals of introspective
individuals and various versions of community (i.e. racial, familial, Communist, reading
circles). As Roberta Rubenstein suggests, “the broad range of issues that occupy the
center of her canon demands that she be addressed critically as one of the significant
writers of this [twentieth] century.”1
1 Roberta Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (Urbana and Chicago: University o f Illinois Press, 1979), 3.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3
In terms of her biography, Lessing scholars have found significant and plentiful
resonances between her real life and her realist-tumed-fantastic works. Bom of English
parents and raised in rural Southern Rhodesia, she—like Martha Quest, the protagonist of
Children o f Violence—has pursued the quest for solidarity and home which has led her to
England (her current home), through two marriages and subsequent divorces, through
Leftist and Communist Party politics, and into Sufi mysticism. Prizing her own steadfast
commitment to experimental living, she says in an interview with Roy Newquist,
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.2
Lessing’s controversial reception in academia has resulted, in part, from comments like
the aforementioned where the author exhibits disregard for reader responses and the
literary establishment.
As a result of her experimental aesthetics and embrace of atypical lifestyles,
Lessing has elicited a wide-range of scholarly attention, from those who claim “Lessing
changed my life”3 to those who disagree with her unconventional ideas or aesthetics.
Indeed, by refusing to resign to popular stylistic techniques and “politically correct”
themes, as well as by voicing a degree of contempt for academia, Lessing and her fiction
2 RoyNewquist, Counterpoint, “Doris Lessing” (New York: Rand McKnally & Company, 1964), 416. 3 Claire Sprague (quoting Virginia Tiger), introduction to In Pursuit o f Doris Lessing (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 9.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4
have elicited a wide-range of responses—from absolute deference to scathing criticism—
from reviewers and critics.
Specifically, Children o f Violence has generated diverse scholarship; it has been
well-received as Lessing’s “famous pentalogy”4 as well as considered “parochial”5 in
comparison with some of her other works, notably The Golden Notebook. While scholars
have generally admired the series as a whole, some have argued for the particular failures
of the novel series in several ways: as a failed Bildungsroman6, as a failed quest for
freedom 7 , as an unbalanced unit with unremarkable early volumes and8 visionary final
novels.9 In fact, scholars have frequently highlighted the differences among the novels,
even juxtaposed the novels—in terms of narrative and formal strengths-—against each
other. The fact that there is significantly less scholarship on Children o f Violence,
compared to Lessing’s most notable work, The Golden Notebook, confirms that the task
of assembling a coherent analysis of such a diverse series has been daunting for many
scholars, and perhaps even neglected, as many have chosen to examine Lessing’s
autonomous works and/or individual novels within the Children o f Violence series.
While this is understandable, the series maintains preeminence in Lessing’s canon as the
■ 4 Bonnie St. Andrews, “Love and Aging: Lessing and the Female Exile,” inForbidden Fruit: On the Relationship Between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Selma Lagerlof, Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood (New York: The Whitston Publishing Group, 1986), 111. 5 Molly Hite (quoting Loma Sage), The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 59. 6 Ellen Cronan Rose, The Tree Outside the Window: Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence (New Hampshire: University Press o f New England, 1976), 67. 7 Frederick Karl, “Doris Lessing in the Sixties: The Anatomy of Melancholy” inContemporary Women Novelists, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1977), 65. 8 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 34. 9 Ibid.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5
quintessential work of her career; as a collection of five novels, the series covers almost a
century of volatile world history, encompasses her uniquely personal and noteworthy
ideas, and displays authorial dedication, as it required a substantial amount of time (1952
to 1969) for the author to complete. Consequently, it seems fitting that theorizing about
the series has been diverse and divergent, in terms of angles explored in critical
scholarship. It is an unmistakably monumental work by a contemporary and prophetic
author that requires further critical attention.
When scholars have examined Children o f Violence as a multi-volume unit, they
have taken particular interest in Martha Quest’s peculiar pathology: her psychological
handicaps,10 her lapses into social conformity, her acquiescence to societal psychosis and
fragmentation, and her sense of inner imprisonment. Unable to fully distinguish between
Lessing’s biography and fiction—which are inevitably intertwined but nonetheless
distinguishable and separate—certain scholars, like Frederick R. Karl, have questioned
Lessing’s ability to craft fiction and her use of it to settle personal problems. ’11 Such
readings are disconcerting because they challenge the usefulness of fictitious creation that
deals with what Lessing calls “our own lives,”12 thereby dissuading and distracting
readers from the contemporary relevance and imaginative vivacity of Lessing’s works.
In agreement with Rubenstein, who says, “Despite the resemblances between life and
work, Lessing’s canon ultimately must be judged not as disguised or transformed
10 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 2. 11 Karl, “Doris Lessing in the Sixties,” 74. 12 Rubenstein (quoting Lessing), The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 5.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6
biography but as imaginative literature in its own right,”131 believe this is especially true
of Children o f Violence. The novels are deeply moving and textually layered; like
diamond mines, they are laden with ideological and psychological gems—some of which
have been excavated and some which remain untouched in critical scholarship. Despite
the historicizing of socio-political issues within the novels that date them as twentieth-
century concerns, the series explores pertinent issues of individuality, female identity,
and gender relations that permeate century and decade lines and remain relevant to
twenty-first century discourse. In this regard, Martha Quest remains identifiable to
contemporary readers and scholarship as a modem protagonist who struggles against
recognizable, post-modem issues such as the threat of violence, the horrors of war, and
the numerous “isms” that plague societies, such as classism, racism, and sexism.
Concerning the critical scholarship on Children o f Violence, most scholars have
acknowledged at least some of Martha Quest’s strengths. Yet many choose to view the
protagonist in terms of her sometimes futile attempts at self-assertion as well as what they
regard as her unrealized personal potential. While I think these differing perspectives
have validity and are astute, in part, based on the texts—the overwhelming sense of
postmodern pessimism, the apocalyptic finale in The Four-Gated City, and even Martha
Quest’s self-hatred and Lessing’s own self-criticism—some scholars have emphasized
the protagonist’s shortcomings at the expense of noticing and theorizing about her
strengths. It is important to remember Lessing’s commitment to realism and to note her
13 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 4-5.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7
use of water imagery as a potential symbol for Martha’s behavior in Children of
Violence. While some scholars have noted the water imagery in The Four-Gated City
particularly, I find it useful to view Martha Quest as analogous to the tide—ebbing and
flowing, advancing and receding. Indeed, Martha has conflicting tendencies—force and
frailty, resilience and resignation—and, unfortunately, scholars have too often
undervalued the protagonist’s aptitude in order to focus on her regressive behavior. This
deprives Martha of the holistic characterization that I believe Lessing intended. Thus, by
exploring Martha Quest’s character from an opposing vantage point, I hope to bring
balance to the scholarly discourse by noticing her determined, conscientious resistance to
oppression which includes, but is not defeated by, her detours into conformist traps.
Whereas Ellen Cronan Rose views the novels in terms of Martha’s evolutionary progress
rather than her revolutionary aspirations, I hope to do the contrary; there is more that is
revolutionary in Martha, and in the novel series, than scholars have given credit for.
In an effort to uncover Martha’s heroism that culminates in the final volume, as
well as to make sense of the Bildungsroman14 function of the series, I plan to trace the
pattern of Martha’s resistance to professional, residential, relational and sexual
possession throughout the five novels. As the aforementioned scholars suggest, Martha
does succumb, at times, to conventional female roles. Yet she also resigns from these
roles after taking them, and her earliest and most consistent assertion of selfhood is
toward freedom and autonomy—a position that, in my opinion, deserves more attention.
14 Doris Lessing, “Author’s Notes” in The Four-Gated City, Bantam edition, fourth printing, Children of Violence series, fifth volume (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8
Echoing Rubenstein, Ronnie St. Andrews asserts that Children o f Violence examines
“major social forces of our century.. .with true epic reach,”15 and I agree; the series is
significant for its examination of the ways in which destructive patterns and social
impulses seep into and shape individual consciousness. This, in part, is what Martha
Quest struggles against—social and self-destruction—while also aspiring to resist “true
womanhood” conventions and conformist pressures.
I contend that Martha Quest resists “occupancy”: she resists being taken over and
negatively consumed by professions, residences, and relationships that threaten to stifle
her individuality and personal agency. I use the term “occupancy” because it implies
tenancy, custody, restriction, and possession, all of which Martha despises and associates
with traditional scripts that bind women, including herself at times, to convention. I also
invoke the word as a synonym of colonization and sexism; in addition to the
aforementioned meanings, “occupancy” signifies militarism and chauvinism—both of
which Martha detests and rejects. Against the backdrop of war, she realizes the
extraordinary difficulty of remaining afloat and, despite almost drowning in conventional
martyrdom, she demonstrates a preference for swimming not treading, for questioning,
not facilitating, violence. Fighting to survive the abysmal state of war, post-war, and
future-war that engulfs most of her peers, she looks for liberation from the many forms of
“occupancy” that involve subjugation and violence.
15 St. Andrews, “Love and Aging: Lessing and the Female Exile,” 111.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER!
AGAINST FAMILIAL OCCUPANCY
Idealizing her literature that is “separate and self-contained, a world in itself,”1
young Martha Quest aspires to fortify herself with ideological buttresses against endemic
war and the socially dysfunctional conditions that plague her hometown in Zambesia, a
fictionalized version of Salisbury, South Africa. With “the French Revolution for a
father and the Russian Revolution for a mother,”2 Martha inherits a reality that, unlike the
Romantic literature she reads, is steeped in violence. Both parents, Frank and May
Quest, serve in the “Great Unmentionable” of World War I, making Martha the
daughter—literally and symbolically—of early twentieth-century violence. At fifteen
years of age, she suffers from the threat of external violence, while an unnamed,
menacing social undertow threatens to drown her as she singularly tries to swim
upstream—against the conventional grain—toward freedom and idyllic conditions of
social peace and human solidarity. Beneath the facade of social order perpetuated, in
part, by her parents as well as by the older generation and white ruling class of Zambesia,
an undercurrent of hatred, fatalism and destructive impulses assails Martha’s youthful
consciousness. The omniscient narrator offers readers a glimpse of Martha’s world from
'Doris Lessing, Martha Quest, HaiperPerennial edition, Children of Violence series, first volume (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 272. 2 Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage, HarperPerennial edition, Children o f Violence series, second volume (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 447.
9
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 10
the perspective of her youthful yet observant eyes:
Each group, community, clan, colour, strove and fought away from the other, in a sickness of dissolution; it was as if the principle of separate ness was bred from the very soil, the sky, the driving sun...[as if] one might never, not for a moment, forget the inhuman, relentless struggle of soil and water and light, bred a fever of self-assertion in its children like a band of explorers lost in a desert, quarrelling in an ecstasy of fear over their direction. ...Martha could feel the striving forces in her own substance: the effort of imagination needed to destroy the words black, white, nation, race, exhausted her, her head ached and her flesh was heavy on her bones. 1 R
Martha, an heir to the Romantic literary tradition, fights with a combination of bookish
idealism and acquiescent futility throughout her life. But she feels perpetually ill-
equipped to defeat such historically and socially insidious and pervasive forces, and often
feels victimized by the “ancient roles”19 of oppressive convention. With few strategies of
self-defense against the modem predicament, she finds herself pummeled by, as well as
prone to violence, irresponsibility, racism, and classism despite her distinctive desire for
an “altogether new life”20 and her imaginative conceptualization of an “ideal city”21 that
would foster social harmony.
In addition to escapist daydreaming about a harmonious environment, Martha
defines herself against her parents who embody, in her estimation, everything antithetical
to her formulation of happiness. Frank and May Quest, British colonists, have personal
histories and experiences that reflect traumatic youth, professional hardships as soldier
18 Lessing, Martha Quest, 68. 19 Ibid., 97. 20 Ibid., 110. 21 Ibid., 21.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 11
and nurse, and marital pity. Bequeathed legacies of unhappiness and martyrdom by her
parents, Martha rejects them in order to claim a different, more optimistic future for
herself. This distancing strategy and establishment of autonomy is Martha’s means of
guarding herself against the intrusive and negative aspects of society which are reflected
in her parents’ controlling actions, failed professions, passionless marriage, and
unsatisfactory residence in the veld. By relinquishing her claims to them as parental
models and figures of emulation, Martha aligns herself with the Romantic tradition,
seeking transcendent fulfillment in nature, solitude, and the imagination.
This leads her to reject her parents wholeheartedly and resist what I term “familial
occupancy.” While she eventually becomes a Communist and therefore, subscribes to the
Party’s ideological stance against the family unit on the basis that it is tyrannical, even
before that time Martha articulates strong distaste for the pretense of conventional family
as a teenager who feels oppressed by the dynamics of her home life. She vacates her
parents’ home as well as rejects their conventional methods of living. Since the family,
in her view, is an abominable institution that inflicts emotional violence on children as
well as society and humanity at large, Martha is driven to repudiate it—despite the fact
that she eventually becomes a wife and a mother herself. Unwilling to perpetuate the
same structure that drives her to intense anger, antagonism, and disgust, she wishes for
freedom as well as a grander notion of home since, for her, the hut on the veld is never a
warm, comforting space. Rather, the Quest home is full of contention, primarily between
Martha and her mother, concerning the subject of Martha’s gender and sexuality.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 12
Rejecting her family members as well as their home, Martha struggles against them
because they represent key ideologies that she despises: Victorianism, conservatism,
colonialism, and racism. Moreover, she rejects identifying with the “oppressor” identity.
Like the Africans she eventually defends as a member of the Communist Party in A
Ripple from the Storm,22 she feels oppressed by her parents whom she considers to be
members of the ruling white minority population of Zambesia.
Insensitive to issues of freedom, the Quests adhere to the colonial mindset and
expect subservience from Martha as well as their African servants. Unsuspecting of her
hatred of family life and unwilling to allow her certain freedoms such as control of her
clothing, possession of her own money, and social interactions with friends of different
religious, cultural, political and economic beliefs, they ultimately drive Martha to
obstinate rebellion because she feels restricted and monopolized by them. In addition to
imaginative daydreaming, Martha prematurely embraces adulthood as a means of
escaping familial tyranny. With an intellectual background in Romanticism and
American notions of democracy learned from books, Martha desires freedom but her
pleas for autonomy and independence fall on deaf, colonial ears. Viewing herself as an
i i “exile,” Martha feels displaced within her parents’ home based on her ideological
differences, which leads her to impulsively move from the veld to a fictionalized city
modeled after Salisbury, Rhodesia, at the age of seventeen. But her means of extricating
22 Doris Lessing, A Ripple from the Storm, HarperPerennial edition, Children o f Violence series, third volume (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995). 23 Lessing, Martha Quest, 273.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 13
herself from her parents’ authority, a brief note with instructions for them to send her
things,24 infuriates May Quest, who consequently holds onto her daughter whom she
presumes to be too young to enter the adult world. Thus, while Martha seeks refuge from
the face-to-face antagonism and circuitous discussions of familial love and fighting that
plague her childhood and patience, her rebelliousness incites anger and criticism from her
parents and she has a difficult time resisting familial (parental) occupancy.
By inhabiting Martha’s consciousness and life in primary, perplexing and
destructive ways over the course of her life, her parents are the first to implant seeds of
conflict within Martha. Indeed, conflict manifests repeatedly as she contradictorily seeks
control of her life (learned from her mother) and cedes control to others (much as Mr.
Quest does). In this regard, Martha learns to be passive aggressive; like the tide that ebbs
and flows, she advances and recedes in life, carving a unique and rebellious existence for
herself but also falling into conventional traps despite her will to do otherwise. Her
choices reflect the warring of two orientations: domination and submission, activism and
pacifism; the two personalities of her parents “take over” and compete for precedence in
Martha’s consciousness. At this early age, Martha aspires to possess herself by asserting
her voice in opposition to her parents, in addition to moving from her family home. In
this regard, Martha adheres to a concept of self-determinism instead of the fatalism of her
parents. She becomes defensive and resists being “occupied” or constrained by them;
ideologically, she goes to war.
24 Lessing, Martha Quest, 110.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 14
I use such language, steeped in notions of violence, because of the unmistakable
undercurrent of violence in all of the novels, evoked by the title, Children o f Violence.
Right from the beginning of the series, Lessing portrays conflict, warring parties, enraged
and violent participants. With a legacy of violence, it is no wonder that young Martha
adamantly internalizes the mindset of a soldier despite the quietness of the rural
landscape around her. Her sense of being a fighter pervades all notions she has of
herself; the ini tial pages of Martha Quest are saturated with images of teenage
despondency, insecurity, and rebellion. Determined to be a fighter, Martha passionately
resists but often suffers from a wavering sense of purpose and an ambiguous source of
antagonism: “She was facing, with dubious confidence, what she knew would be a long
fight. She was saying to herself, I w on’t give in.I won ;’t though it would have been hard
for her to define what it was she fought.”25 Indeed, at various times throughout Martha’s
life, she contests without knowing exactly whom or what she is opposing. She feels
oppressed by factors (i.e. gender discrimination, social determinism, racism) which she
leams are difficult to refute by solitary individuals and demand, if they are to be changed,
the efforts and attention of collective groups. Thus, while she begins her journey for
autonomy and personal freedom with the adolescent mindset of self-aggrandizement and
egotism learned from the solitary heroes of literature, Martha eventually realizes that one
can find great agency in collective action as well. Part of the Bildungsroman framework
of the pentalogy involves Martha’s “education”—her increasing understanding of
25 Lessing, Martha Quest, 32 (emphasis mine).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15
interpersonal relationships and the ways in which not all of them, despite her familial
upbringing, have to be contentious.
But tension characterizes the majority of Martha’s relationships from childhood to
adulthood. In writing Children o f Violence, Lessing explains that she wanted to explore
“the individual conscience in its relation to the collective.”26 Implicit in this statement, it
seems, is Lessing’s interrogation of the necessity for balance between individualism and
collectivism, between autonomy and interpersonal relationships. Young Martha finds
herself looking for balance in literature as well as in the imaginative realm of personal
experience; she finds it difficult to achieve peace within her self as well as within society
at large. Somewhat dramatically, Martha comes to view herself as a captive prisoner in
her parents’ home and, while she ultimately moves away from the home in the veld, she
never entirely divests herself of the contempt she feels for adults shaped by the values of
colonialism. The Quests complain incessantly with their neighbors, the Van Rensbergs,
speaking “nagging phrases” about the government and Africans.
Lessing captures the social schisms between white colonialists and Africans,
adolescents and adults in a manner that historicizes the Children o f Violence and educates
readers who, like Martha, increasingly understand more about the intricate
socioeconomic, cultural and political strife intrinsic to Zambesia as a result of British
colonialism. In this regard, the novel series is informative in terms of teaching the
protagonist as well as the audience; Lessing functions as both author and Sufi teacher.
26 Doris Lessing, A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, edited and introduced by Paul Scblueter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 14.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 16
Relaying wisdom through storytelling, Lessing employs Sufi epigraphs and parables in
the form of a series of stories about Martha’s exploits to acquire knowledge as well as a
superior consciousness. Part of Martha’s qualms about her parents resides in their
inability to engage intellectually with her or challenge their conventional attitudes. As
colonialists, the Quests fear the dissolution of apartheid and desperately attempt to
preserve it with hopes of maintaining their elite social position within the South African
society. Martha notes that her British parents, despite the white, racial “subgroupings
[are] held together only because they [can] say, ‘this is a British country’—held together
by the knowledge of ownership.”27 She, on the other hand, empathizes with the
oppressed, the Jews and Africans, and includes them in her vision of an ideal city in
which “black and white and brown [live] together.”28 Both parents are conservative and
racist; they perpetuate the social norms instead of challenging them, which makes them
prone to repetitive and mundane lives. They are not courageous nor are they
revolutionaries, as Martha desires to be, and this infuriates her to the point of near-hatred:
her “irritation overflowed into a flood of dislike for both her parents. Everything was the
same; intolerable that they should have been saying the same things ever since she could
9Q remember.” Emphatically, Martha detests the static quality that characterizes her
parents’ lives, chaining them to impoverished, war-stricken Zambesia, and therefore, to
her, since she is their child.
27 Lessing, Martha Quest, 68. 28 Ibid, 21. 29 Ibid, 10.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17
Unable to tolerate being a subordinate, Martha makes her autonomy “visible” to
her parents when she leaves their custody for life in the city. In this manner, she resists
“familial occupancy”; by choosing an alternative life specifically contrary to her
upbringing, she disclaims what she considers an inherited legacy of superficiality,
melancholia, and failure. The adamancy of her rebellion suggests, in fact, that Martha
must defend and protect herself against such destructive and potentially devastating
Victorian values. While her parents certainly do not consider themselves her enemies,
they are appalled by Martha’s insolence and antagonism, and they attempt to reprimand
her for what they consider to be her extremist teenage rebellion. Moreover, they
discount her intelligence, which is Martha’s defense against them and the result of
diligent self-study as well as tutelage from friends. This acquired intelligence distances
her from the Quest family home, affording her acute perception of external antagonism as
well as violence within the social environment.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 2
AGAINST PROFESSIONAL OCCUPANCY
Although some scholars have viewed Martha Quest’s character in terms of deficient
initiative,11 view Martha’s approach to employment as another form of resistance: she
resists molding herself to conventional standards related to occupational self-definition as
a means of achieving personal success. With regards to employment, Martha remains
largely remiss; she does not approach employment with the expected levels of
seriousness and commitment that traditionally accompanies professional work. As
Margaret Moan Rowe suggests, Martha “produces nothing”2 and has no desire for a
•5 professional identity. Rather, Lessing explores the notions of “work” as a process of
self-growth and self-actualization that takes precedence over making products. Rowe
explains that, in writing Children o f Violence, Lessing was committed to documenting
Martha’s process of personal development,4 or, to use Lessing’s own words, Martha’s
“curious process toward freedom.”5 Committed to socialist ideas, as a woman in her
twenties young Martha first seeks employment as a legal secretary as a means of
distancing herself from her parents and the veld. As a woman in her forties, she also
1 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 16; St. Andrews, “Love andAging: Lessing and the Female Exile,” 121. 2 Margaret Moan Rowe, Women Writers: Doris Lessing (New York: St. M artin’s Press, 1994), 35. 3 Ibid., 34. 4 Ibid., 35. 5 Ibid., 35.
18
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 19
works as a secretary for author Mark Coldridge, such that she circles back upon her first
occupational experience. Yet as an employee for Cohen and Robinson Legal firm as well
as later for Coldridge, Martha demonstrates a desire to surpass the conventional
limitations prescribed for women in the workforce during those time periods and in those
places. Although Martha works in positions of servitude and assistantship, she
transcends the limitations associated with such positions. For her, unlike other women
before her as well as her own female peers, work becomes synonymous with freedom—
physical as well as ideological. While the term “occupation” traditionally implies a sense
of responsibility, specialization, and compliance to established professional (and usually
patriarchal) rules, Martha takes jobs throughout Children o f Violence series but she
resists having a career and being enslaved to either employment or employers. Work is a
means of furthering her independence and she preserves herself within the work place.
She works for mere subsistence with little effort given to furthering business initiatives.
Rather, her primary interest resides in self-aggrandizement as well as self-edification and
ultimately, humanitarian causes.
By never fully committing to corporate firms or career specialization, Martha
resists “professional occupancy.” She preserves her autonomy within the work
environment and opposes professionalism in several key ways: by investing herself in
independent, academic study as opposed to attending university for formal specialization;
by remaining aloof and semi-committed to office work in order to pursue personal
fulfillment; by opposing jobs that devalue her based on gender biases; and by resisting
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20
professional advancement. This rejection of conventional employment ultimately enables
Martha to gain more than financial independence as a young woman: it allows her to
remain imaginative and uncommitted to the business realm, leaving her intellectually and
physically available for the greater personal causes of her life—independent education,
Communism, spiritual growth.
Reading literature can be considered Martha’s alternative to achieving a vocation
in the business realm. Moreover, her resistance to occupations can be viewed in terms of
her adolescent obstinacy and intellectual consciousness that shape her character against
conventional notions of employment, and especially degrading female employment
conditions. Although her disciplined pursuit of self-knowledge is not recognized by the
world as important, Martha takes pride in her leamedness; her heightened intellect and
consciousness, not her clerical abilities or business etiquette, ultimately prove to be
indispensable to her survival of the apocalyptic disaster that culminates in the final novel
of the series. At the age of sixteen, she does not take the exam to attend college but
establishes a discipline of independent studies. Pursuing her studies devotedly,
consistently, and independently—as an entrepreneur might—she ultimately refuses to
submit her love of literature to institutional demands. In this regard, she resists acquiring
a formal educational “occupation,” and in turn, remains outside of the academic structure
and unaffected by its specialized curriculum.
Yet at times Martha loathes the isolation that accompanies independent study.
While still in Zambesia, she longs for an imagined London, a place she relishes, believing
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 21
that there are people there to whom she can talk.6 She and her friends, Joss and Solly
Cohen, form a small, adolescent intellectual group. Throughout her life, she repeatedly
seeks communities of intellectuals, trying to find an intellectual haven. Drawn to the
“Sports Club,” the “Left Books Club,” the Communist Party, and eventually the writer
communities of London, she attempts to connect with like-minded people of her own
generation with hopes of refashioning the world. Perhaps she would have benefited from
a formal, educational experience? The opportunity to engage in intellectual discussion
groups as well as to read a variety of fresh literature might have intrigued Martha, for,
while the Cohen boys furnish her with books, most of them she has already read, and the
fragments of intellectual conversation regarding their literature do not suffice. Or,
perhaps university courses would have been repetitive and unbearable for Martha, who,
by the age of seventeen, has read many of the classics taught in school, including
Thoreau, Shelley, Whitman, Thackeray, Dickens, Scott, H.G. Wells, and numerous
histories of the Great War. Other books in her intellectual arsenal, such as Mein K am pf
Engels’ Origin o f the Family, Lloyd George, and Havelock Ellis’ treatise on sex, counter
the classical education and challenge conventional ideologies held by the older
generation. Thus, despite the lack of university schooling and limited exposure to
academic communities, Martha develops an extraordinary intelligence that differentiates
her from her female peers. She, unlike other women her age, pursues self-study and
6 Lessing, Martha Quest, 79.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22
educational opportunities, in addition to accepting social conventions such as securing a
job and seeking a suitable husband.
Although she is an avid scholar who studies diligently on her own, Martha shies
away from attending university. This decision illustrates the degree to which she is
internally conflicted, unsure of herself and her ambitions. She does not want her
education to become a preoccupation—too demanding, formal, and institutionalized. Yet
she is encouraged to develop her intelligence by an early mentor, Mr. Spur, whose library
and educational advice steer her toward autonomy and self study: “Yes, my child, you
must read. You must read everything that comes your way. It doesn’t matter what you
read at first, later you’ll leam discrimination. Schools are no good, Matty, you learn
nothing at school. If you want to be anything, you must educate yourself.”7 Spur’s
words reflect Lessing’s own attitude about the nature of education. According to
Lessing, “one of the advantages of not being [formally] educated was that [she] didn’t
have to waste time on the second-best.”8 In her words, “It was my education, and I think
it was a very good one.”9 By not attending university, Martha keeps literature as her
interest and hobby; she keeps herself free of rules, rigid doctrine, and educational
“occupation.” Additionally, Martha’s decision to pursue independent studies
demonstrates her hesitancy to trade one locus of occupancy for another—home for
university. She keeps herself attuned to the prospects of an “extraordinary, magnificent,
7 Lessing, Martha Quest, 286. 8 RoyNewquist, “Interview with Doris Lessing,” in A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews, edited with an introduction by Paul Schlueter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 49. 9 Ibid. (emphasis mine).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 23
and altogether new life”10 where she can remain uncompromised and become “something
different”—independent of parents, professors, and social conformists.
But Martha, after all, does not entirely extricate herself from professional
responsibility, as her move to the city and attainment of a clerical job ultimately prove.
Groomed by her mother in conflicting notions of womanhood, as an adolescent she
develops contradictory ambitions that result in feelings of melancholia. Disconcerted,
she discovers an immense gap between herself and other girls her age. The differences,
in fact, are immeasurable, between Martha’s drive toward autonomy and her
contemporaries’ acquiescent desires to marry and start families. When conversing with
friend and neighbor Mamie Van Rensberg about girls their age who pride themselves on
“getting a man,” Martha refers to herself as having “intellectual snobbishness”11 that
differentiates her from her female peers. This superior consciousness reflects self-
criticism, however, and Martha develops feelings of inadequacy along with feelings of
intellectual difference. Nevertheless, she has different ambitions than her female peers
and (at least initially) rejects the social status quo, dissatisfied with the idea of securing a
husband at this stage in her life. Rather, she tells herself that—intellectual snob though
she might be—“the difficult, painful process of educating herself [is] all she [has] to
sustain her.”12
10 Lessing, Martha Quest, 110. "Ibid., 23. 12 Ibid.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24
Ultimately, Martha becomes a role model for her friend, Mamie who, following
Martha’s example, also leaves the veld in order to pursue work and achieve independence
from her parents. The narrator notes that “Mrs. Quest had said in a letter [to Martha] that
the Van Rensbergs were furious with their daughter [Mamie] for taking a job suddenly in
I 'j town, without consulting them; it was all as a result of Martha’s bad example. The
young girls, united “against the older generation,”14 quickly lose their solidarity, as
Mamie succumbs quickly to the conventional pressure to marry. After a brief time in the
city, she tells Martha “she [has] got herself a man, only to find this achievement losing
glory under Martha’s polite indifference.”15 But Martha, after having worked for only a
year, also marries despite herself. Later, Martha echoes her early sentiments about the
unsatisfying nature of marriage. Projecting idealized views and hopefulness onto
England, she tells herself, “What an extraordinary thing— people calling this a marriage.
But they do. Now they’ve got used to it, they can’t see anything wrong with this
marriage.. .When I get to England, I’ll find a man I can really be married to.”16 Along
with finding a literary discussion group in England, she believes “a real man” exists there
as well. England can be seen as Martha’s imaginative intellectual sanctuary that enables
her to envision an optimistic, fulfilling future to counter her unsatisfying, restrictive
present reality.
13 Lessing, Martha Quest, 278. 14 Ibid,, 278. 15 Ibid. 16 Lessing, Landlocked, Harper Perennial edition, Children o f Violence series, fourth volume (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), 117.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 25
Thus, Martha’s quest for independence is in opposition to her upbringing. Within
her parents’ home, she struggles with self-preservation as her mother threatens to dictate
her future by appropriating her education and disallowing Martha’s future career pursuits.
While the Cohen boys, Mr. Spur, and Martha, herself, value her individual studies,
Martha receives mixed messages from her parents regarding the importance of her
intellect and her status as a female. For example, summoned from her classroom by Mrs.
Quest, Martha is asked to forgo her studies at the age of sixteen in order to help take Mr.
Quest to the hospital for diabetic treatment and tests.17 Martha’s personal investment in
formal education is slighted by familial and social demands that require her, as a female,
to recognize herself as a daughter first, student second. To her mother, she maintains, “I
can’t possibly spend all day having tea and gossiping.”18
After getting pink eye one week before the examination for university, Martha is
confronted with the paradox of her intelligence—she is taken by her mother to various
doctors for presumably “weakened eyes,” and her mother insists on the debilitating
condition. As the narrator notes, it was certainly “curious that Mrs. Quest, whose will for
years had been directed towards Martha distinguishing herself—curious that she should
accept those damaged eyes so easily, even insist that they were permanently injured when
Martha began to vacillate.”19 In effect, Mrs. Quest stunts Martha’s intellectual growth;
she encourages her daughter to accept her eye condition in order to keep her home and,
1' Lessing, Martha Quest, 30. 18 Ibid., 165. 19 Ibid., 36.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 26
therefore, keep Martha within the conventional roles she followed as a young woman.
Yet Mrs. Quest also stimulates Martha’s intellectual growth because the Victorian values
she ascribes to oppress her daughter, driving Martha to repudiate domestic work. Instead,
Martha claims book learning as her vocation and, when Mrs. Quest tries to appropriate
her educational successfulness, Martha rejects academia for independent studies.
Contradictorily to her actions, Mrs. Quest speaks incessantly about Martha’s
brilliance and her assured proficiency on academic examinations, boasting to neighbors
that “university and scholarships” are guaranteed in Martha’s future. Using Martha to
assert the Quest family’s elitist position, “Mrs. Quest aggressively statefs] to Mrs. Van
Rensberg that Martha [is] clever and [will] have a career. ...Mrs. Quest used the word
‘career’ not in terms of something that Martha might actually do, such as doctoring, or
the law, but as a kind of stick to beat the world with, as if she were saying, ‘My daughter
y 1 will be somebody, whereas yours will only be married.’” When Martha’s intelligence
becomes a function of entertainment and attention for her mother, it is painfully stripped
of its autonomous, self-fulfilling elements: “For months Mrs. Quest was talking about
university and scholarships, [sic] Martha listened, sometimes eagerly, but more often
writhing with embarrassment.”22 In this regard, Martha’s rejection of the university
demonstrates further resistance and rebellion, although passive and indirect, against her
mother’s control. As Mrs. Quest seeks ownership and possession of Martha’s intellect,
20 Lessing, Martha Quest, 34. 21 Ibid., 12. 22 Ibid., 34.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 27
Martha averts her; she resists being an intellectual puppet as she attempts to sever her
mother’s apron strings.
Yet by not investing herself in institutionalized education, Martha is forced to
contemplate the prospects of her professional future. Thus, her rebelliousness has
negative consequences; she prematurely enters the workforce and, instead of spending the
majority of her youth in classrooms and campuses, she faces corporate employment and
office buildings. She cannot escape or avoid professionalism or vocations, and the
literature she reads only compounds the conflict: “From these books Martha had gained a
clear picture of herself, from the outside. She was adolescent, and therefore bound to be
unhappy; British, and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the
twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class;
female, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past.”23 Trying to carve a
different niche for herself in society, she rejects conventional expectations by viewing
herself in terms of what her parents and girls her age are not. In her bedroom, among the
piles of books which are simultaneously hobbies and history for her, she finds herself
disposed to anger and frustration as nothing—neither books nor people around her—
reflect her own desires for female freedom, independence, and autonomy.24 This, in fact,
can be considered another reason why Martha resists pursuing literature at the university:
her inability to find characters, in literature, that reflect her experience.
23 Lessing, Martha Quest, 18. 24 Ibid., 60.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 28
Compelled by a sense of urgency to leave her parents’ home and the veld in order
to resist familial occupancy and establish an autonomous life for herself, Martha enters
the workforce. Since her family is not independently wealthy, she cannot rely on an
inheritance to free her from work obligations and she quickly concludes that she must
work vocationally or professionally in some capacity. But Martha loathes the fact that
her freedom is intertwined with money and employment, and she daydreams that “some
rich and unknown relation would come forward with a hundred pounds and say, ‘Here,
Martha Quest, you deserve this, this is to set you free.’”25 But, since this is not her
fortune, she follows her friend Joss’ advice and acquires a job working for his uncle,
Jasper Cohen, as a secretary in a legal firm. As an extension of her rebellion from
familial occupancy, Martha continues to resist being dominated once she acquires the
position. In a sense, she acquires a profession but remains unprofessional as a means of
preserving her autonomy.
Unlike the veld with its rolling hills and infinite horizon, the fictional city
modeled after Salisbury where Martha moves for employment is described as cramped
and dismal: “The offices of Robinson, Daniel and Cohen were crushed into the top floor
of a building on Founders’ Street,”26 just as Martha faces the prospects ofbeing cramped
into a professional role as a clerical assistant. At the age of seventeen, she chooses this
alternative in order to escape from “her parents who destroyed her,”27 which reflects an
25 Lessing, Martha Quest, 225. 26 Ibid., 113 (emphasis mine). 27 Ibid., 97.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 29
exaggerated yet typical teenage sentiment with regard to the conflict with her parents.
Discovering that she is unsuited for the work that is expected of her, as well as hesitant to
invest folly in a clerical role that is associated with gender issues, she quickly loses her
momentum in the new city. Her futility derives, in part, from the labor conditions of the
time period; as a result of social biases against women that were common in the
Zambesian business realm during this time, she is asked to perform menial, not
intellectual, work. Unable to folly accept the role because of her insistence on having an
intellectual and independent identity, she works with minimal effort and does only what
is necessary for retention and economic survival.
Martha’s sense of being personally stifled, or cramped by external conditions, is
reflected in her new work environment. Amid clutter and confusion, she hesitates to folly
settle in the legal firm that is “undignified and unsuitable,”28 even uninhabitable. In this
regard, the office resembles her family’s hut on the veld—something temporary to be
thought of as impermanent and therefore, not indefinitely confining. Unlike her parents’
home, however, the office is less imposing; as an employee of Mr. Cohen, she is not
subjected to authoritative rule. Discerning Martha’s uniqueness, he accommodates her
under-developed office skills, as well as offers advice regarding ways she might preserve
her freedom. He says,
“You see, Miss Quest, you are very young—you won’t mind me saying that, I hope? It is obvious you are intelligent and—well, if I may put it like this, you’re not considering getting married next week are you?...You shouldn’t
28 Lessing, Martha Quest, 114.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 30
marry too quickly. In this country I think there’s a tendency.. .most girls work in an office simply to pass the time until they get married.”29
In this respect, Lessing highlights Martha’s unique consciousness as being transparent—
everyone, including not only her employer but new acquaintances, notices her distinctive
intellect. Cohen joins the network of male mentors who contribute to shaping Martha’s
different consciousness against conventional conformity and toward personal
independence.
Martha’s intentions for taking the job are just the opposite of convention—she
consciously attempts to avoid getting married. Likewise, she never becomes married to
her work, as some of the other assistants such as Mrs. Buss do. From her first day of
employment, she is besieged by conflicting desires—to prove herself useful as a typist
but also to free herself from professional obligation: “She went from typewriter to
typewriter to see what kind of work she would be asked to do, and felt dismayed in spite
of her large intentions; for these legal documents—no, no, it was as if she, Martha, were
being bound and straightened by the formal moribund language of legality.” In fact,
while she is grateful for Mr. Cohen’s generosity and understanding, she detests her job;
her only solace resides in the potentiality of acquiring a different life than the veld offers
her. Thus, by resisting being “occupied” or controlled by her parents, Martha works for
freedom that derives, in part, from the attainment of her own financial independence.
She assures Mr. Cohen that she “wanted to be an efficient secretary” even though she
29 Lessing, Martha Quest, 130. 30 Ibid., 116.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 31
“felt quite indignant; she felt herself capable of much more.”31 Part of maturing, Martha
learns, involves having patience and experiencing different roles and environments as a
means of progressing toward a desirable future.
Thus, Martha never fully commits herself to the office. It never earns her full
attention nor is she ever subservient to the profession. Under-skilled when she begins,
Martha is encouraged to seek additional training at the Polytechnic, where she becomes
more competent yet not entirely sufficient at her job requirements. Indeed, she is
promoted “not to the status of the skilled, but somewhere in between.”32 Demonstrating a
kind of detachment and aloof sensibility, she is often accused of “thinking of something
else.” ■ Aware of her capacity to excel, Martha vacillates between a determination to
prove her ability and a determination to live a life of entertainment which involves
intense participation in “sundowner” parties. Her work and private actions conflict: “she
studiefs] at the Polytechnic with all her concentration”34 only to find herself burdened by
the desire to escape from both the social scene and her job. Moreover, her father’s
foreboding words about office work reverberate throughout her consciousness and
perplex her:
She was remembering what her father had said of his days in an office in England, for it was to escape from that office that he had come to farming: “I simply couldn’t stick it. Day in and day out, damned routine, and then, thank God, there was the war, and then, after that, going back to the office
31 Lessing, Martha Quest, 131. 32 Ibid., 149. 33 Ibid., 191. 34 Ibid., 284.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 32
was nothing but purgatory, sitting at a desk like a mouse in a hole.”35
Calling upon her former strength as a hunter in the veld, Martha rejects this
parental legacy of despondency and monotony and asserts her will to live differently.
She conducts an independent job search after work hours in order to secure a more
fulfilling work situation. Inquiring about other positions, she rejects employment as a
window dresser for Mr. Baker because she refuses to be monetarily exploited.36 After he
offers her a meager five pounds for one month of labor, Martha becomes outraged and
“inform[s] him in short and angry jerks that he ought to be ashamed of himself.” 37
Contemplating the prospects of other jobs, she fantasizes about occupations that would
liberate her from menial work and engage her imagination and intellect. She “dream[s]
with a fierce hunger of escape, and doing something vital and important,” which38 leads
her to entertain notions of being a journalist for the Zambesia News, a window dresser, a
shorthand writer for a wealthy older lady, a freelance writer and poet, and an artist.
While she interviews for positions, writes poems and creates sketches, a rejection letter
from the Zambesia News halts her unrealistic ambition. Moreover, “serious study” as a
commercial artist at the Polytechnic seems compelling but not entirely desirable,
especially as Martha senses an undercurrent of social futility with the upcoming war.
Driven by a lack of promising alternatives toward conventional marriage and
domestic work, Martha does not adequately fulfill the necessary obligations associated
35 Lessing, Martha Quest, 118. 36 Ibid., 285. 37 Ibid., 286. 38 Ibid., 288.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 33
with keeping a “proper house,” nor does she commit herself to sustaining a “proper
marriage.” Rather, she continues to resist “professional occupancy” even when later, her
work takes the form of running her own family and home. In addition to preparing meals
for her husband, Douglas Knowell, Martha takes up sewing as an alternative vocation.
Having sewn her dresses in defiance of her mother while still living with her parents, she
sews as a young married woman in order to combat the “question of work” that perplexes
her.39 She realizes that her work includes, among other domestic tasks, physically coping
with the “rising tide of excitement that was like a poison.”40
Struggling against war hysteria and the pressure to present a fapade of marital
contentment, Martha works to simply survive and remain sane in the wake of World War
II. She briefly feels compelled to volunteer for war-related service as a nurse for the Red
Cross, but quickly discovers it to be a “waste of time.”41 Once pregnant, Martha rejects
the kind of work conventionally associated with childrearing as well. When her
daughter, Caroline, is bom, she loathes the caretaking and housekeeping; Mrs. Quest
chastises her for her ineptitude and encourages Martha to hire servants to perform manual
labor around the home. Mrs. Quest cannot comprehend Martha’s resistance to African
help and says, “You’re so scatterbrained, and all your servants do as they like with you—
and you’re mining Caroline.”42 Martha, recognizing her inadequacies as a wife and
mother, feels as though she has failed: “Her inability to enjoy Caroline simply filled her
39 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 87-9. 40 Ibid., 90. 41 Ibid., 118. 42 Ibid., 230.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. \
34
with guilt. Yet she could not relax into Caroline; that would be a disloyalty and even a
danger to herself. Cycles of guilt and defiance ruled her living, and she knew it; she had
not the beginnings of an understanding what it all meant.”43 Martha resists this form of
professional occupancy because it requires her to acquiesce to the point of self-
annihilation. Still interested in self-aggrandizement and autonomy, she preserves
ambitions for grander notions of “work” that contradict her familial environment as well
as her marital and maternal commitments.
Not yet twenty, she still desires teenage independence and seeks freedom from yet
another restrictive form of occupation. By taking the radical step of leaving her husband
and young daughter, Martha enacts another resistance against familial occupancy. In
effect, she also rejects the professional occupancy associated with being a wife and
mother. Returning to work at the legal firm, Martha decides to leave the firm well before
she actually quits, knowing “it would be one of the bad, serious decisions of her life” to
stay forever.44 Ultimately, while she does not entirely fail at clerical work, she does not
entirely succeed either. When Martha is offered the head secretarial job, a promotion,
and a pay raise, she temporarily accepts the offer out of necessity more than competence.
Yet her time and energy are increasingly invested in working for the Communist Party
which, although unpaid work, suits her imaginative and intellectual desire to participate
in a collective endeavor of ideological significance. Ultimately, Martha leaves the Party
as well as the offices of Daniel and Cohen. She becomes a freelance typist for Mrs. Van
43 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 263 (emphasis mine). 44 Lessing,Landlocked, 15.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 35
der Bylt, a Communist Party member and revolutionary woman who recognizes many
similar traits between herself and Martha. As a positive role model, Mrs. Van der Bylt
contracts work for Martha from local politicians and supports her in intangible ways by
presenting a healthy model, in contrast to the conventional matron model that Martha
despises.
Later, in the final volume of the series,45 Martha moves to London and secures a
job as secretary for Mark Coldridge, a local businessman and aspiring author. Her most
significant, professional work involves this final, professional arrangement that is, in fact,
very casual and unconventional. Mark has a study within the house where the two
“work,” but Martha’s work also takes place within the context of the home environment
where she finds a way not only to meet financial obligations but to creatively explore and
articulate her personal capabilities. With Mark, she assists in fictionalizing the “ideal
city” of her youth in his novel, A City in the Desert. Thus, her vision becomes art, and
ultimately, actuality. By the end of The Four-Gated City, Mark and a financial patron
construct the ideal “city in the desert” as an alternative community for individuals who
reject conventional society.
Finally, Martha’s resistance to professional occupancy ultimately leads her to
intense self-analysis followed by humanitarian initiatives to save not only the children of
the Coldridge household but also the children and citizens of the world. While her work
for Mark involves assisting him in a secretarial capacity, Martha also serves others, such
45 Lessing, The Four-Gated City.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 36
as the children, Francis and Paul, as well as Lynda, Mark’s wife, and herself. In fact, her
work in this final arrangement is never restricted by patriarchal structures nor is it two-
dimensional. In addition to editing and coauthoring, she performs many household and
maternal-like functions. Reclaiming the domestic work that she previously relinquished
while married to Douglas Knowell, and then Anton Hesse, Martha ultimately finds the
form of employment and work-environment she has been seeking with Mark and Lynda
Coldridge. In The Four-Gated City, she discovers a transcendent notion of work that
involves liberation—the antithesis of occupancy. Martha, finally free of traditional and
constraining forms of occupation, works with the ambition and persistence of a
revolutionary. Serving humankind as well as herself by becoming a telepathic seer and
self-explorer, she achieves personal fulfillment as she actualizes communal and self
salvation. Thus, Lessing radically revises the concept of work by making Martha a
responsible humanist and agent of goodness, developments in her character that I will
discuss in greater depth in the final chapter.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 3
AGAINST MATERNAL OCCUPANCY
As the Children o f Violence series commences with Martha Quest, the dichotomy
between protagonist and antagonist, Martha and Mrs. Quest, commences as well. It can
be said that Martha and her mother inaugurate the pentalogy. The connections between
Martha, her mother, martyr, matron, and matricide consume the opening pages as well as
infiltrate many pages throughout the rest of the series. Quite overtly, Martha’s
tremendous hatred, resentment, and detestation of her mother and women like her of the
World War I generation dominate the narratives. Indeed, right from the onset of Martha
Quest and Children of Violence, the reader feels thrust into a contentious yet conventional
battle as, page after page, Martha scorns her mother. Outside in the grass, defiantly away
from her mother’s domesticity and domination, Martha develops a literal refrain of hatred
that is directed primarily toward her mother. The narrator notes:
Martha, in an agony of adolescent misery, was lying among the long grass under a tree, repeating to herself that her mother was hateful, all these old women hateful, every one of these relationships, with their lies, evasions, compromises, wholly disgusting.1
Versions of this refrain recur throughout all five volumes and, although Martha’s anger
eventually subsides into pity and guilt in the later novels, the antagonism toward her
mother is presented as the initial, central force that drives her eager but also defensive
1 Lessing, Martha Quest, 16.
37
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 38
pursuit of autonomy.
Martha detests her mother because Mrs. Quest is a version of the archetypal
woman shaped by Victorian values who presents Martha with a chilling portrait of the
future: domineering, hypocritical, simple-minded, and resigned to unhappiness.
Therefore, to claim a better future for herself, Martha feels that she must reject her
mother and everything she stands for. Portrayed as an obstacle that must be overcome,
Mrs. Quest is the muscle of the Quest marriage whose strength threatens to overpower
Martha as she seeks to gain her independence. Indeed, Mrs. Quest is somewhat
immovable and unconquerable as a maternal force until Martha’s later adulthood, when
the two exchange brutal words and then painfully separate, followed by Mrs. Quest’s
sudden death. Scholars have taken particular interest in the antagonism between Martha
and her mother in Children o f Violence. Ellen Cronan Rose describes Martha’s quest in
Eriksonian terms as one that stems from an “initial encounter and locus of mistrust—with
her mother.”76 Always looking for but feeling excluded from “some warmth,” Martha is
“psychologically handicapped,”77 according to Rose, because of the disconnectedness she
feels from her mother.
This sense of disconnection results in contention between Mrs. Quest and Martha
who both seek control ofM artha’s life. The most overt demonstration of Mrs. Quest’s
controlling nature occurs when Martha leaves her parents’ home in the veld for the city.
Unannounced, unexpected, and most importantly, uninvited, the Quests barge into
16 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 3. 77 Ibid.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39
Martha’s new life and first apartment, asserting their parental authority over her. Mrs.
Quest claims Martha’s space, which she “was prepared to call her home”78 prior to the
intrusion, by rearranging the room to her own liking. After chastising Martha about not
coming to tea and criticizing her decorating, Mrs. Quest appropriates Martha’s space,
“briskly mov[ing] around the room as if it were her own.”79 The visit enrages Martha,
who, overcome by tiredness and passivity, can only claim resistance through personal
promises to future action: “She decided to leave this room at once for another which
would be free of her mother’s atmosphere and influence.”80 Yet, bound by the rent
contract, Martha chooses instead to resist through reordering her things, reclaiming them
from her mother’s “contamination” and “will.”81 She repudiates Mrs. Quest’s presence
as being infectious, but what she really rejects are her mother’s conventional attitudes and
values.
Thus, even after Martha moves away from home and establishes herself as an
adult, Mrs. Quest attempts to control her daughter’s life. Described by the narrator as “a
rather tired and disappointed yet decided matron, with ambitious plans for her
children,”82 Mrs. Quest remains committed to parenting her even though Martha
wholeheartedly rejects her Victorian values. A familial battle ensues between mother and
daughter, played out through a series of domestic disputes that Mr. Quest neither pacifies
78 Lessing,Martha Quest, 123. 79 Ibid., 124. 80 Ibid., 125. 81 Ibid., 127. 82 I T
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4 0
nor participates in. There are instances where Mrs. Quest is less confrontational than
Martha, and Lessing seems to suggest that, on the one hand, traditional mother-daughter
antagonism persists. On the other hand, Martha’s receptivity and reactions to such
conventional antagonism seem to be heightened, even perpetuated, by her isolated,
exceptionally analytical sense of self. The following passage demonstrates the idea that,
in some cases, Martha instigates conflict and is consumed by an almost demoniac,
perhaps maniacal, desire for difference:
She made resolutions day after day that from now on she would be different. And yet a fatal demon always took possession of her, so that at the slightest remark from her mother she was impelled to take it up, examine it, and hand it back, like a challenge—and by then, the antagonist was no longer there; Mrs. Quest was simply not interested.83
Thus, Lessing illustrates the equity of stubbornness between the two women. While their
antagonism is consistent, their roles interchange; Martha as monster, mother as monster.
As “the gatekeeper of convention,”84 Mrs. Quest can be seen as the primary
“enemy” of Martha, who pursues a version of womanhood that is unconventional and
involves personal freedom and autonomy. Attempting to “convert” Martha to the
traditional doctrine, Mrs. Quest repeatedly interrupts Martha’s quest for independence by
intruding into Martha’s living spaces. Engaging in what can be viewed as strategic
takeovers, Mrs. Quest enters Martha’s residences on different occasions and ambushes
Martha with reprimands and intentions to change Martha into a conventional woman.
83 Lessing, Martha Quest, 14. 84 Rowe, Women Writers: Doris Lessing, 6.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41
Like a “regulator,”85 she asserts herself as the person in charge and organizes Martha’s
premises to her own liking. This both startles and infuriates Martha who, partially
incapacitated from sleep as well as hostility, can only protest silently. Offering readers
insight into the repetitiveness and intrusiveness of Mrs. Quest’s actions, the narrator
describes one of the takeovers from Martha’s perspective:
Her mother was following the ritual that she had already gone through here, this room. The flowers had been removed from their vases and rearranged, the chairs set differently, books put into place. Mrs. Quest had reassured herself by touching and arranging everything in the living room, and was now doing the same in the bedroom.
Thus, for Mrs. Quest, there is no sanctity of boundaries, no respect for privacy, and no
acceptance of independence. Martha, in fact, has no sanctuary from “mother”—the
archetype that threatens every fiber ofher conscious and unconscious being.
This archetypal presence so antagonizes Martha that, despite encountering
positive matron models, she feels ambivalent toward the multitude of surrogate-mother
figures she meets throughout her life. When not under the “rule” of Mrs. Quest, Martha
finds herself constantly confronted with other maternal figures: Mrs. Gunn, Mrs. Carson,
Mrs. Buss, Mrs. Maynard, Mrs. Talbot, Mrs. Van der Bylt, Mrs. Coldridge, Iris, Phyllis,
and Stella. While not every woman or matron attempts to control Martha or turn her into
a conventional matron, she nevertheless feels antagonism toward the conventional mother
“archetype” that is reflected in women ofher mother’s generation as well as her
contemporaries. Stella and Jasmine, her peers, “mother” Martha; they whisk her away to
85 Rowe, Women Writers: Doris Lessing, 6. 86 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 124.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 42
tea, to meetings, and to volunteerism, imparting their notions of womanhood as if it were
doctrine. The Children o f Violence novels abound with multiple living versions of
“mother” and Martha’s longing to escape might be, in fact, a repressed desire to destroy
such manifestations in order to claim newer, less dominating models. Ironically, in order
to revise the older models, Martha accepts the mother role and finds herself caught in an
inescapable pattern of doing, or in this case becoming, that which she initially rejects.
Martha as Mother
Martha vows as a teenager to neither succumb to nor perpetuate a marriage like
her parents’ relationship: “a marriage whose only basis was that ironic mutual pity.”* 87
Yet she nonetheless ends up married and pitiful, and faced with repetition—constructing
a life analogous to her mother’s. In this regard, the maternal shadow figuratively
depicted by the fenis wheel that Martha sees outside ofher bedroom window when she
lives in the flat with Douglas Knowell envelops her consciousness. After repudiating the
“tyrannical family” as an adolescent, she discovers as a young adult that “tyranny is not
so easily legislated against”88 and that the tyranny of the family is inescapable. Restless
in marriage and fighting against her intuition that she is pregnant, Martha sets herself
against being “a mere housewife,”89 only to be overtaken by the lethargic reality of
maternity and the potentiality of dependence, not independence. While she attempts to
87 Lessing,Martha Quest, 85. 88 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 111. 89 Ibid., 130.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 43
remain resistant on all levels—psychological, emotional, and physical—her resistance is
futile and involves self-denial to the extent that she obstinately refuses to acknowledge
her pregnancy. Even when Mrs. Talbot, a Victorian mother-figure very similar to Mrs.
Quest with conventional ambitions for her own daughter, recognizes the pregnancy,
Martha responds, “I shan’t have children for years yet—damn it, I’m only nineteen
myself.”90 Echoing her longstanding vow not to have children and invested in her
“power to cut the cycle,”91 Martha fights with increasingly futility as she finds herself
trying to reject yet another form of maternal occupancy—this time, in her own body.
Once pregnant, Martha experiences a sense of double-consciousness because her
rejection of the archetypal mother and maternal occupancy has dual fronts—external as
well as internal. While resisting Mrs. Quest and the multitude of surrogate mother-
figures she encounters as undesirable maternal models, Martha simultaneously resists her
internal, maternal sensibility, fearing to become that which she despises—a monstrous
mother. Thus, as a continuation ofher repudiation of maternal occupancy she begins to
reject herself. When she finally realizes that she has been fighting against the reality of
her pregnancy for some time, Martha feels hatred for the social system that she believes
perpetuated her pregnancy as well as her ignorance concerning being pregnant:
Martha sat feeling the imprisoned thing moving in her flesh, and was made more miserable by the knowledge that it had been moving for at least a week without her noticing it.. ..She was filled with a strong and seething rage against her mother, her husband, Dr. Stem, who had all joined the conspiracy against
90 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 105. 91 Ibid., 126.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 44
her. She addressed angry speeches of protest to them, fiery and eloquent speeches; but, alas, there was no one there but herself.92
Convinced she will not have the baby, she considers terminating the pregnancy as a
means of retaining her freedom. Drinking gin, taking scalding baths, jumping off tables,
and wishing for a miscarriage in order to be “released from a position [she finds] all at
once humiliating and intolerable,” Martha tries to disown the baby that occupies her
flesh and threatens her autonomy. The baby’s inhabitance of her body, as well as her
anxious preoccupation with becoming a mother, plagues her consciousness. But when
Stella, Martha’s married friend, and Douglas give her directives for aborting the
pregnancy, Martha rebels against them— in favor of keeping the baby. In doing so, she
contradicts her own conscious beliefs; her commitment to keeping the child reflects her
insistence on rebellion, not her actual desire to have the child. Rejecting her friend’s and
husband’s directives, she reclaims the baby because they instruct her to do otherwise: a
decision which leads her to become a mother despite the fact that she vehemently detests
everything associated with motherhood. In this regard, Lessing portrays Martha as one
who aspires to live an independent, different life but who is yet, at the age of nineteen,
still unable to truly assert and maintain the beliefs she claims.
Contradicting her personal promise to never become pregnant, Martha finds
herself driven to defend her body and the young baby from the injurious world, which
includes her mother along with Mr. Quest’s male favoritism and rigid notions of
92 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 136. 93 Ibid., 176.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 45
childrearing.94 Illustrating Martha’s desire to love, not injure, the child once she becomes
defensive of it and claims it as part of herself, the narrator foreshadows Martha’s unique
approach to the maternal role which eventually culminates in a transcendent,
humanitarian sensibility in the final volume of the series:
When Mrs. Quest had left, Martha cupped her hands protectingly over her stomach, and murmured to the creature within that nothing would be allowed to harm it, no pressure would deform it, freedom would be its gift. She, Martha, the free spirit, would protect the creature from her, Martha, the maternal force; the maternal Martha, that enemy, would not be allowed to enter the picture. It was as one independent being to another that Martha spoke.95
Defending herself and the child, Martha rebels against the emotional violence of her past:
she vows to “free” the child and consequently liberate a young version of herself.
Through Martha’s actions, Lessing captures an important historical moment for women
who, in efforts to free themselves from wife and mother martyrdom, sought
contraceptives and asserted their rights to sexual freedom as well as personal choice.
Originally published in 1954, A Proper Marriage was a revolutionary, fictionally radical
declaration of women’s rights that articulated key issues of the women’s liberation
movement, including women’s rights to choose their pregnancies as well as to end them.
Martha’s unique consciousness derives from her aspiration to be free in all respects—
emotionally, psychologically, and physically—from the imprisoning social expectations
of her gender. But her obstinacy leads her to contradictory actions, depending on whom
or what she is opposing.
94 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 146-7. 95 Ibid., 148.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 46
After several grueling, contentious years of raising Caroline while struggling with
her marriage to Douglas Knowell, Martha leaves them both. Unable to sustain the
interdependence of motherhood, she feels as though the child’s needs conflict radically
with her own:
Caroline was that hard and unalterable fact which turned Martha’s life, in spite of a pleasant and helpful nursegirl, into a routine which began at five sharp every morning.. .and ended in seven in the evening.. ..The rhythm of Caroline’s needs was in sharp discord with her own; she adjusted herself, she did what was necessary, but it was a sense of duty which regulated her. Being a mother, or rather the business of looking after a child.. .was not a fulfillment but a drag on herself.96
In a desperate act of resistance against maternal occupancy, Martha is unwilling to
subject her young daughter, Caroline, to the same emotional violence she experienced as
a child; ultimately, she abandons the three year-old. She disclaims the motherhood
position as much as she rejects the potentiality of being as possessive and domineering
mother as Mrs. Quest was. With increasing involvement in the Left Book Club, a group
of intellectuals committed to investigating the political and social conditions of
Zambesia, Martha feels compelled to pursue her autonomous quest and notions of
freedom, independence, and communal harmony to which the Club generally ascribes.
She decides to leave her marriage because an alternative lifestyle presents itself—one of
intellectual fulfillment and political activeness, as opposed the mundane repetition of
domestic work.
96 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 330.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 47
While her ideas are well-intentioned—to save herself from boredom as well as to
set Caroline “free” from her potential as a monstrous mother—Martha ultimately leaves
the child defenseless and partially orphaned; Caroline is eventually raised by Douglas and
his second wife, acquiescent Elaine Talbot, and grandmother-ed by Mrs. Quest. Thus, by
leaving Caroline, Martha does not liberate her daughter from matronly conventionality
and possessiveness. Regarding her complicated feelings for her daughter, Martha
determines that
What [is] wrong with Caroline [is] that she, Martha, [does] not feel the right way about her. Do I love her? she ask[s] herself sternly, looking with steady criticism at the little girl. The emotion of love vanishe[s] as she examine[s] it. At this moment she [feels] nothing but the bond of responsibility. ...It would be much better for her if I didn’t [love her].97
Ironically, in this passage she rejects “claiming” her daughter by denouncing love for her.
For Martha, love is intrinsically a false and destructive claim; from her own unhappy
experience, as Rose articulates, love is excluded from the mother-daughter bond.
Remaining committed to the idea that she will not perpetuate the tyranny that
characterized her youth in the person of Mrs. Quest, Martha believes she saves the child
from her worst enemy—the mother in herself.
However, Lessing does not portray Martha as a hero for this action. Rather,
Martha is plagued by her abandonment of Caroline as well as by the domineering
presence of Mrs. Quest; the two often coincide as troubling sentiments Martha must
comes to terms with. Yet using Martha’s experience, Lessing makes a compelling case
97 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 347.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 48
for the necessity of female independence as well as an “altogether different” model of
mothering. Young Martha, selfish, irrational, and not fully self-defined, is portrayed by
Lessing as incapable of the multiple sacrifices required by conventional standards of
mothering. Her “ideas,” which Mrs. Quest criticizes, are antithetical to domesticity; her
interest in politics and desire to explore liberating ideologies conflict with the roles that
are expected of her as Douglas’ wife and Caroline’s mother. Thus, Lessing illustrates the
contradictory alternatives that Martha faces and the difficulty of achieving happiness
within the allotted script of female acquiescence and self-sacrifice. When Douglas comes
home from the war to find Martha attending Club meetings, he is outraged; both he and
Mrs. Quest attempt to impose another child on Martha, suggesting that she become
pregnant again in order to live a “proper” life and continue with the “proper marriage.”
Her “ideas,” from their viewpoints, are not satisfactory and not within the prescribed
“boundaries” of societal acceptance.
Yet by the end of the pentalogy, Martha has broken out of the restrictive mother
and wife boundaries. As a surrogate-mother and partner (not wife) within the Coldridge
household in The Four-Gated City, she demonstrates a revolutionary capacity for
mothering and mediating family relationships. Lessing re-envisions the mother role such
that, in this atypical environment, children are not possessions and women are not
subordinated by the mother position; rather, Martha becomes a kind of idyllic mother
figure who shares the role with another woman, Lynda Coldridge. Together, the female-
duo performs the mother role for the children; with the assistance of Mark Coldridge,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 49
they form a trio to adeptly fulfill the children’s needs. Thus, given the combination of
psychological and emotional maturity as well as the absence of biological ties to the
children, Martha becomes Lessing’s alternative to Mrs. Quest and the mother monster.
A mother, Lessing ultimately suggests, should be unconventional, imaginative, creative,
friend, communicant, teacher, nurturer, and co-inhabitant (as opposed to dictator) of the
household. Martha’s transcendence in the novel series is intrinsically connected with her
ability to repudiate and then reclaim the “ancient female role” in a satisfying and
revolutionary capacity.
Thus, I maintain that by the end of the series, Martha transcends her anger and
contention against her mother. The intense anger she harbors against Mrs. Quest fades
into pity when Martha matures and becomes a middle-aged woman herself. In
concordance with Roberta Rubenstein’s assessment of this tyrannical nature of the
mother-daughter relationship, I affirm that despite having endured pathos for most of her
life, Martha ultimately supersedes her adolescent anger. One might say that Martha
resists “maternal occupancy” though she is plagued, for the majority of her adulthood, by
immense hatred for the woman whom she feels never wanted or loved her. Though Mrs.
Quest dies without Martha ever gaining a true sense of her mother’s acceptance,
significantly, as Rubenstein asserts, when May Quest leaves Martha for last time, Martha
“has finally stripped off (by identifying) the part of herself that her ‘inner’ mother had
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50
controlled.”98 This leaves Martha fully capable of exploring all of the facets of her being
and consciousness.99 Most importantly, Martha is compelled to end the cycle of maternal
occupancy and violence, resolving to become a surrogate-mother to children that are not
her own.
Thus, although I share Rose’s view regarding the emotional destructiveness of the
primary relationship between Mrs. Quest and Martha, I find that Martha moves beyond
the “infantile stage” of development. Rose sees Martha’s quest as limited because she is
never able to move beyond adolescence as a consequence of her inability to feel nurtured
by May Quest. While it is true that Martha never experiences warmth or acceptance from
her mother, even as an adult, and though she abandons Caroline permanently, I contend
that in The Four-Gated City, Martha ultimately moves beyond the debilitating quality of
her relationship with her mother as well as confronts her sense of the maternal role. As
Rose articulates, the relationship between the May and Martha, as well as between
Martha and the world, involves hostility.100 Yet Martha eventually confronts this
antagonism; with the assistance of her psychiatrist as well as the actual death of Mrs.
Quest, she is able to come to terms with the agonizing relationship. Evidence of this, it
seems, is her ability to “mother” the children of the Coldridge home. Had she been
permanently “handicapped,” as Rose suggests, Martha would not have been equipped to
98Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 143. 99 Ibid. 100 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 4.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 51
become a kind of surrogate-mother for Francis and Paul Coldridge as well as their group
of orphaned and displaced adolescent friends.
This positive resolution opposes the emotional violence that Martha experiences
as well as perpetuates within the familial environment. Countering the subtext of death,
destruction, and destitute social conditions, Martha progresses toward and ultimately
achieves a transcendent, fulfilling existence. Yet ironically, the death of Mrs. Quest in
The Four-Gated City can be seen as pivotal to Martha’s personal advancement. Her
death, in effect, represents the death of an era for Martha, which includes ties to her
former marriage and daughter, Caroline. Middle-aged and raising multiple children who
entirely repudiate all conventional ways of living, Martha faces only the destructiveness
of Mother Nature as the series concludes—and she triumphs over “Her” by surviving the
apocalypse that wipes out the majority of European civilization. Though Martha’s
psychiatrist, Dr. Lamb, insinuates that Martha suffers from a matricidal impulse and
reversal of the Oedipal complex, Martha disclaims this idea. She does not feel
responsible for Mrs. Quest’s death,101 nor does she feel responsible for Caroline who, it
can be assumed (because she is not mentioned again in the concluding pages), perishes in
the apocalyptic disaster.
Needing liberation from her relationship with her mother as well as her role as a
mother, Martha reconciles both maternal situations with the advent of distance. Longing
to divorce herself from the incessant and life-long domination, possessiveness, and the
101 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 326.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 52
emotional abuses inflicted upon her by her mother, Martha also distances herself from
Caroline in order to break the biological ties and repetition of familial violence
altogether. Her resolve enables her to oppose Mother Nature’s violence with an
outpouring of empathy and altruism, such that by the end of the series, Martha becomes a
new, positive maternal model. By that point, her consciousness as well as her
experiential knowledge and maturation ultimately guide her toward transcendence—of
the violence endemic to her upbringing as well as that of the war-laden environment.
The fact that Martha’s transcendence is intertwined with her establishment of a
new maternal self is an indication of Lessing’s serious commitment to revising the
conventional maternal script. By the end of the series, Martha “works through” her
negative associations with the mother archetype by becoming a sympathetic,
compassionate, instructive mother to the Coldridge children as well as to the children
who inhabit the island with her after the apocalypse. Thus, antagonism between mothers
and daughters ceases and maternal love prevails; Martha defeats not only the negativity
inherent in her relationship with Mrs. Quest but also the internalized and monstrous
antagonistic presence within herself that stemmed from being a negligent mother to
Caroline.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 4
AGAINST SEXUAL OCCUPANCY
Just as Martha Quest faces dysfunctional relationships with her parents and her
daughter as a result of her intense internalization of individualism, she also struggles to
find the appropriate balance between personal autonomy and romantic intimacy with
men. Lessing captures the tension between Martha’s conflicting desires—to do
something “altogether new and different” with her life, while at the same time to
experience “close complete intimacy with a man.”1 The two notions strike a discordant
tune throughout the five-volume series, as Martha finds herself struggling against yet
succumbing to successively demeaning, restrictive, and abusive relationships with men.
As Margaret Moan Rowe observes, marriage turns Martha into property where, in a
perversion of the Sleeping Beauty tale, the romantic kiss presages imprisonment, not
freedom.2 Rowe links this sentiment with Lessing’s portrait of the “battle of the sexes,”
and views Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage as Lessing’s critical contributions to the
■2 hotly debated “sex war.” According to Rowe:
[These] earlier books present female protagonists living in societies grappling with what the Victorians called ‘the Woman Question.’ And like so many of the Victorian reformers before her, Lessing centres her response to ‘the Woman Question’ on a critique of the institution of marriage which she vigorously attacks in Martha Quest and A Proper
1 Lessing, A Ripple From the Storm, 54. 2 Rowe, Women Writers: Doris Lessing, 32. 3 Ibid., 29.
53
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54
Marriage. In both novels, Lessing presents a critique of marriage and family as the enemy of free women.4
Indeed, Lessing articulates a chilling illustration of the abuses of marriage and the lack of
pleasure associated with Martha’s sexual intimacy when it is confined to the institution of
marriage.
In an interview with Roy Newquist in London, 1963, Doris Lessing spoke of
marriage as a distressing, disappointing aspect of her own life. She said, “I do not think
that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married.”5
Her statement, made while Lessing was in the process of writing Children o f Violence
(between A Ripple From the Storm, pub. 1958, and Landlocked, pub. 1965), is a key to
understanding Martha Quest’s failures with men and, particularly, her two unsuccessful
marriages. While the pentalogy is only in part fictionalized autobiography, one can apply
Lessing’s admission of marital difficulty to Martha’s situations. For Lessing, marriage is
a talent; it is an acquired skill that, for a woman, involves selflessness and acceptance of
subordination. In The Four-Gated City, Martha speculates that some women are
“unmarriageable.”6 Some women, like herself, instinctively fight against being “under
siege” and loathe marriage because it proves to be imprisoning and unpleasant.
Although she marries twice, Martha harbors escapist thoughts early in her
engagements as a means of liberating her mind and promising herself the future liberation
of her body. Ultimately, Martha fears marriage because it perpetuates emotional
4 Rowe, Women Writers: Doris Lessing, 29-30. 5 Roy Newquist, Counterpoint, 414. 6 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 299.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 55
violence; she discovers that she is not alone in her dislike of marriage and sex. Thus, one .
portrait reflected in Children o f Violence is that of a diverse female community that
combats the dissatisfaction associated with marriage. In fact, Lessing depicts three
generations of women who regard marriage as an obstacle of freedom and something
antithetical to happiness. From the older generation (Mrs. Quest, Mrs. Van der Bylt, Mrs,
Knowell, and others) to Martha’s generation (Martha, Stella, Alice, Patty, Lynda,
Dorothy), and even the youngest generation (Jill, Gwen), Lessing captures the
overwhelmingly unpleasant experience of numerous women for whom marriage and sex
offer institutionalized as opposed to sufficient forms of intimacy.
Created, in this sense, for something other than marriage offers—for notions of
global family instead of singular family—Martha attempts marriage but lacks the
temperament for the self-sacrifice, resignation, and traditional martyrdom that women
have historically accepted. Marriage, for her, as for Lessing, becomes something that
Martha must “go through.” As Mona Knapp suggests, Martha “has to sample and
experience the patterns of social conformity before she can transcend them.”7
Consequently, Martha marries and divorces twice over the course of the series,
completing a circle: autonomy, marriage, autonomy, marriage, autonomy. Indeed, she
seeks independence from her parents, then gets married to Douglas Knowell, escapes
from that marriage in pursuit of autonomy again, but then marries Anton Hesse and
becomes disillusioned once more. She has significant extramarital relationships with four
7 Mona Knapp, Doris Lessing (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1984), 47.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 56
men: William Brown, Thomas Stem, Jack from the minesweeper, and Mark Coldridge, a
fact that is consistent with Lessing’s use of the number four as a whole number,
o representative of seasons, circles, and completion. The series culminates with an image
of Martha alone, contemplating her next steps. Unlike her earlier contemplations of a
“next man,” Martha ultimately recognizes that her next stage of growth involves no man,
just herself: “She thought, with the dove’s voices of solitude: Where? But where? How?
Who? No, but where, where. ...Then silence and the birth of a repetition: Where? Here,
Here? Here, where else, you fool, you poor fool, where else has it been, ever.”9 Thus, the
series does not conclude with another depiction of romantic or marital dissatisfaction or
failure for Martha. Rather, the appendix to The Four-Gated City offers a portrait of
Martha—man-less—as a “free woman,” survivor, and savior on an island community
following apocalyptic destruction.
From beginning to end, the series diverges and digresses as Martha fluctuates
between conventional and progressive notions of love and relationships. While she
prefers independence and rejects the marriage models of her parents and the Van
Rensbergs, she nonetheless ends up married and loathing not only her husbands but the
entire institution of marriage. Many scholars have tried to make sense of Martha’s
incessant fluctuations between desiring autonomy and being acquiescent.10 Interestingly,
the focus tends to be on her acquiescence and attempts to explain her regressive, not
8 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 127. 9 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 591. 10 Ellen Cronan Rose, Roberta Rubenstein, Gayle Greene, Sydney Janet Kaplan
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 57
rebellious, tendencies. From the initial pages of the series, the protagonist creates
physical and ideological distance between herself, her parents and the Van Rensbergs;
she scrutinizes their marriages and contemptuously repudiates them. In Martha Quest,
she appears obstinate, saying on repeated occasions that she would “rather die”11 than be
married. Eager to free herself from familial occupancy, Martha views marriage, at least
initially, as another unwanted obstacle to autonomy. Thus, with minimal success until
late in life, she resists “sexual occupancy”; she vacates her marriages and objects to the
ways in which marriage and sex are versions of unwanted bodily takeovers. In marriage,
she finds herself conquered, invaded, and claimed as property, as Lessing articulates the
difficulties of resisting systemic, patriarchal force when it is legally and socially
sanctioned. In a sense, the colonial and African battlefield becomes synonymous with
the female body; Martha’s body becomes a kind of war zone as she desperately although
inconsistently fights against sexual occupancy.
With Donovan Anderson at the young age of seventeen, Martha experiences her
first longing for sexual union. But the relationship remains asexual and disappointing to
Martha who, discovering that their situation was arranged by Mrs. Quest and Mrs.
Anderson, is faced with the incessant presence of her mother meddling in her affairs. As
a member of Salisbury’s youthful elite, Donovan introduces Martha to a society of junior
civil servants and their girlfriends as well as to wild nights o f binge-drinking and dancing
at the local Sports Club. While Donovan and Martha gradually cease to claim each
11 Lessing, Martha Quest, 157 and 253.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 58
another in the manner of consistent date-shuffling that characterizes the Sports Club, he is
the first male figure whom Martha must define herself by and against. Almost
immediately, Donovan indoctrinates Martha in the Sports Club obsessions of beauty,
drink, diet, and irresponsible behavior. He dictates her dress, refashioning her clothes
according to his own definitions of beauty which coincide with the social dress code of
the Club:
“You know what this dress needs, my dear? What you need is...’ He went to the wardrobe as if he had been using it for years, flung it open, and searched for something that already existed in his mind. ‘You must buy a black patent belt tomorrow,’ he announced firmly. ‘About an inch and a half wide, with a small, flat buckle.”12
Thus, he appropriates her for their mothers’ sakes, as well as for his own. With the “new
girl in town,” he benefits from Martha’s debut at the Sports Club while ensuring himself
the privilege of getting “unspoiled” dates.13 Indeed, he absurdly attempts to “book”
Martha one year in advance for dances at the Club; in this regard, the conventional
system greets Martha through Donovan’s notions of male proprietorship of women as
objects to be adorned and displayed.
Gradually, however, Martha begins to reject what Donovan and the Sports Club
group represent as well as offer: superficial relationships and parodied romance. When
she begins to feel bored with the social scene, she gets involved with Adolph King, a
Polish Jew and marginalized member of the group. For this alignment with an unpopular
figure, Donovan calls her a “naughty girl.” Indeed, he chastises Martha for her
12 Lessing, Martha Quest, 135. 13 Ibid., 145.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 59
unconventional ideas and opinions, and saying, “You just have to be different, don’t you
Matty dear.”14 On successive occasions, Martha’s unique consciousness conflicts with
the partygoers’ conventionality. By rejecting what would be now be termed racist and
classist practices, Martha removes herself from the group and abandons her tenancy of
the elite social circle. In this regard, Lessing demonstrates Martha’s preference for
“something different.” Indeed, even though Martha joins the group, she maintains a
sense of independence which becomes more solidified when she is forced to define
herself against traditional expectations. Thus, she is part of the group but remains on the
periphery; she becomes an anomaly and, despite her initial acquiescence, preserves a
certain degree of autonomy,
Part of Martha’s acquiescence, Ingrid Holmquist suggests, is the negative
consequence of her indoctrination in the romantic myths of love through literature.15 The
traditions in which women are groomed to please men and be attractive for them, and
then find idyllic love in marriage, confuse Martha, who, as Holmquist notes, still desires
to “transcend the given social reality.”16 In a youthful frenzy, Martha claims her learned
inheritance as an “heir to the romantic tradition of love” and11 decides to lose her
i o . , virginity to Adolph, a man whom she pities but does not love. Rejecting Victorian
14 Lessing, Martha Quest, 245. 15 Ingrid Holmquist, “From society to nature: a study o f Doris Lessing’s ‘Children o f Violence,’” Ph. D. diss., Goteborg University, Gothenburg Studies in English 47 (Goteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis 1980), 60. 16 Ibid., 82. 17 Lessing, Martha Quest, 249. 18 Ibid., 244.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 60
ideals of female chastity and purity, Martha claims a different kind of consciousness that
involves the pursuit of knowledge and experience. She becomes attached to Adolph as a
means of social protest—against the Sports Club and the pervasive conventional
expectations of her parents which demand that she stay within the prescribed boundaries •
of race, culture, and class.
Even Ellen Cronan Rose, who believes Martha is “too insecure to rebel” and too
prone to “adapting one proffered role after another” 'm Children o f Violence,19 concurs
that Martha’s relationship with Adolph is characterized by defiance. Rose suggests that
in Adolph’s presence, Martha feels empowered, as if she seeks to salvage the persecuted
figure in both Adolph and herself. Indeed, Martha becomes “ready to fight the world on
his behalf—or at least her world,” which suggests increased strength and rebelliousness,
yet for somewhat selfish reasons. I share Rose’s view that Martha’s involvement with
Adolph has a narcissistic quality to it. Yet more importantly, I see Martha’s interest in
him as an early example of progressive ideology and action. Her ability to reject social
conformity, retain open-mindedness, and connect with individuals in a more idealistic,
romantic and altruistic capacity is fully apparent in this teenage relationship and
foreshadows her transcendent relationships in the final volume of the series. By choosing
Adolph, Martha resists being “occupied” by the Sports Club and controlled by their
conservative rationale. Thus, she vacates her position as “just one of the girls,” and in
doing so, continues on her path toward “something different.”
19 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 19. 20 Lessing, Martha Quest, 245.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61
But this desire to transcend tradition cedes to Martha’s ingrained sensibility to
marry and start a family. Encouraged and shaped by society to adopt conventional
female roles, she acquiesces despite having revolutionary intentions. Martha Quest,
published in 1952, is Lessing’s historic snapshot of early twentieth century society and its
prescribed social roles for women. Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex
published in 1953, parallels Lessing’s viewpoint of marriage as inescapable tradition:
“Marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by society, [and] it is still true
that most women are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being.”21
Indeed, Martha finds herself speaking differently than she thinks. Displaying
contradictory actions, she rejects the social set’s traditional apartheid perspectives, only
to yield to marital fantasies at the age of eighteen. As a member of the Sports Club and
while dating her first lover, Adolph King, she speaks of acquiescence and marriage:
“Why shouldn’t we get married?” she asked, her heart sinking at the thought of it. He laughed at her, and smoothed her hair back, gently, in a paternal way, and said she was crazy. Then, a suggestion of cruelty returning, he held her close around her throat, so that it slightly choked her, and said that she would marry a good city father and become very respectable and have five nice, well-brought-up children. She shook herself free, and said that she would rather die.22
In this passage, the contradictions are captured quite clearly, as Martha speaks the
familiar, feminine script and then immediately recoils from her own words. Indeed, she
seems to be play-acting, and Adolph calls her “crazy” for adopting such traditional roles.
21 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated and edited byH. M. ParsMey (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1949;New York and Toront: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 425. 22 Lessing, Martha Quest, 253.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 62
in this regard, “madness” is equated with Martha’s conformity as much as with her
naivete. With Adolph’s prophecy, Lessing foreshadows Martha’s inclination toward
submission. He predicts Martha will marry a civil service tenant and have five children,
and his comment foreshadows the violence that manifests in Martha’s future, as Douglas,
her civil servant husband, ultimately resorts to physical abuse and threatens her life.
Martha’s relationship with Adolph comes to an abrupt end when she recognizes his
investment in objectifying and possessing her. Interrogating her about her sexual history
and defaming her character publicly with declarations of their sexual intimacy, Adolph
makes a habit of stalking Martha and represents the perverse romantic lover that she must
learn to repudiate.
Briefly, Martha becomes involved with two of the “wolves” of her social set:
Perry, whose “big paws”23 are both enticing and revolting, and Douglas Knowell, whom
she eventually marries. While she rejects lovemaking with Perry because it becomes his
own “self-absorbed rite”24 from which she feels both excluded and objectified, she seeks
union with Douglas, who seems to demonstrate progressive politics and reads The New
Statesman, Resisting Perry’s insincere marriage proposal—“I like you, kid, I like you,
let’s get hitched”25—she fails to entirely escape convention, marrying Douglas despite
her intuition that the marriage will not last. Lessing implicates war hysteria as a driving
force behind Martha’s marriage. The narrator notes, “There was a new, dangerous spirit
23 Lessing, Martha Quest, 234. 24 Ibid., 235. 25 Ibid., 236.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 63
in the Sports Club.. ..[T]his new wind blowing, this disruptive force was so strong that it
even seemed proper and normal that three couples should suddenly get married.”26
Ironically, the two, Martha and Douglas, do not “know well” enough to see the
foreboding signs that characterize their relationship, their irresponsible group of friends,
and the youthful society at-large. Despite mixed feelings, Martha does not listen to her
inner voice that recognizes, “there was something mean about it, something
commonplace.”27 Likewise, there is evidence of discomfort in both of them with regards
to Martha’s imitation of the ancient, female script: “the maternal note was back in her
voice, so that they both felt uncomfortable. It was a discord in their relationship.”28
Despite herself, Martha marries against her earliest declarations of freedom and disdain
for conventional arrangements.
Facing the futility of her employment situation, Martha sees marriage as a
counter-alternative to occupational progress. Not advancing in her career, she looks for
success in other ways, of which marriage is deemed a conventional success and priority.
She is told that, by choosing Douglas for a husband, she has “done well for herself.”
Marriage is Martha’s temporary means of escaping professional failure-—or even
advancement. She contemplates “serious study” at the Polytechnic but, resisting
professional occupancy and commitment, she chooses the more conventional path toward
marriage and family. Indeed, the career option seems less sustainable for Martha; as de
26 Lessing, Martha Quest, 229. 27 Ibid., 296. 28 Ibid., 297. 29 Ibid., 305.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 64
Beauvoir maintains: “The young girl’s freedom of choice has always been much
restricted.. ..[Mjarriage is her only means of support and the sole justification of her
existence.”30 As de Beauvoir implies, her choices are made based on limited options.
Furthermore, for Martha Quest, marriage becomes a means of resisting familial
occupancy. Once she and Douglas decide to marry, Martha uses the marriage as a
weapon of defense against her parents and the values of their generation. She informs
them of her decision to marry in a pithy letter that states her plans to marry “a man in the
civil service.”31 Glaringly absent from such letter is Martha’s interest in what her parents
think; rather, she tells them instead of consulting them regarding her marital plans.
Moreover, though she conveys resolve regarding her decision, in actuality, she feels quite
conflicted:
On the following morning she woke in a panic. She told herself she was mad, or rather, had been, for now she was quite sane. She did not want to marry Douglas, she did not want to marry at all....She told herself that she would ring him from the office and tell him they had both made a terrible mistake.32
What she remains invested in, however, is the notion of rebellion. Ironically, she
believes her intimacy with Douglas directly challenges her parents’ conservatism.
Refusing to admit that she is contradicting her earlier sentiments against marriage, she
believes marriage and sex will liberate her from her parents’ legacy:
These people were heirs, whether they liked it or not, of the English Puritan tradition, where sex is either something to be undergone.. .or
’° de Beavoir, The Second Sex, 427. 31 Lessing, Martha Quest, 304. 32 Ibid.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 65
something to be shut out, or something to be faced and overcome. At least two generations of rebels have gone armed to the combat with books on sex to give them assurance they did not feel; for both Martha and Douglas, making love when and how they pleased was positively a flag of independence in itself, a red and defiant flag, waving in the faces of the older generation.33
Mrs. Quest, angry at her daughter’s second enactment of independence, views
Martha’s liberal sexuality and rash marriage announcement as immoral and insubordinate
acts by a daughter of “proper” Victorian upbringing. The narrator describes Martha’s
sexuality as a form of rebellion against conservatism: “In Martha’s case, it worked like
this: her mother had a rooted dislike for all matters sexual; therefore, it was a matter of
pride for Martha not only to be attractive sexually, but to be good in bed.,,u Thus, by
marrying Douglas, Martha rejects familial occupancy (or, from her parents’ perspective,
support). She thinks of marriage as a door that will enclose them in idyllic, romantic
love.35 For her, it becomes a symbol of adulthood, of a life away from her parents and
the veld, especially since the marriage announcement elicits outrage and condemnation
from them. Her mother responds with a lyrical tirade of “every sort of abuse” and
accusations of immorality, positive affirmation that Martha’s rebellious action has
succeeded. Defiantly, Martha takes Douglas, like a newly acquired possession, to her
parents’ house for what she sarcastically calls “inspection” and physically “braces
herself’ for the anticipated conflict, determined that “she was going to fight and win.”
33 Lessing, Martha Quest, 320. 34 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 365 (Lessing’s emphasis). 35 Lessing, Martha Quest, 308. 36 Ibid., 312.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 66
The language of violence, resistance, and combat reflects Martha’s adamancy in rejecting
her parents; yet in resisting them, she commits herself to a marriage of imperilment.
As with Donovan, Adolph, and Perry, Martha aligns herself with Douglas in a
selfish yet romantically idealistic way, against perpetuators of convention (in this
instance, her parents) despite being objectified by him. While love “beckons to her like a
promise,”37 she also discovers that Douglas “feasts [on] her beauty” and engages in “self-
absorbed adoration” of her. She feels “excluded” from the pleasures of sexual intimacy
as well as detached from her own body.38 Consequently, her rebellious intentions
concerning marriage work against her. Marrying with rebellion in mind, she fails to
realize that, up until her engagement, she has successfully resisted without serious
repercussions. Once the marriage is set, the circle motif (like a wedding ring) resonates
as a legally inescapable insignia, as Martha falls into a pattern of being elated and
depressed—a cycle that continues throughout her engagement and marriage. She “goes
on the tide,” drinks herself into elation and marital stupor, and then suffers from brief
moments of conscientious despondency:
Martha was completely swept away by it all. There were occasional cold moments when she thought that she must somehow, even now, check herself on the fatal slope towards marriage, somewhere atthe back o f her mindwas the belief that she would never get married, there would be time to change her mind later.39
37 Lessing, Martha Quest, 296. 38 Ibid., 299. 39 Lessing, Martha Quest, 307 (emphasis mine).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 67
In this manner, Lessing goes to great lengths to describe Martha’s conflicted feelings and
the warring ideologies that compete for priority in her consciousness. Martha is, in one
sense, “occupied” by the romantic ideals; her consciousness is taken over by the promise
of a perfect union. Despite her intuition and premonitions regarding divorce, and despite
the fact that a sense of marital impermanence always lingers in her consciousness, Martha
marries Douglas. Her prophetic sensibilities not fully developed or acknowledged at this
young age, Martha acquiesces to convention and hopes for a better future, knowing that
this is one stage of a process of becoming “something different” that must be gone
through. However, she resists sexual occupancy by cultivating escapist notions,
eventually retaliating against Douglas’ oppressive behavior by leaving him.
Capturing the brutality of post-war as well as what contemporary readers might
identify as a postmodern existence, Lessing uses multiple examples and brutal language
to capture the social violence that pervades Martha’s environments, including her
residences with Douglas. Depicted by Lessing as the obstacle to freedom and to personal
and marital happiness, violence is part of several relationships within the series. It
characterizes the Knowell relationship, as Lessing uses this relationship to critique the
institutionalized flaws of matrimony. Despite their gratifying courtship, Martha fears
marriage; she has a sense of being “like a prisoner before an execution” and wishes to
survive the “unpleasant if not dangerous operation”40 that is marriage. Moreover, despite
Martha’s consciously “unorthodox” wedding, the ceremony is invaded, even taken over,
40 Lessing, Martha Quest, 319.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 68
by Mrs. Quest who, consumed with the idea ofhaving her daughter “properly married,”
intrusively inserts herself into the wedding ceremony. Martha’s desire to resist familial
occupancy by getting married thus proves to be futile. As Rubenstein explains, Martha
“moves from one enclosure into another,”41 from one familial occupancy to another,
when she trades her parents’ family for a family with Douglas and eventually, Caroline.
While she longs “for the moment when it would no longer have anything to do with
her,”42 she longs for escape; just as she commits, she longs to rebel. But the inevitability
of the marriage leaves her defenseless. I share Rubenstein’s view that the combination of
fatality and determinism undercuts Martha’s struggling consciousness.43
While the autonomous spirit does not leave Martha, she contends with the legal
ties that favor the husband and legitimate sexual occupancy and possession. Martha’s
body becomes a battlefield upon which she and Douglas fight for dominance. When
returning home after a disappointing, inactive stint in the war, Douglas finds Martha
engaged in meetings and entertaining male company—actions which he believes
contradict her responsibilities as a wife and mother, her housekeeping, and her caretaking
of their by-then three year-old daughter, Caroline. Angry and full of feelings of
inadequacy because he made it close to the warfront but never engaged in actual combat,
Douglas brings the battlefield home with him. He wants to participate in war somewhere,
and after three years of marriage, Martha becomes the enemy. Critiquing the generations
41 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 41. 42 Lessing, Martha Quest, 308. 43 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 44.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 69
of wax, Lessing portrays marriage as an institution steeped in violence and contention.
The narrator notes, “The hatred between them was so strong it frightened them both.”44
Douglas, unable to make the adjustments necessary in order to leave the battlefield
behind and reenter their home, attempts to dominate the domestic sphere by using
physical force and accusatory language. When Martha expresses her desire to quit their
marriage, he treats her like a war deserter and threatens to punish her, imprisoning her in
their marriage by imprisoning her in her body—hoping to make her pregnant again.
Furious at her use of a contraceptive device, he forcefully attempts to claim her sexually;
he tells her, “I’ll hide that damned thing one of these nights, and that’ll make up your
mind for you,”45 and later pins her down while saying, “I’ll give you another baby—
that’ll put an end to this nonsense.”46
Thus, Martha finds herself trying to resist sexual occupancy—being detained
from independence by legalized male domination. Her “sex,” her female identity,
becomes a burden within the marital arrangement that neither she nor Douglas want any
longer. Increasingly chauvinistic, he enacts within their home the views he learned
within the realm of battle. Encouraging a Greek comrade to resist marriage, he says,
“You don’t want to get married—what do you want to get married for? .. .Nothing but
bitches, all of them.”47 However, by refusing to have another child, Martha resists male
chauvinism; she chooses not to succumb to the narrow sociological and biological
44 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 314. 45 Ibid., 332. 46 Ibid., 414. 47 Ibid., 299.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 70
definitions of womanhood, maintaining her adolescent desire to become “something
altogether different.”
Unable to find solace within the home, Martha goes elsewhere, only to discover
that she is isolated from the female community, her contemporaries as well as the women
of her mother’s generation, since her opinions of marriage, once again, are deemed
unorthodox and rebellious by the majority. Mrs. Talbot, an elderly matron and neighbor
to whom Martha turns for advice and comfort, only supports Mrs. Quest’s conventional
notions that Martha be “properly married.” Indeed, Martha views herself as a victim of
an overwhelming conspiracy: Doctor Stem, Stella, Mrs. Quest, Mrs. Talbot, Mrs.
Knowell—all force her to acquiesce to social customs, even though she remains unhappy
and ultimately demeaned in the marriage with Douglas. Mrs. Talbot, complimenting
Martha on her “proper marriage,” elicits a negative response from Martha: “But Mrs.
Talbot, I’m not properly married. I’m bored, bored, bored, you can’t imagine. I can’t
bear it. I haven’t anything in common with Douglas, and I’ve been unhappy all the
time.”48 When Mrs. Talbot proceeds to list the virtues of the marriage, including their
house, Caroline, and the prospects of a nice future, Martha disagrees: “I think [Douglas]
mad, I hate him. I hate everything about him!”49
Although it takes Martha a while to leave Douglas, she paradoxically gathers
momentum from his accelerated outrage. Douglas’ abusive rituals of ceaseless taunting
and violence toward her while she sleeps become increasingly unbearable, culminating in
48 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 417. 49 Ibid.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 71
his unthinkable threat to shoot both her and Caroline. Martha considers her alternatives
without the benefit of receiving confirmation for what she feels to be her only suitable
option—leaving him. Blaming traditional literature for perpetuating silence about the
reality of domestic violence during this time period, the narrator says, “Not in her own
experience, nor in any book, had she found the state Douglas was now in.”50 Thus, what
Martha faces is the unprecedented action—leaving her husband and daughter—and she
must do this without literary or social models. Lessing critiques the women who
perpetuate the systemic oppression of other women by remaining silent about
unhappiness, abuse, disillusionment. Martha Quest’s resistance to subordination in
marriage and her refusal to occupy the position that many women before her held
becomes a threat to Douglas’ mother as well as her own. According to the narrator,
Mrs. Knowell lay awake night after night, looking into the darkness, crying steadily....[S]he felt betrayed by Martha. Her own life was made to look null and meaningless because Martha would not submit to what women always had submitted to .51
In concordance with Nancy Porter, who affirms Lessing’s reclamation of female
experiences and “revision of silenced history”52 in Children of Violence, I claim that
Lessing catalogues the generations of marital violence followed by female silence in
order to depict the overwhelming need for a revision of the female experience, including
the faulty (often premature) acquiescence to marriage. In effect, she validates Martha’s
50 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 433. 51 Ibid., 435. 52 Nancy Porter, “Silenced History— ‘Children o f Violence’ and ‘The Golden Notebook ,World Literature Written in English 12, University o f Texas, Arlington (1973), 161.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 72
Quest for readers who cannot avert their eyes or their consciousnesses from the
oppressive descriptions of marriage and violence in the novel. Lessing makes a
compelling case for Martha’s desire to get beyond the conventional, oppressive
institution of marriage, as well as for her loathing of the older female community and the
women of her mother’s generation who perpetuates the abuses of marriage through
silence and the insistence to conform. Including Mrs. Knowell’s admission, which
parallels Martha’s experiences, Lessing communicates what Porter calls “personal
histories” as well as the larger, collective female experience. She makes a case for a
“new woman” model by offering Mrs. Quest as a vicious example of internalized sexism,
since Mrs. Quest ceases to defend her daughter against Douglas, even after Martha
confesses to his spousal abuse. After running to her parents’ home for what she considers
safety, Martha finds herself admitting her victimization to a mother who
unsympathetically tells her, “Well, you deserve it, Now go back to bed.”54 Perhaps if
Mrs. Quest has been a supportive mediator and model for her daughter, Martha’s escape
from Douglas and Caroline would not have been necessary. But, left to fend for herself
and make decisions on her own, Martha chooses the solitary path, defiant and
unrepentant.55 With two suitcases and her books, her only other companions, she divests
herself physically as well as emotionally from sexual occupancy with Douglas.
53 Porter, “Silenced History,” 161. 54 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 444. 55 Lessing,A Proper Marriage, 435.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 73
But Martha’s escape is only temporary, for she finds herself in the midst of an
incessant battle for autonomy even after she leaves Douglas. Becoming fully engaged in
the Communist Party, she and the groups members engage in scathing personal
criticisms, thinking that brutal honesty leads to greater self and collective awareness. But
Martha finds herself, along with her other female comrades, pummeled by the male
comrades’ attack on their femininity. Discussing the conflict between being a woman
and being a revolutionary, Martha and her comrade, Jasmine Cohen, espouse frustration
with the ways in which their sexuality is deemed antithetical to Party ideology. Jasmine
laments, “Because we wear lipstick and nail varnish.. .they say that we are corrupted by
the emphasis capitalist society places on sex.”56 Indeed, sexual intimacy becomes
increasingly complicated for Martha, who feels herself caught in a battle over the right to
be sexually attractive and to control her own body. When she becomes gravely ill from
over-exertion in Party affairs and ceases, therefore, to be her strongest self, she feels
“claimed” by her male comrades who come to visit her:
Good Lord, she thought, [Jimmy’s] taken me over. He’s responsible for me. And through the wall on the other side Anton was talking her over with Dr. Stem. An old feeling of being hemmed in and disposed of prickled through her. I hate it all, she thought wildly, not knowing what she hated or why she was imprisoned. I wish to God everyone would leave me alone. She had a nightmare feeling of sliding helpless into danger.
Lessing depicts the inescapable presence of male domination and female subordination
by describing the ways in which the “battle of the sexes” permeates even allegedly
56 Lessing,A Ripple from the Storm, 118. 57 Ibid., 125 (emphasis mine).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 74
progressive social circles. Anton Hesse, fellow comrade and local Party leader,
ultimately wins possession of Martha, despite the ambivalent feelings he elicits from her:
“She felt him to be logically right; she felt him to be inhuman and wrong.”58 In addition
to feeling “less than free”59 while dating him, she discovers that their sexual relations are
plagued by violence and displeasure: “The act of sex was short and violent, so short she
was uninvolved.”60
This sense of being “uninvolved” that is a parody of romantic commitment,
intimacy and fulfillment characterizes the Hesse marriage. Selflessly, in a complete
reversal of her selfish decision to marry Douglas, Martha marries Anton following his
request for assistance under “special circumstances.”61 He, not wanting to be sent back to
Germany as an expatriate, asks Martha to legitimize his existence in the Southern African
colony through marriage. Repeating her mistake once again, Martha acquiesces and finds
fy herself married in a “loveless stalemate,” such that she is legally but not
psychologically or emotionally connected to Anton. As Rubenstein observes, Martha is
caught in a kind of “existential trap in which the only means of defining and establishing
the self is through a series of negations that eventually result in a chronic and nihilistic
self-division.”63 Enfolded, in a sense, by narrative repetition, Martha seems incapable of
escape and deterred from her original desire to claim freedom and autonomy. She is
58 Lessing,A Ripple from the Storm, 131. 59 Ibid., 201. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 235. 62 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 63. 63 Ibid., 64.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 75
“entextualized,” a term Gayle Greene uses to describe Martha’s imprisonment within
romantic textual myths that do not reflect her own reality.64 Additionally, however,
Martha is entextualized within the Children o f Violence series. By the end of the third
volume, and within her third interpersonal living environment, Martha finds herself stuck
in the same scenario: mentally seeking liberation but physically caught in a web of
marital and sexual possessiveness.
Martha finds herself facing a past and a personal history of repetition with only
glimpses of revolution, as part of her participation in ancient female patterns of
experience that lack originality, creativity and pleasure—all of which she craves. As de
Beauvoir observes:
Formerly, when sheltered by her family, the young girl used what liberty she had in revolt and hope for change, in gaining marriage itself; now she is married, and before her there is no other future, this is to be her whole lot on earth. She knows just what her tasks are to be: the same as her mother’s. Day after day the same rites will be repeated. As a girl she had nothing, but in dreams she hoped for everything. Now she has her bit of the earth, and she thinks in anguish: ‘Only this, forever! Forever this husband, this dwelling.’ She has nothing to await, nothing important to wish for.65
Both Lessing and de Beauvoir capture the despondency and lack of alternatives available
to women prior to and in the mid-twentieth century: women like Martha Quest who are,
in a sense, deadlocked between eras—on the cusp of radical change in terms of women’s
liberation, yet still caught in the repetition of the past. Awaiting a liberating future and
faced with a loathsome reality, Martha is observed as being “pale and withdrawn, sitting
64 Gayle Greene,Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 39. 65 de Beauvoir,The Second Sex, 458 (de Beauvoir’s emphasis).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 76
against the wall with her arms locked around her knees”66 on her wedding night with
Anton, longing for rescue; she longs for something other than the familial and sexual
occupancy she has known.
In the fourth volume of the series67, Martha meets Thomas Stem and experiences
the opposite of sexual occupancy—true intimacy and mutually-aggrandizing union within
a unique, albeit extramarital relationship. Thomas is married, as is Martha; in each
other’s company, the two find reprieve from their respective marriages. Instrumentally,
he helps Martha move past her debilitating experiences with men as well as beyond
conventional womanhood toward a visionary model of female autonomy in which the
“self’ is not egotistical, isolated or subjugated by others; rather, the self exists
conterminously with others in equitable, not hierarchal, relationships. As a Polish Jew
and gardener, Thomas empathizes with her sense of isolation as well as her desire for
growth above and beyond the constraining traditions. Through their sexual intimacy,
they psychologically and physically inhabit an elevated, sublime space in which Martha
is both reborn and positively reorganized in terms of acquiring new dimensions to her
consciousness.68 Facing self-dissolution as a consequence of trying to reconcile her lofty
ambitions with oppressive social roles, Martha “waits for a man” to “unify her elements,
a man. ..like a roof, or like a fire burning in the centre of an empty space.”69 Thomas
enters her seemingly abysmal life as fellow Party member, teacher and friend; he makes
66 Lessing,A Ripple from the Storm, 261. 61 Lessing, Landlocked. 68 Rubenstein,The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing, 116-7. 69 Lessing,Landlocked, 41.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 77
her laugh in addition to helping her understand the wrongs of society. According to him,
war creates frustrated romances;70 while the two of them form a bond that counters, in
many positive ways, the loveless environment of the city during wartime, their
connection ultimately cannot sustain the pandemic of violence, death, and loss:
They felt as if they might never see each other again after this afternoon, and that while they touched each other, kissed, they held in that moment everything the other was, had been, ever could be. They felt half-savage with the pain of loss.71
Yet Thomas leaves Martha with gifts—telepathy, acute sensitivity, and strength—
that positively contest the immense sense of loss and ultimately enable her to transcend
societal destruction. Among the destructive impulses, she faces Anton as a “legal
possessor” 79 of her body. The narrator notes that Martha’s “feelings about Anton had
gone beyond anything she could understand. Like ‘the circle of women,’ ‘her husband’
provoke[s] in her only the enemy, feelings so ancient and, it seemed, autonomous, they
were beyond her control.”73 By communicating with Thomas, Martha is able to move
beyond the sexual battle with Anton; one year of intense, pleasurable experience with
Thomas enables her to stretch herself psychologically, emotionally and physically,
beyond loveless existence into meaningful, passionate love that neither fully
70 Lessing, Landlocked, 112. 71 Ibid., 128. 72 Ibid., 141. 73 Ibid., 140.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 78
comprehends: “She and Thomas loved each other. Whatever that meant. And whatever
it meant, it was the most sure, the most real thing that happened to her.”74
When Thomas chooses to give in to the social undertow of destruction and
violence by pursuing conflict with an inner antagonist from his own past, he becomes a
model for Martha; his positive-tumed-negative experience crystallizes Martha’s
resistance and helps her define that which she must defeat—internalized violence—by
projecting internal love outward, into the collective community. Thus through Thomas,
she confronts the violence that threatens to overtake every positive and optimistic fiber of
her being. Lessing reveals the distressing reality of ceaseless violence: “that part of
Martha and of Thomas was twisted and warped, was part of a twist and a damage. She
could no more disassociate herself from the violence done her, done by her, than a
tadpole can live out of water.”75 From obscurity in a Southern African village, Thomas
writes letters and messages which ultimately reach Martha in the city and foretell of the
madness that awaits her. In this respect, he provides her with a revolutionary text that,
unlike the traditional literature she values, provides her with an applicable strategy for
confronting her experiences. When she leaves for England, she carries Thomas with her
through his manuscripts, offering a compelling sense of connection that revises the earlier
volumes’ depictions of Martha in isolation. As Rubenstein explains, the character
74 Lessing,Landlocked, 198. 75 Ibid., 243.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 79
interaction between Martha and Thomas is a “break through” experience for the
protagonist.76
Martha takes her newfound capacities and heightened awareness of interpersonal
connection and love to England—the place to which she and many other characters
within the novel collectively dream of escaping (among them: Mrs. Quest, Douglas
Knowell, Thomas Stem). By the beginning of the final volume, The Four-Gated City,
Martha, by now a middle-aged woman, experiences unprecedented freedom as well as
intense loneliness. There is no sexual occupancy in the opening scenes of the novel as
Martha—homeless, friendless, and selfless—confronts only a de-centered self. Walking
nomadically around London without the desire to work, without contact friends or family,
and without any defined place, Martha completely rejects traditional notions of existence
and, like the war-tom landscape around her, needs rebuilding. Her quest takes her to the
residence of a man named only Jack, who barely survived his post in a minesweeper
during the war and who offers another negative model against which Martha defines her
existence. Able to tap into “wavelengths of hatred,”77 he presents Martha with a notion
of sexual intimacy that threatens to dismantle her autonomy altogether because it
involves violence, prostitution, and sadomasochism. For Jack, “Sex [is] the slow
building up, over hour after hour, from the moment of meeting the woman he [is] to make
love with, a power, a force, which when held and controlled, took both up and over and
away from any ordinary consciousness into—an area where no words could be of any
76 Lessing,Landlocked, 123. 77 Lessing,The Four-Gated City, 60.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 80
use.”78 Thus, while he desires a transcendent experience to counter his recollections of
war and bodily injury, he seeks to control the power of intimacy himself. Described as
someone with a “gnawing hunger” that he wishes to pacify through sex, Jack has both
eating and psychological disorders that ultimately make him incompatible with Martha,
who does not want to be consumed.
Jack can be viewed as another manifestation of the male “w olf’ in the narrative.
A kind of reincarnation of figures from Martha’s past, he resembles Douglas and Perry
from the Sports Club. Jack has the negative capacity to devour women. His dream
involves a perversion of fidelity; he invites Martha to become “one of his girls,” but she
fears the self-annihilating role: “She was in a panic. Funk. This was a danger point in
her life: she was being taken over. Had been taken over? Jack’s voice, again measured:
O f t l ‘If you come over now, Martha....” Lessing thus illustrates Martha’s isolation,
transient living, and brief occupation by a sexual predator in London—the place she has
believed, her entire life, holds the promise of a free and fulfilling life. She contrasts
Martha’s desires—the ideal, four-gated city—and her reality—bomb-stricken, depraved
England—to show the disparity between positive and negative human capacities.
Critiquing war, Lessing describes a landscape synonymous with T.S. Eliot’s “The
Wasteland,” in which everything is disconnected, even demoniac, as a consequence of
militaristic invasions, genocide, and poverty. Jack, a figurative product of violence,
78 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 61. 79 Sarah Sceats, “Eating, Starving and the Body: Doris Lessing and Others,” Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 80 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 95.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 81
enables Martha to confront the full knowledge of human destructiveness and therefore, to
solidify and affirm her pursuit of “something different.” Ultimately rejected by Martha
after several months of inconstant contact, Jack completely succumbs to violence; he
01 becomes “cruel, hard, driving; all domination and hurt.” Partially to escape Jack’s
OT perverted dream of sexual occupancy—of multiple, chained, destitute women —Martha
enters the Coldridge residence. Encountering him several years later in public, Martha
notices his complete abandonment of morality; like a demoniac or vampiric figure, he is
completely devoted to breaking the female will. As he goes “in search of fresh prey in
0 0 the park,” she recalls his sly tactics of turning women into concubines and prostitutes:
“He could only enjoy the process of breaking down.. ..He used these techniques, which
were identical with those used in torture; and in certain armies....”
Martha, not wanting imprisonment in a sadomasochist nightmare, rather
desperately enters the Coldridge home in search of employment. Before long, she finds
herself involved in an unorthodox “tripartite” sexual and emotional union of intimacy.
Mark and Lynda Coldridge have a sexless marriage as a result of Lynda’s fear and what
o z r Rubenstein observes and terms as “abnormal consciousness.” Lynda tells Martha,
“Look at him [Mark]. He wants me in a prison. He doesn’t want me to have my
81 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 403. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 432. 84 Ibid. 85 Dagmar Bamouw, “Disorderly Company: From The Golden Notebook to The Four-Gated C ityf Contemporary Women Novelists, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1977), 47. 86 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 9.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 82
freedom. He wants me cured,” to which Mark responds, “Lynda, Lynda, this is
Mark!”87—as if he wishes her to see him and not the conventional husband-monster she
sees. Martha finds herself mediating the ancient “battle of the sexes” on various physical,
emotional and psychological levels. Lynda and Mark, representatives of Martha’s own
generation of dysfunctional marriage partners, cannot live or sleep in the same space;
Lynda is hospitalized for four years and Mark waits for her to be “cured” so that she can
re-inhabit the house as his wife—a role that Lynda rejects entirely. Martha, on the other
hand, turns to Mark for sexual refuge, and the two create a “cave of soft, protective
dark.”88 Thus, Mark functions as both the husband who waits for the conventional wife
(who never comes) and the intellectual lover who, like Martha, desires an ideal city
community of love. Lessing juxtaposes the two alternatives explicitly with this trio:
marriage that debilitates versus extramarital relationship that fulfills. Martha helps
Lynda, her character-double or alter ego, remain unoccupied—free of conventional wife
and mother roles—and therefore, free of the divisive qualities of both that Lynda fears.
She also teaches Mark and his son, Francis, how to accept a radically different notion of
family. Thus, Lessing seems to be suggesting that the sex roles need revisioning;
transcendent experiences between individuals occur when they are able to commune as
persons of free will as opposed to being imprisoned in a hierarchal relationship of
oppressor and oppressed.
87 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 124. 88 Ibid., 284.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 83
With Mark, Martha experiences a kind of sexual synthesis and sanctuary, as
opposed to subjugation or sexual occupancy. The narrator describes an idyllic union
formed out of the necessity to survive and combat not only external violence but internal
negativity:
The two lay behind locked doors, two bodies that exploded into each other.... A silent, desperate act of—survival? It seemed so.. ..They lay in each other’s arms, their faces running with tears of their shared tension, and rested, under the maps of a poisoned world, in a silent house.89
In this passage, Martha and Mark violate the official union (between himself and Lynda)
within what is the alleged sanctity of the marriage. Challenging all notions of traditional
romance, Lessing revises the notions of intimate union. On the one hand, “a bomb
explodes when a protagonist [tries] to get outside of traditional roles, as Frederick Karl
suggests.90 Yet this explosion may also be beneficial, and Lessing offers her readers a
portrait of lovers that is devoid of occupancy, possessiveness, subordination and other
restrictions. Molly Hite suggests that Lessing uses repeated “violations of coherence”
throughout The Four-Gated City, and I think this is one of them. Exploding the
conventional male-female relationship within the context of bombed London becomes
Lessing’s way of constructing an alternative vision that, according to Hite, creates room
for new possibilities.91 Thus, Martha Quest ultimately transcends sexual occupancy; after
Mark Coldridge, she does not engage in another sexual relationship. Sydney Janet
89 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 398. 90 Karl, “Doris Lessing in the Sixties,” 55. 91 Molly Hite, The Other Side o f the Story,6 8.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 84
Kaplan is correct when she maintains that “Martha’s quest takes her out of her body.”92
She articulates that Martha’s “rebellion is carried out through her body” since “through
her body (sex, pregnancy, childbirth), profound discoveries occur.”93 Ultimately, Lessing
illustrates a transcendent consciousness in Children o f Violence: Martha reclaims her
body as a function of reclaiming her restored mind. While Martha works to rescue her
female body from successive male takeovers, she ultimately learns to inhabit a more
cosmic view of the self, in which “the mind is empowered”94 but also limitless—free and
not singularly contained within the confines of the body. The female body, in effect, is
no longer “occupied”; Martha reclaims it and then converts to an extrasensory, telepathic,
intuitive existence, leaving the physical as well as sexual behind.
92 Sydney Janet Kaplan,Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel (Urbana: University o f Illinois Press, 1975),143. 93 Ibid., 142. 94 Ibid., 143.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 5
AGAINST RESIDENTIAL OCCUPANCY
Throughout the initial volumes of Children o f Violence, Martha Quest learns that
it is easier for her to be self-contained than interconnected and intimate with others.
When she lives with people, including her parents and husbands, she finds it difficult to
share space, physically and psychically. Lessing presents a correlation between spatial
environments and interpersonal relationships, most of which, at least in the first volumes,
require Martha’s subordination. Alternating between feeling resistant and autonomous,
acquiescent and subordinate, Martha ultimately resists such oppressive environments and
residences. Her response to these residences—her desire, for the most part, to resist fully
occupying them—demonstrates her preference for mobility, freedom, and autonomy. Yet
by presenting unconventional, liberating living arrangements in the later volumes,
Lessing offers an alternative model of spatial arrangements in which interpersonal
sharing takes precedence over female servitude. Thus Martha, by challenging and
transcending traditional notions of female housekeeping, mothering, and subordination,
ultimately finds a “home base” that allays her restless transience and pursuit of a “real
home”; she finds a home-basement that enables her to confront unknown aspects of her
consciousness, an experience that ultimately leads her to self-fulfillment and self-
actualization.
85
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 86
Amidst the destruction of Martha’s residences, including her parents’ mud house
in the veld, her loft with Thomas Stem in the forest outside of the city in Zambesia, and
the Coldridge home in London, Lessing offers a critique of the ways in which women
might liberate themselves from the various relational and residential confinements
ascribed to them by society. Yet even the most supportive environments, such as
Thomas’ loft and the Coldridge house, are ultimately dismantled in the series, which
seems to be Lessing’s assessment of the overwhelming destructive, inhospitable society.
The dilapidated buildings and the apocalyptic ending of The Four-Gated City suggest that
society, including its residences, must be revisioned as well as reconstructed. Martha, in
“going through” various residential locales and repeatedly relocating in her effort to find
“something different,” demonstrates the reality that nothing suffices, and that new
constructs that are free of possessiveness, brute force, and substandard situations must be
found. Ultimately, Martha begins and ends in nature—in the veld and on an island—but
even nature, the freest form of residence, lacks complete security and liberation as a
result of the human tendencies toward war, violence, and various “isms,” including
sexism and racism. Lessing takes Martha through various residences, showing her living
in them only to repudiate them with greater hopes of obtaining some place better. In this
regard, Martha resists “residential occupancy”—she ultimately fights for better literal and
figurative living conditions by vacating dystopic environments.
Even when under her parents’ roof and subjected to the conventional notions of
protection and authority, Martha finds alternative means of living—of not occupying the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 87
assigned space she is allotted. In fact, she spends most of her time outdoors where there
are expanses of open terrain. Daydreaming and looking up toward the sky, she displays
early signs of imaginative capacity and a fundamental desire to ascend to greater heights.
According to Gaston Bachelard in his classic The Poetics of Space, such behavior is
proof of the ways in which the human imagination “augments the values of reality.”1
Such an imagination is unique to young Martha Quest, however, because she defines
herself imaginatively and literally against the reality of her “first universe.” Early m
Martha Quest, Martha sits outside underneath a tree in defiance against her parents, her
'X ... mind “swimming and shaking like clearing water.” Claiming freedom intrinsic to nature
as opposed to her parents’ hut, she sits
under the tree, whose roots were hard under her back, like a second spine, and [she] looked up through the leaves to the sky, which shone in a bronze clamour of light. She ripped the fleshy leaves between her fingers, and thought again of her mother.. ,.[S]he would not be bitter and nagging and dissatisfied like her mother.4
She rejects her parents’ home, made of “grass, mud, and stamped dung,”5 in favor of
imaginatively constructing an ideal residence—the youthful yet detailed four-gated city.
Bachelard suggests that the human imagination “builds walls” of comfort and protection,
and such is the case with Martha’s adolescent, idyllic formulation of a city that unifies
nature with human architecture, black with white, young with old:
1 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics o f Space, translated by Maria Jolas, foreword by Etienne Gilson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 3. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 Lessing, Martha Quest, 21. 4 Ibid., 20. 5 Ibid., 25.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 88
There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and the stunted trees, a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its falling flower-bordered terraces. There were splashing fountains, and the sound of flutes; and its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together; and these groups of elders paused, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of the children.6
Sharply contrasted against rural Zambesia, which is divided along racial,
religious, and socioeconomic lines, Martha’s ideal city reflects her imaginative
capabilities and represents her desire to reject what she feels are the unendurable
conditions of her parents’ house. Viewing the Quest family home as uncongenial,
Martha seeks delight away from the house just as she ultimately, at the age of seventeen,
seeks pleasure and autonomy apart from them. Martha’s earliest sentiments of pleasure
are intertwined with her voyages away from home: “She was happy because she was, for
the moment, quite free; she was sad because before long she would reach home.”7 Thus
her first residential space or “shell,” as Bachelard describes it, requires shedding.
Bachelard notes that “Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at
work. It mows and ploughs.”8 By envisioning “the four-gated city,” Martha “mows and
ploughs” her parents’ mud hut, rejecting the primitive space for an elevated, fortified,
even transcendent space.
Acquiring a defensive mentality towards her family and their Zambesian home,
Martha loathes the simplicity and simple-mindedness associated with both. In her mind,
6 Lessing, Martha Quest, 21. 7 Ibid., 72. 8 Bachelard, The Poetics o f Space, 12.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 89
“The house had been built as temporary, and was still temporary.” 9 In this regard, the
hut is easily outgrown and Martha’s sense of adventure and desire for more and for
“something new” take precedence over staying in dilapidated, loathsome conditions.
With eagerness for life and freedom, she resists inheriting her parents’ abysmal lives,
including their hut that “was not only shabby, it was sordid. Everything decayed and
declined, leaned inwards.”10 Spatially as well as emotionally, Martha’s experience in her
parents’ residence can be considered “claustrophobic”11—a term which Roberta
Rubenstein uses to describe the Quest family dynamics as well.
In refuting her parents, Martha eagerly refutes this residence that she
wholeheartedly believes is “not really her home.”12 Even the Quests deny tenancy in
their hut on the veld because of its inadequacies, to the extent that the failed farm makes
Mr. Quest pray for a miracle that might “transport them back to England.”13 Thus,
Martha rejects her family’s financial and agricultural failures, their identities as British
colonial farmers who never yield much crop, and the inadequate living accommodations.
Feeling like an exile because of her intellectual and political differences, she leaves her
parents’ home. Displacement sends her venturing away from the veld and into the city,
looking for a sense of identity. With no notions of a true home other than nature and her
9 Lessing, Martha Quest, 27. 10 Lessing, Martha Quest, 38. 11 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 33. 12 Lessing, Martha Quest, 27. 13 Ibid., 33.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 90
intangible dream of the four-gated city, young Martha leaves the hut because she “live[s]
there without really living there.”14
In seeking personal and social mobility, transcendence from dysfunctional family
and residence, Martha seeks refuge in “a room of her own” in the city. But her claims to
autonomy, freedom, and better spatial conditions are short-lived. Almost from the time
of new occupancy, Martha is forced to contend with Mrs. Quest and her redecorating
exploits. To repossess her new apartment, Martha reorders things according to her own
liking in order to eradicate Mrs. Quest’s presence and unmatemal spirit from the room.
But the shadow of her mother lingers, in the form of the matronly neighbor, Mrs. Gunn.
With the spying, conventional mother-figure always criticizing and condemning her
social relationships and living habits, Martha feels displaced in her own apartment.
Consequently, her sense of dislocation extends backward to taint her memories of
the veld, as well as forward, to her new apartment in town. Martha considers herself to
be an exile; despite having a residence in town, she feels homeless. When she receives
letters from her mother that encourage her to accept arrangements with Donovan
Anderson as well as others that convey racist ideologies about “kaffirs,” Martha feels
spatially confined. She feels cramped, as if she sees herself as a self-contained space:
“The effect of this letter [from her mother] on Martha was hardly reasonable. After half
an hour of violent anger, a feeling of being caged and imprisoned, she went to the
14 Lessing, Martha Quest, 26 (Lessing’s emphasis).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 91
telephone. Contrary to her desires, she cannot find what Bachelard calls a “material
paradise”16—a place of nourishment and comfort, usually associated with one’s original
home. Even in this first “place pf her own,” she is preempted from obtaining the
necessary security and space she needs. Consequently, she internalizes notions of being
an “exile” that derive from her parents but involve retaliation against them. Mrs. Quest
feels strangled by the disappointment that she equates with the veld, while Mr. Quest
feels intensely “shut in”17 in the city when they move to be near Martha. The dichotomy
between rural and urban, “soil and city,” makes Martha feel like a geographical exile,
“cut off from her roots.” This produces intense restlessness and haunts Martha, making
her desire a radically different living space.
A pattern of discontentment with living arrangements as well as restlessness
continues throughout the series as a defining feature of Martha’s life. The combination
of factors ultimately incites Martha to embrace transience and move forward in her quest
for transcendent living. According to Rose, Martha has successive experiences in which
she longs for a sense of paradise and fails to find it. Martha’s paradise, conceived during
her youth as the four-gated city, is not only an idyllic place, but also a frame o f mind, and
a form o f belief From Rose’s viewpoint, Martha looks for paradise within people as
well, such that “paradise” has tangible and intangible, spatial and psychological
connotations for the protagonist. In agreement with this analysis, I maintain that Martha
15 Lessing, Martha Quest, 289. 16 Bachelard, The Poetics o f Space, 7. 17 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 169.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 92
looks for the “original shell” of relational as well as residential wholeness; as Rose
suggests, “In one encounter after another, vocational, sexual, or political, Martha reveals
her.. .doomed nostalgia for a lost paradise of symbiotic function.”18 This seems to be the
case with Douglas, her first husband, whom she first conceptualizes as a “wall of
strength.”19 Once she is married to him, living in their flat, and discontented with the
marriage, Martha begins to revise her earlier positive notions of him. She begins to long
for another place, what she considers a truer homeland—England. Her friend’s words,
“You are nicely settled at last,”20 do not hold true for her, and she temporarily flees to
another friend, Solly Cohen, and his liberal colony21 in order to find “refuge” from the
boredom and constraints of marriage. Married, Martha feels “shut away in two high
rooms with a bathroom attached.”22 She also begins to view her body as a
compartmentalized space; she has the sense of being crowded out and taken over by
Douglas and the flat they live in.
As the living arrangements with Douglas shift from being a refuge from parental
domination to a residence in which Martha encounters gender oppression and physical
violence, she looks to escape from the fiat for the same reasons that she left her previous
residences—freedom. Her body, analogous to the Zambesian landscape, becomes a
territory that Douglas ultimately feels compelled to conquer and control—through sex,
18 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 22. 19 Lessing, Martha Quest, 319. 20 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 67. 21 Ibid., 53. 22 Ibid., 86.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 93
physical force, and the threat of death. In this regard, Lessing offers a critique of the
patriarchal colonization of the female body that Helene Cixous describes in her article,
“The Laugh of the Medusa.”23 Written after Children o f Violence, in 1975, Cixous’
article makes a similar assessment of the female bodily condition under patriarchal .
society. Like Lessing yet in theoretical language, she articulates the need for female
liberation and change. To men, Cixous says, “You can incarcerate them, slow them
94 down, get away with the old Apartheid routine, but for a time only.” Women, she
suggests, “are Africa, [they] are black. [Their] continent is dark. Dark is
dangerous....Don’t move, you might fall.”25 Thus, just as Martha’s quest for a new
existence that is more liberal and unconventional is “chadless”—without precedent and
with only negative models as guides—Lessing, and Cixous after her, articulate a notion
of the female body that opposes colonization and idealizes open, not delineated, space.
Order is restrictive for Martha; she ultimately seeks an environment that lacks structure
and definition, leaving her spatial and psychological room to move freely.
By resisting full occupancy of her new flat with Douglas, Martha rejects both
spatial and sexual domination. Alone in the apartment, she chooses to sit down where
she can relax without “surrendering to the boundaries of a chair.”26 Wishing to escape
Helene Cixous, “The Laugh o f the Medusa,” translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Feminisms: an anthology of literary theory and criticism, eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Hemdl (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 347-61. 24 Cixous, “The Laugh o f the Medusa,” 349. 25 Ibid. 26 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 88.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 94
from her marriage and the subconscious realization of pregnancy, she disclaims
ownership of the flat with Douglas and contemplates other residential alternatives:
It was not her flat; it belonged to that group of people who had seen her married. Almost at once her thoughts floated away from this place she sat in....[Sjlowly she tested various other shells for living in, offered to her in books.. .and each went with a kind of life she must dismiss instantly and instinctively. For instance, there was her father’s childhood in the English country cottage...it would not do at all., .a tall narrow Victorian house, crammed with heavy dark furniture.. .it was too dangerous. ...And that house which was being built now everywhere, in every country of the world, the modem house, cosmopolitan, capable of being lifted up from one continent and dumped down in any other...no, certainly not ....So there remained the flat in which she was in fact now sitting? But she was not here at all; she did not live shein it,was waiting to be moved on somewhere....
Contemplating the various residences she could inhabit, Martha envisions herself residing
in a cottage, like that of her father’s family, or a Victorian house like that of her mother’s
family; she speculates about a “modem house” but that residential “shell” does not fit her
needs either. With Douglas’ increased involvement in pre-war partying with his peers,
Martha feels increasingly “shut in here, in this flimsy little flat, by the rain, because of the
baby in her stomach.”28 Thus, she begins to feel trapped in multiple ways—by the
marriage contract, by the restrictive architecture of the flat, and by her own body which
belongs to her unborn daughter, Caroline, and therefore is not fully her own. In these
claustrophobic, cramped circumstances, Martha feels sectioned off—a feeling that
increases as she matures. Indeed, while she acquires more responsibilities, she
simultaneously self-divides in order to match each task with a persona to fulfill it.
27 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 88-9 (emphasis mine). 28 Ibid., 175-6.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 95
During pregnancy, another new space-—a “small lit place in her brain”—develops inside 7*} of Martha that serves as her locus of attention and her guiding light. It becomes a
sanctuary space through which Martha psychologically preserves her quest for autonomy.
Yet Martha is selfish with regards to her body and lackadaisical in terms of
rearing the child. From birth, Caroline is distanced from Martha, by the hospital Labour
Ward’s enforcement of early weaning, as well as by Martha’s preference for selfhood and
her inability to engage in intimate relationships—even with her own infant—without
feeling bound and oppressed. Encouraging Caroline to be an autonomous entity as an
infant, Martha makes the irrational decision to detach herself from the dependent child.
The internalized negativity from her previous relationships carries over into her treatment
of Caroline as a foreigner; like Martha’s parents and husband, the baby is exiled from
Martha. When Mrs. Quest and Douglas come to visit her at the Labour Ward, Martha
regards them as visitors from another country.30 When Mr. Maynard visits, he notes that
Martha appears to be very “self-contained”—which he bases, in part, on her reluctance to
keep house and care for Caroline effectively. As one who feels self-contained, Martha
feels less inclined to participate in the activities required to keep a conventionally clean
and orderly flat. Indeed, her sense of autonomy pervades her treatment of her
environment, as a reflection of her effort to preserve space within relationships. Martha’s
inadequate housekeeping and mothering are her means of resisting residential tenancy.
29 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 189. 30 Ibid., 197.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 96
Lessing portrays Martha as one whose rebellion begins with her imagination and
escapism, then translates into action. Wishing to flee Zambesia, Martha compares her
residence with Douglas to a Victorian novel31 long before she successfully removes
herself from the place. Her ideals of freedom ultimately manifest in a dialogue with
young Caroline. Aspiring to impart freedom to Caroline, Martha prematurely advises the
child not to marry young and hopes that her daughter will be able to enjoy the privilege
of imaginative as well as physical freedom. She says,
“You’ll imagine yourself doing all sorts of things in all sorts of countries; the point is, your will will be your limit. Anything’ll be possible. But you will not see yourself sitting in a small room bound for twenty-four hours of the day—with years of it in front of you—to a small child.”32
Equating marriage and motherhood with oppression, Martha extends her analysis of
being residentially constrained to other environments outside of her own. When visiting
her friend, Stella, Stella’s mother, and Stella’s new daughter Esther, Martha describes
their flat as oppressive. She aligns the restrictive rooms with the traditional female roles:
‘There was silence. Martha felt the room oppressive. She could see that both women
were devoting their lives to Esther; it was a close, jealous, watchful household.”33
After she gains her own household with Douglas when he returns from the war,
Martha distinctively keeps her gaze directed away from the residence as well as from
31 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 244. 32 Ibid., 268. 33 Ibid., 271.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 97
Caroline. She is not watchful, attentive, or happy. While she and Douglas recite the
conventional script of happiness and home, Martha speaks empty, unconvincing words:
“Surely,” [Douglas] said, in the voice of an injured boy, “surely you’re pleased to have a house of your own.” Again her eyebrows rose, and she said, “There’s nothing in the world I want more.” Then she burst into laughter, and kissed him on the cheek, moving away immediately as he grabbed at her.34
Martha speaks what she does not feel and home, for her, is not a happy, hearth-filled
place.
In fact, the older, gated house with servants and luxurious space to which she,
Douglas, and Caroline move proves to have an equally negative, constraining effect on
Martha. As if it aggrandizes the marital arrangement, and therefore reinforces her
participation in an undesirable contract with Douglas, she repudiates the new house even
more than their previous flat. Martha spends much of her time trying to evade
domesticity, which includes avoiding the house, her daughter, and the servants.
Displaying disinterest and a strong desire to escape from domestic confinement, she
stands under a tree looking out past the gate of her yard35 with her back to Caroline, the
“rough lawn” and the African servants whom she, against her mother’s orders, hesitates
to instruct. Fearing that she is caught in a “trap,” Martha reflects on her acquiescence to
a life that involves being “bound by a house and insurance policies until the gates of
34 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 313. 35 Ibid., 323.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 98
freedom opened at fifty.” 36 She wants opened gates in her twenties, even though she
stands behind them.
Simultaneously engaging in contradictory lives—one that rejects confinement and
one that embraces it—Martha cultivates her freedom imaginatively and then, as she
matures, enacts it. Thus, she distances herself psychologically and emotionally from her
residence with Douglas and never fully occupies it. She remains skeptical of the
arrangement as well as her own participation in it: “She was uneasy because she had
adapted herself so well to this life; some instinct to conform and comply had dictated that
she must quell her loathing.”37 While she is “instinctively compliant, enthusiastic, and
[takes] every step into bondage with affectionate applause for Douglas,” I contend that
she maintains a sense of autonomy and rejects residential occupancy as well.
Consciously rejecting the marriage and residence, she
never felt that she really lived in this house, whose furniture had been chosen by the woman who lived in it before her, whose garden had been designed by someone else. She did not feel like Douglas’ wife or Caroline’s mother. She was not even bored. It was as if three parts of herself stood on one side, idle, •no waiting to be called into action.
Martha’s experience represents what feminist writer Betty Friedan, author of The
Feminine Mystique,39 eventually termed “the problem that has no name.” Friedan, a wife
and mother herself, sought to articulate in the 196G’s what had been circulating among
36 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 328. 37 Ibid., 327. 38 Ibid., 328. 39 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, with an introduction by Anna Quindlen (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 99
American households as a plague of discontentment, seldom voiced, by housewives.
Such “problem,” eventually called “the housewife’s syndrome,”40 generally surfaced as a
feeling of lack, disappointment, and the desire for something else, something better.
Lessing, one of the first writers to articulate in fiction “the problem that has no name,”
did so in a different geographic context. Nevertheless, Martha’s rejection of conventional
housekeeping reflects her desire for a different life, while her abandonment of marriage
and motherhood demonstrates the immense degree of disillusionment she feels in the
home as well as in the roles of wife and mother. As Claudia Roth Pierpont suggests, both
Lessing and Friedan call attention to the only script that women had available to them
from 1949 onward until the social transformations of the 1970’s—“Occupation:
Housewife.”41
Martha is not alone in feeling dissatisfied with her arrangements, as Friedan might
argue, yet Martha singularly chooses an alternative that few women do—complete
abandonment of traditional roles. By rejecting these living arrangements, Martha rejects
the flatness and boredom of her marriage and envisions some other place, the four-gated
city, which ultimately becomes an actual place in the final novel of the series. Rejecting
the “shells” of marriage and restrictive married space, she projects her desires onto
different psychic and geographic landscapes linked with England. There, she discovers
the Coldridge home, embraces her self as a “dark,” unknown territory, and, in
40 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, with an introduction by Anna Quindlen (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), .20. 41 Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Memoirs of a Revolutionary: Doris Lessing,” Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2000), 241.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 100
collaboration with others, brings the long-imagined four-gated city to fruition. Lessing,
by documenting such an unconventional repudiation, verbalizes—through Martha—-the
overwhelming degree to which such conditions were unlivable. And while the “problem
has no name,” Martha assumes several—she is “Matty” as well as “Martha”—as if trying
to name, as Friedan ultimately does, the competing factions or “shells” of female identity
that must be first named, then dealt with.
Martha resists this occupation, in part, because her happiness never fully resides
in family life or traditional notions of the home. Instructively, Simone de Beauvoir
explains the ways in which the house was traditionally equated with female fulfillment:
“The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or
castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.”42 Yet for Martha, her
first parents’ residence is everything but ideal and there is nothing for her but to repudiate
it. Indeed, it is impermanent and offers colonial notions of the world—which Martha,
with an astute intellectual consciousness—ideologically rejects. Moreover, her rejection
of such residences enables her-—just as books do—to imagine and cultivate her own
space and disclaim familial dependencies as well as the traditional female domain.
Summarizing young Martha’s experience perfectly, de Beauvoir says, “It is not without
some regret that she shuts behind her the doors of her new home; when she was a girl, the
whole countryside was her homeland; the forests were hers. Now she is confined to a
42 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 448.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 101
restricted space.”43 While Martha never concedes to the notion of Zarabesia as home, she
does reminisce about the vast expanses of land and sky that the veld offered her during
her childhood. Lessing seems to be commenting on the limited horizons of the female
protagonist: her shrunken sphere as she trades infinite space for a series of rooms, walls,
and compartmentalized space.
Martha, having set for herself a precedent of repudiating constricting
circumstances, flees from what she feels is an “improper” marriage and household, just as
she fled from her parents’ hut in the veld. By leaving, she seeks refuge in another “room
of her own” with yet another matronly landlady. Rubenstein explains that, by running,
Martha releases herself from enclosure 44 Yet she remains enclosed by repetition, as her
mother intrusively invades her new apartment just as she stormed the previous place.
Wishing to fortify herself against her mother and all societal conventions, Martha dreams
of the future in architectural terms— first evident in her conceptualization of the four-
gated city which can be considered her ideal model of home. Characterized by
“buttresses and arches,”45 her city of the future enables her to create an alternate,
imaginative space that supports her notions of freedom. Indeed, buttresses and arches
imply strength and height; they seem particularly necessary for Martha’s pursuit of a
transcendent existence.
43 de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 450. 44 Rubenstein,The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 46. 45 Lessing,A Ripple from the Storm, 32.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 102
Her conceptualization of the four-gated city is revolutionary and her decision to
leave her family is a radical enactment of personal liberation. While one might not agree
with her decisions, Martha Quest is compelling because of her humanistic qualities: her
bravery as well as her faults. Although her quest for liberation is respectable, even
heroic, Martha is a realistic character whose desire for a better future and ideal city can
be understood by the reader even though one might not agree with her means of attaining
it. This seems to be part of Lessing’s intention; Martha is a believable character who
represents Lessing’s commitment to realist fiction. Yet Martha displays a single
constancy throughout the series—the desire for freedom—which sometimes forces her to
take extreme actions to abandon intolerable arrangements. Her superior consciousness
makes her a revolutionary, a distinctive individual, and also makes her unwilling to
compromise—traits that typically describe historically revolutionary figures. According
to Rubenstein, one can “value Lessing’s fiction without endorsing her specific views”46—
and the same concept can be applied to the reader’s perception of Martha Quest. Though
she trades one form of family for another, Martha temporarily aligns herself with the
Communist Party in an effort to join other revolutionary figures as well as the global
revolution for freedom and equality. She is drawn to Communism’s ideological “arches”
of racial and economic equality as well as positive political change. Thus her dream of
an ideal city is shared by this community that fights for an idyllic world.
46 Rubenstein,The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 141.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 103
Daydreaming of post-war peace, Martha and her Communist comrade, Jasmine,
dream of an “ideal town”:
Martha and Jasmine smiled at each other, saying in the smile that because of them, because of their vision.. .the future they dreamed of seemed just around the comer; they could almost touch it. Each saw an ideal town, clean, noble, and beautiful, soaring up over the actual town they saw47.
As a result of the overwhelming similarities between her vision and the Party vision,
Martha finds it easy to follow the tenets of Communism since she subscribed to them
long before she becomes a Communist. Having given up “everything” in the form of her
child, her husband, and her home, she easily adopts the tenet: “A Communist must be
prepared to give up everything.”48 In joining the Party, however, Martha begins to lose
her selfhood in the larger collective group identity. Resisting being solely defined by the
Party, she eventually breaks from the group. She retreats to her room and to her original
desire to be self-contained, independent, and free to think and do as she pleases.49 To
escape the Party’s takeover or appropriation of her, she submits to illness as a means of
reclaiming personal space in her apartment as well as free time to herself.
Yet Martha does not remain alone for long; a stream of individuals visit and care
for her, interrupting her solitude. Jimmy Wood and Anton Hesse, fellow party members,
enact the ancient battle of male ownership, making her feel “taken over” as well as
“hemmed in,” “caged” and “imprisoned.”50 Once married to Anton Hesse, Martha
47 Lessing,A Ripple from the Storm, 40. 48 Ibid., 44. 49 Ibid., 110. 50 Lessing, A Ripple from the Storm, 125 and 146.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 104
assumes the same roles she repudiated, and their flat—much like her earlier dwelling
with Douglas Knowell—becomes a burdensome responsibility that she loathes and fears.
In fact, despite Anton’s political competence, leadership and organizational skill, he fails
to be resourceful and efficient when handling the apartment arrangements.
Through repeated residential confinements, Lessing demonstrates the pervasive
social ideology of Martha’s society: women cannot function by themselves; they partner
with men in order to survive. Depressed, Martha speculates about the Party and asks
herself, “Are we all going to pair off?”51 But Martha’s sense of survival repeatedly takes
her out of these residences with supposedly strong, supportive men. Indeed, she chooses
to be overworked in order to escape, in part, from her past with Douglas and Caroline, as
well as to resist the housekeeping and (potential) mothering roles that are assumed with
the new marriage to Anton. When outside of her flat with Anton, however, she confronts
the harsh realities of apartheid and poverty in the colonial landscape. The Africans, to
whom she sells the Party’s local newspaper, The Watchdog, also suffer from the
conservative political regime but, unlike Martha, they fight fo r residential occupancy—
the right to claim a residence, not a shanty. Thus, Martha is not the only victim of
patriarchy and oppressive politics in the Children o f Violence series. In fact, she is
“privileged” to be able to resist various residences. Her rebellion against “residential
occupancy” is selfish when compared to the Africans’ rebellion that has at its core the
51 Lessing, A Ripple from the Storm, 101.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 105
struggle to attain better housing and living conditions and possess improved forms of
shelter.
The Africans’ circumstances reflect imprisonment; like Martha, they are denied
the freedom of simply being. With limited access to resources and rules which regulate
their travels, they are subordinate to the colonials much as Martha is subordinate to men.
Once she marries Anton, Martha experiences a form of curfew and prohibition that
characterizes the apartheid conditions. Anton sends servants to bring Martha home,
restricting her time as well as her activities. The Africans suffer from such laws as well
and, if caught, face severe punishments. Martha’s situation is analogous but not parallel
to the horrifically oppressed and marginalized conditions of the Africans she tries to help.
Yet like the Africans, she feels as though there is no “safe place.” Her residences are
synonymous with antagonism just as the external landscape reflects war and oppression.
Once, running down the street following a political meeting, she seeks refuge in her
house only to find that she cannot shut out the noise of war. Always, no matter the
residence, no matter whether she is single or married, she remains subjected to the threat
of violence—emotional, psychological, and physical.
To counter the oppressive nature of her flat with Anton and its associations with
housekeeping and subordination, Martha begins to spend the majority of her time away
from their home. Either “at work” for the Party in service of the Africans and humankind
or with her friend, Maisie, Martha distances herself by staying away from the flat and
frequently sleeping in a different bed. She moves back and forth, searching for safety,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 106
fulfillment, a sense of purpose and home, but she ultimately internalizes the various
forms of external fragmentation. In Landlocked, Martha begins to view herself from the
inside-looking-out as a twenty-four year old attractive woman who does nothing but “run
around” all day for Communist Party causes. Her mobility keeps her away from the
static housekeeping alternative and gives her momentum to continue pursuing her ideals
with a “determination to survive.”52 Committed to endurance and aware of the potential
of the future, Martha does survive as a result of her will to live differently.
But as she describes “running around,” it is as if she is really “running around in
circles.” Despite her interest in autonomy, Martha is caught, as Rubenstein observes, in a
circular pattern of collective dissolution as well as personal failure.53 In agreement with
Rubenstein, who suggests that Lessing portrays Martha as one who is placed in an
“existential trap,”541 contend that Martha’s initial habitations are threatening, not
comforting, limiting not expansive—until she meets Thomas Stem. The multiple
residences, occupied by dominating figures (her mother’s intrusiveness, her husbands’
control and ineptitude) force Martha to retreat further and further into herself, where she
awaits a time of tranquility and wholesomeness. Indeed, she becomes a “lighthouse of
watchfulness” and someone who is “totally on the defensive,”55 who tries to hold herself
together as she awaits the passing of the storm.
52 Lessing, Landlocked, 21. 53 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 64. 54 Ibid. 55 Lessing,Landlocked, 22.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 107
Ultimately, she finds fulfillment in the extramarital arrangement with Thomas
Stem, a Polish lew and a cultural and geographical exile whose extended family perished
in the atrocities of the Holocaust. Reminiscent of her waning interest in Douglas
Knowell, Martha allows herself to become involved with Thomas since sexual and
emotional intimacy with Anton prove to be unsatisfactory. After a series of relational
pitfalls, she becomes involved with yet another man who cannot fulfill her ideal of a
“perfect friend.” Lessing suggests that this is, in part, Martha’s character—she is
defensive and irrational, at times, as well as drawn to difficult situations. Martha also
contends with the forces of social determinism as many women throughout the series,
even Martha’s comrade and “revolutionary” female friends, succumb to poor choices of
men. Martha’s preference for mobility and her established precedent of fleeing from
confining circumstances takes shape as a desire to move on to new men (and
consequently, new places) when circumstances become stagnant. Her affair with
Thomas, also a Communist, is impermanent and imperfect because of their respective
marital obligations. With limited time together and a tentative spatial arrangement, their
hope for a future together is impossible. Yet despite these obstacles, Thomas’ vitality
and the potency o f their sexual union expands Martha’s conceptualizations of life, love,
intimacy, and interpersonal communication. As a gardener who runs a business out of his
brother and sister-in-law’s loft, Thomas sets Martha free, so to speak, of a past of
unrewarding, conventional relationships.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 108
For the first time in her life, she finds herself participating in a relationship that
psychically and geographically liberates rather than oppresses her. As Rubenstein notes,
“Martha is reborn through Thomas”56 and with him, she has a sense of expanding and
discovering new territory within herself. Love and sexual intimacy, Lessing suggests,
resuscitates individuals when experienced freely—without legal impositions associated
with marriage. Moreover, with a like-minded companion who is sensitive and committed
to notions of global freedom, and who feels like an exile (even from his own-family),
Martha experiences a true form of intimacy that is simultaneously sexual, psychological
and emotional. The last of these Martha lacks with Douglas and Anton, both of whom
were invested in ideas of masculine possessiveness. Thomas makes a point of explaining
to Martha that he is a lover of women. In addition to having had multiple affairs, he tells
■ of his informal training as a youth who watched American movies in order to
“understand” women.57 With a combination of humor and irony, Thomas attempts to
understand Martha, unlocking closed “regions” in her, tapping into areas within her that
“she had not known existed.”58 With his help, she grows in emotional, intellectual, and
physical capacity; she considers herself, with Thomas’ assistance, to be a “strong young
woman” who “puts on flesh”59 as evidence of her amplification. In this regard, she adds
literal “space” to her interior geography as well as gains an additional residence that
becomes an equitable “centre” from which she works and lives. Thus, the “empty space”
56 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 116. 57 Lessing,Landlocked, 101. 58 Ibid., 125. 59 T
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 109
that Martha felt before dissipates with Thomas’ presence. He fills the void which was the
desire for a man that would “unify her elements, a man like a roof, or like a fire burning
in the centre of an empty space.”60 After disclaiming herself in order to comply with
Communist Party mandates, Martha no longer feels like an “empty space” when she is
with Thomas; rather, she reclaims her selfhood and experiences personal fulfillment
through intimacy with him.
In the loft with Thomas, Martha does not have to resist residential occupancy
because she is not “taken over” by either him or the space. Part of their unique
arrangement, Lessing suggests, resides in the fact that their love and lovemaking occur
outside of the bounds of marriage—which is associated with possessiveness, control,
self-sacrifice and domination—all of which typify Martha’s two marriages. Although she
remains married to Anton, and Thomas is married with a child as well, Martha feels
liberated by their circumstances, with moments of despondency occurring only when she
reflects on the impermanence of such a union. Her experiences with Thomas are organic
and original—she does not feel occupied by him even though they share intensely
intimate internal and external spaces. The narrator describes the power of Thomas’ hands
which heal, as opposed to hurting, Martha. When he touches her, Thomas “spread[s]
slow, calm areas of warmth.”61 Thus, he brings vitality in contrast to the excessive
“dryness” that she gathers from the Zambesian landscape. Indeed, he recreates her
original, Edenic environment in the veld, linking her former identity as an adventurer
60 Lessing, Landlocked, 41. 61 Ibid., 101.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 110
with her young adult experience as a revolutionary. In the “aromatic” space o f‘Thomas
Stem’s nursery,” Martha finds a place that, with its elevated space and arches, symbolizes
progress and transcendence.
The relationship with Thomas is briefly paradisiacal: through it, Martha finds
balance, peace and companionship, as well as a desirable combination of lovemaking and
solitude. The fact that “Here she was ‘herself, no one put pressure on her”62 suggests
Lessing’s intent to show Martha reaching self-actualization in a place devoid of
convention, constraint, and contracts (marital). Thomas’ intense caring for Martha, his
delicacy and warmth amid the fragrant foliage, approaches perfection; indeed, there is an
Edenic quality to the loft. Lessing offers the most compelling counter-arrangement of
male/female companionship in this relationship, one that is never equaled by Martha’s
other relationships with men in the pentalogy. He invites Martha to share a space that,
although impermanent, is a vital alternative to her past spaces where she was reservedly
detached from others, personally restrained, or completely isolated. Sharing the loft with
him ultimately prepares her for her future task and altruistic role in The Four-Gated City.
In preparation for her unique role as a central, unifying force in the Coldridge house in
the final volume of the series, Martha feels— at last—a sense of home: “She was living in
the shed—that’s what it amounted to. This had become her home, and Thomas visited
her in it.”63 The loft proves to be a positive example of the kind of living environment
one needs to feel happy and whole—one which overrides, at least temporarily, Martha’s
62 Lessing, Landlocked, 140. 63 Ibid., 147.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I l l
total sense of displacement. Temporarily, she experiences synthesis and fusion with
another being as she inhabits an organic, rejuvenating space.
Martha fears such interconnectedness, however, and thinks to herself that it is
easier to be “self-contained” since the feelings shared between herself and Thomas are at
times “too strong.”64 Yet while the intimate emotions threaten to overpower Martha,
Thomas and the loft do not. The loft, while it is an impermanent, “flimsy space,” is
“strong enough” to support the two of them as well as other materials, including a small
library of books. Lessing describes the loft as a locus of learning—o f Martha’s learning
about intimacy and equitable sharing with a man as well as the ways in which she
. acknowledges herself as a delicate balance of fragility and strength. The height of the
loft represents the ways in which this place and the experience it fosters are epitomized:
the loft is the pinnacle of Martha’s residences just as Thomas becomes the irreplaceable
man o f her life.
While Martha and Thomas never willingly vacate the loft, it is eventually usurped
by Thomas’ brother’s wife and appropriated for conventional family needs—play space
for the children. Lessing illustrates the societal impossibility of sustaining such an
unconventional relationship. Indeed, from the onset of their relationship, both Martha
and Thomas allude to the impermanence and both “plan to go away”—for Thomas, this
means a trip to Israel, and for Martha, this means emigration to England.65 Even more
than Martha, Thomas embraces the idea of mobility and lives a nomadic, “in between”
64 Lessing,Landlocked, 123. 65 Ibid., 125.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 112
life: “Neither town nor country. If I were of the soil, I’d be running my wife’s farm. But
I don’t live there and I don’t live in town. I bring things into the towns to sell. And I
meet a woman in my brother’s wife’s garden shed.”66 Both characters embody
momentum, mobility, and desire for “something different”-—qualities which enable them
to transcend the societal condition of being “landlocked.” Martha and Thomas, caught in
a social “deadlock” of racial and political contention, experience reprieve from the reality
of apartheid and war in Zambesia. Yet problematically, the loft is only temporary;
Martha and Thomas constantly ascend to and descend from the loft, never being able to
inhabit the space for long periods of time.
While Thomas succumbs and eventually dies as a consequence of the pressures of
external violence, Martha ultimately moves forward in her quest for a different model of
living as a result of their profound relationship. The alternate space and expanded
consciousness she gains from Thomas leads her to pursue unconventional connections
with individuals, such that her “self’ becomes less self-serving and even more altruistic
in nature. In fact, by the end o f Landlocked, she makes progress toward reinhabiting
“Martha” again, as Dagmar Bamouw suggests.67 Having moved beyond the parodied and
«ro acquiescent version of herself, “Matty,” Martha enjoys a “fusion of disparate selves.”
She does this with the provisions offered by the loft—companionship blended with
solitude, literature as well as intellectual and political conversation. Adding to Martha’s
66 Lessing,Landlocked, 164. 6' Bamouw, “Disorderly Company,” 41. 68 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 116.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 113
consciousness, Thomas fosters a space that enables Martha to construct a new self as well
as view Zambesia from a literally and symbolically elevated vantage point; with his
assistance and the environment of the loft, Martha is able to surpass and transcend the
chaotic landscape.
Following several events, including the dissolution of the local party, her father’s
death and most critically, Thomas’ death, Martha embarks on a voyage to England as a
nearly middle-aged woman. In a drastic shift of environment, she exchanges colonial
Zambesia for post-war England. When she arrives in London, she initially repudiates
residences entirely; while she leaves a few belongings in a series of rooms, she, herself, is
seldom in them. With Thomas’ manuscripts and his papers detailing his experiences in
an African village prior to his death, Martha goes to England with an alternative legacy—
no children, but rather the “seeds” of love and knowledge that she acquired through their
intimacy. Retaining agency from their relationship, including the knowledge that she
contains “new dimensions,”69 she leaves “landlocked,” dystopian Zambesia for the
romanticized conditions of England, the one place apart from the four-gated city she had
dreamed of inhabiting as a youth. But looking for security and solidarity in war-torn
England proves to be disillusioning for Martha since even England, the emblem of
“civilization” by her standards, shows the scars of violence and World War II. She
incessantly walks the streets absorbing the destruction, decay, and loss of millions of
people and their residences—feeling once again as though no place is safe or sacred from
69 Lessing,Landlocked, 191.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 114
the threat of violence. While Martha finds very little in her London environment with
which to construct a new life, she at least succeeds in escaping from traditional roles.
She puts the ocean between herself and what she considers infringements on her
autonomy—her parents, two, husbands, a child, and the Communist party. At the
beginning of The Four-Gated City, nothing but her se lf holds, promise for the future.
In fact, everything is fragmented and destroyed. Searching the remains of
buildings, she looks for signs of life amid the dismal gray. She attempts to make the
long-awaited connection with a home that she partially rejects:
It was so ugly, so ugly: what race was this that filled their river with garbage and excrement and let it run smelling so evilly between the buildings that crystallized their pride, their history. Except—she could not say that now, she was here, one of them; and to stay.
Lessing offers a mixture of sentiments by describing Martha’s reaction to England.
Romantic by youthful education, Martha also suffers from the Modernist malaise of the
spirit, in which the human consciousness tries to make sense of a fallen world and
societal destruction. The epitaph Lessing uses from St. Polcarp, “My God, in what
century have you caused me to live?” underscores the atrocities of war, genocide, and all
manifestations of antagonism, including that between human beings and their
environment. Internalizing a sense of modernist discontinuity, Martha is Lessing’s
illustration of the “female consciousness in the process of disintegration.”71
70 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 17. 71 Kaplan, Feminine Consciousness in the Modem British Novel, 140.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 115
Disoriented and disillusioned, Martha turns to geographic landmarks, like the
river in London, for a point of reference amid the war-torn environment. She searches
for fragments of Thomas, hoping to connect with someone and some place as she was
able to do with him in the loft. Her landladies and landlords are friendly, concerned,
interested in helping her get better—reminiscent of Thomas’ desire to attend to the
“delicate, sick” Matty who worked tirelessly for the Party.72 But Jack, a liberal property-
owner with an interest in making his own unconventional space, is full of “negative.
capability”73 that mirrors Thomas at the end of his life when he succumbs to violence and
madness just prior to death. Still unable to make wise choices concerning men, Martha
becomes involved with Jack, whose masochistic perversion of intimacy threatens to
annihilate her—the revolutionary who seeks idyllic love and freedom.
Feeling dominated once again, Martha contemplates her options in England.
Transience, she knows, is unsustainable. Homeless and jobless, she is portrayed by
Lessing as being finally “free” of her past and free of roles, yet still unfulfilled, and
therefore, at a crossroads in her life where, caught in the “existential trap” of
unsatisfactory relationships, she must choose self-containment or interdependent
relationships. Jack, although he represents unconventional living, is another negative
model whom Martha must reject because he offers the antithesis of idyllic space.
According to the narrator, Martha “was in a panic. Funk. This was a danger point in her
life: she was being taken over. Had been taken over? Jack’s voice, again measured: ‘If
72 Lessing, Landlocked, 69. 73 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 120.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 116
you come over now, Martha, then we could talk about it, hey?”’74 Jack’s ideal
community involves his sole possession of multiple women-breeders who collectively
inhabit his residence as a kind of one-man’s house of prostitution. Thus, Martha finds
herself at the negative extreme and furthest “outpost” of unconventional living
arrangements. This view of sexual liberation still involves possessiveness and Martha
chooses not to submit to sexual degradation. Jack offers a residential arrangement that
Martha chooses to resist based on its immorality and perversity, choosing instead to
resume occupancy in a family-centered environment.
Lessing depicts Martha at the end of her quest for boundlessness and autonomy;
Martha, in fact, begins to realize that she has personal and spatial limits-—lines that she
does not want to cross, as in the case of Jack and his repellent version of “home.” Since
adolescence, she has quested for freedom, finally achieving it at the beginning of The
Four-Gated City. Yet Lessing illustrates that absolute freedom is not what Martha solely
or soul-ly desires, therefore extending the Bildungsroman in unconventional,
unpredictable ways. This narrative decision, to send Martha back into the “trenches” of
home life once she acquired her freedom, is a conscientious choice by Lessing to combat
traditional assumptions of female fiction. In agreement with Frederick Stem’s analysis of
Martha as a “tabla raza” in The Four-Gated City,751 find that Lessing captures Martha in
her freest capacity: divested of traditional roles and confining residences related to the
74 Lessing,The Four-Gated City, 95. 75 Frederick Stem, “Doris Lessing: The Politics o f Radical Humanism,” in Doris Lessing: The Alchemy o f Survival, eds. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose (Ohio University Press, 1988), 51.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 117
family. This “clean slate” enables her to readdress family and residences and radically
revise the ways in which a woman approaches them. Discovering that freedom to the
point of exile and isolation is not desirable, Martha reenters a household and becomes
involved with a family. The reader, upon reaching this point in the novel, might assume
that Martha would fall into another residential “trap”; one might not think that the
Coldridge household, within the context of the series and considering Martha’s
previously negative residential experiences, could lead to her transcendence. But by
choosing the Coldridge household, Martha chooses to locate herself in an environment
that fosters personal growth while enabling her to nurture others.
With her perception of family and cohabitation altered by her positive experience
with Thomas in the loft, Martha re-enters an interdependent, familial and residential
space. While Greene suggests that Martha achieves her goal of freedom only to return to
being in a “traditionally confining situation,”76 I contend the contrary; Lessing offers a
new model of the family residence in which Martha retains a sense of self yet also
functions cooperatively and co-dependently with men, women, and children. Martha
chooses both work and residency in the Mark Coldridge house, though she initially fears
that it will claim her even though it appears to be an uninhabited, even vacant space. In
contrast to the dilapidated ruins of urban London and Jack’s masochistic space, the house
offers Martha a place in which to find herself and to help others discover their essential
selves as well.
76 Gayle Greene,Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 75.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 118
Upon first moving in, Martha addresses the house as if it were a presence.
Defining the terms o f her tenancy,
She closed her eyes on a room whose presence was so strong, so confident, that she was saying as she went to sleep: I’ll stay for just a while, just a short time. A couple of months. 77
Quickly faced with semi-orphaned children, housekeeping, and tending to a married yet
companionless man, Martha initially finds herself repeating her previous rebellion against
“residential occupancy.” As with her previous husbands, she harbors escapist notions of
fleeing and “leaving soon anyway”78 in order to combat feeling overwhelmed and “taken
over” by responsibility. In interior monologue, Martha tells herself, “I’ve got to go I
must. Now. Or I’ll never be able to leave this.”79 She fluctuates, feeling claimed by the
house but longing to claim her new room that provides her with distinctive pleasure and a
coveted view of a sycamore tree.80 Encouraged to stay, to help “manage” the two
Coldridge children, Francis and Paul, during difficult times, Martha tentatively moves
into the Coldridge home and goes to great lengths to insist on the brevity of her brief stay.
The reclamation of this house—which consists of roles she conscientiously rejected
throughout her life—takes time, and Martha enters the arrangement with trepidation.
Despite her hesitancy to fully occupy the Coldridge home, Martha eventually
acclimates herself to the environment and moves into the house in stages. Firstly, she
physically moves her possessions into the room—to which she eventually becomes quite
77 Lessing,The Four-Gated City, 104. 78 Ibid., 105. 79 Ibid.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 119
attached. Intellectually, she becomes invested in her professional work with Mark
Coldridge, which involves collaboration with him on his novel based on Thomas’
manuscripts while also reflecting her earliest vision of an ideal city. Emotionally, she
becomes affiliated with the home through the children; Paul, who loses both of his
parents, is left in the custody of his uncle, Mark. Francis, Mark’s son, is only semi-
parented, since his mother, Lynda, is largely absent, institutionalized for mental illness.
Martha fills the void that exists in the house; she becomes a kind of surrogate mother who
caters devotedly yet non-possessively to its occupants. Lessing implies that Martha
succeeds in this role because of her ability to identify with the children’s orphaned states;
also, having experienced and then rejected traditional notions of maternal love, she is
able to relate to the children in compassionate, nurturing, and unique ways.
As evidence of Martha’s ability to approach the home with an unconventional
mindset, she continues to demonstrate a preference for mobility and freedom within the
actual spatial arrangement of the Coldridge home—resisting stasis and insisting on
continual growth and progress. The home is a compromise. Martha has no biological
ties to the children, yet she discovers that she is capable of maternally caring for others;
she is mobile within the home yet remains a kind of “energetic center” that unifies the
disparate individuals of the house. She literally shifts from floor to floor and room to
room, and even inhabits the basement, the traditionally negated, feared, unused level of
the house. Bachelard notes that the cellar symbolizes the irrational, unconscious, “dark
space” of the human psyche. Following this interpretation and coupling it with Cixous’
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 120
understanding of the female body being synonymous with “dark” Africa, one might say
that the basement of the Coldridge home encompasses both, becoming the dark part of
Martha’s residential terrain that must be lived in and “gone through.” Lessing makes the
basement of the Coldridge home a positive locus of female, irrational, unconscious,
uncharted experiences. By befriending its occupants, Lynda Coldridge and her multiple
female guests, Martha transcends the matronly role by delving into the depths of female
identity; she descends to the basement to experience radical dimensions of female
consciousness and community.
Lessing creates Lynda, Martha’s “perfect friend,” as an amalgamation of literary
allusions. Lynda, diagnosed as schizophrenic by psychoanalysts is compared, in The
Four-Gated City, to Virginia W oolfs “mad” character, Septimus from Mrs. Dalloway.
She is also reminiscent of Charlotte Bronte’s “madwoman,” Bertha Rochester, from Jane
Eyre. Like Jane, Martha must face an unorthodox female figure who is, in fact, a
character double of herself. Developing an allegiance with Lynda, another
unconventional wife and mother, Martha comes to terms with her “darker” persecuted
self that, like Lynda, has been abused by patriarchy. Mistreated for her unconventional
visionary consciousness, Lynda, as a consequence of having telepathic abilities, is
hospitalized and maltreated with drugs and psychoanalysis, told she is crazy, and
marginalized as an “abnormal” person. Martha, in confronting Lynda as a shadow of her
self, branches out beyond the male-oriented quest and communes with the “madwoman
in the basement.” Indeed, her initial quest for autonomy and freedom, her selfish desire
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 121
(at times) for solitude is modeled after her literary and epic heroes. Inhabiting an
“unorthodox” space, Martha is permitted to develop her unique consciousness; in this
home-basement, she obtains her fullest sense of self-actualization and acceptance.
With Lynda’s guidance and support, Martha engages in active dreaming,
telepathy, extrasensory modes of communication, astrology and mysticism; Martha
expands and adds, in addition to her “house” with a “roof,” a “basement” that enables her
to formulate a complete, coherent house. Having divested herself of all of the
conventional roles and assumptions that have plagued her progressive consciousness
since youth, Martha is like a house that has been prepared for remodeling. With the
combination of the roof, acquired through her intimacy with Thomas, and the addition of
the basement with Lynda, Martha encompasses the totality of the psychic and
architectural structure that Bachelard espouses. Bravely, she faces the unknown of the
basement, where she recovers and discovers aspects of herself, including her memory.
Treating her consciousness as though it were buried under the rubble of violence, hatred,
and antagonism of her past, she participates in self-salvation. Later, she gives more
“room” to her consciousness, moving into an apartment building that allows her to
experientially confront the entirety of her past and present as well as the potential of her
future. Acknowledging what Bachelard calls the “buried walls that have the entire earth
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 122
Q 1 behind them,” she tries to release Lynda, who “creeps” along the walls much like the
nameless narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
With a multi-layered consciousness, Martha transcends—entirely surpasses—
traditional female roles that limit the wife or mother, literally as well as figuratively, to
the kitchen or the bedroom. Martha becomes a coherent, whole, fully actualized
person—which is a tremendous accomplishment, given the degree of horrific conditions
that are identifiable and indicative of postmodern society. In a series that describes the
destruction and chaos of the external world, starving and mutilated bodies as well as
polluted and dilapidated environmental wastelands, Martha is transcendent; she is
uniquely able to find self-fulfillment despite the horrific conditions of her society. As the
narrator repeats throughout the final volume, “everyone had had a bad time,”82 and “bad
times” recur throughout the volume. Sub-communities develop, with the leadership and
resources of the Coldridge children, to help provide shelter for the growing population of
individuals who “can’t cope with ordinary life,” the “broken, spoiled, unable to cope,
R.I.P.”83
Ultimately, Lessing offers a vision of salvation for the individual who faces the
reality of the postmodern world in which God is dead and everything else is dying as
well. Martha is salvaged; through anti-conformism, self-discovery and the relentless
pursuit of “something different,” she finds extraordinary capacities within herself and
81 Bachelard, The Poetics o f Space, 20. 82 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 418. 83 Ibid., 438.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 123
ultimately surpasses the “house” metaphor, as indicated by the symbolic crumbling of the
Coldridge house, which is eventually taken over by the government for urban renewal
purposes. As she did with Thomas’ loft, Lessing illustrates the impermanent nature of
physical structures. What transcends is Martha’s internal architecture: her holistic and
synthesized being that is no longer mind versus body, consciousness versus
unconsciousness. Though Mark Coldridge chooses to construct the ideal city in the
desert as an alternative society in response to the apocalypse at the end of Children of
Violence, Martha seeks refuge on an island—a primitive space that is surrounded by
water on all sides, with safe distance from the destroyed European landscape and
symbolically “afloat.” Back in her most identifiable and welcoming space, nature,
Martha makes the “circle” that Jaqueline McLeod Rogers contends is characteristic of
women’s literature.84 Yet the process by which she arrives back at her “original shell” is
anything but conventional.
84 Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, “Masculine Story/Female Experience,” Aspectsin o f the Female Novel. (Wakefield, New Hampshire: Longwood Academic, 1991), 30-1.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 6
AGAINST SELF OCCUPANCY
As an adolescent, Martha Quest fights to establish an identity that is distinctively
her own and different from conventional standards. She fights, in fact, for the right to
achieve autonomy, for the right to claim herself as opposed to being controlled by others.
In this sense, her earliest quest is for the right to what I term “self occupancy.” Though
individuals such as her domineering mother and ill-matched husbands attempt to dictate
her personhood, Martha remains committed to notions of her own uniqueness and
independence. Caught in a circular pattern of rebellion and acquiescence throughout the
series, she attempts to preserve an inner space that affords her the capacity, when she is in
her forties, to investigate her inner self and extend her notions of self-definition. Quite
overtly, Martha disdains the claustrophobic conditions and limiting expectations of
female identity in mid-twentieth century, apartheid Southern Africa. Desirous of being
self-contained and free, she radically rejects external constraints and traditions.
Paradoxically, although Martha’s quest leads her into a world that appears free
and uninhibited, she discovers that it is actually quite the contrary; she discovers that she
must fight for the right to herself—for the right to be an intellectual as well as to do as
she pleases with her body in societies and countries that challenge her on those views. In
an interview with Roy Newquist, Doris Lessing celebrates the spaciousness offered by
124
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 125
the natural and rural Southern African landscape: “You see, in this background, people
can spread themselves out” and there is “space to move in.”1 But in the Children of
Violence series, Lessing suggests otherwise; Martha quickly discovers that there are
gender boundaries in the workforce as well as apartheid-enforced racial boundaries that
demarcate the Southern African landscape. Nevertheless, Lessing emphasizes the
necessity of spaciousness: Martha’s “self’ needs an expansive interior topography as well
as the personal license to explore the innermost locales of her own being.
In the early volumes, Martha’s “self’ is imprisoned within conventionality; she
feels constrained by her parents’ home as well as by their Victorian and colonial values
and by society’s essentialist prescriptions of the female identity. Seeking agency in the
potentiality offered by the Zambesian horizon as opposed to her parents’ hut, Martha
moves to the city in order to shed her constricting adolescence and acquire freedom. In
Martha Quest, she literally and figuratively disrobes and re-dresses herself to become
someone different, unconventional, and antithetical to her mother. However, in rejecting
biological determinism, Martha does not entirely disclaim all notions of femaleness. She
reclaims her “self’ by making form-fitting dresses as well as by engaging in self
starvation tactics to emulate the thin bodies of female magazine models. Thus, her
resistance to the external facets of womanhood is paradoxical; she disowns her biology
because she feels imprisoned by it, but she chooses alternatives that nonetheless lead to
objectification by men and bodily self-destruction. In this respect, Lessing demonstrates
1 Newquist, Counterpoint, 415.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 126
the ways in which Martha remains biologically and ideologically locked in a problematic
cycle of self-definition. To claim a “new self,” Martha feels compelled to identify
intellectually with men as well as to make alterations that involve slimming, or
disembodying her female physique.
While fighting to occupy herself, Martha loses herself; she disclaims her female
selfhood to the point of being disembodied and is taken over by a “masculine
intelligence” and an invasive presence that represents convention—sometimes female,
sometimes male, and often called “it” or the “self-hater.” Her body becomes a
battlefield: her intellect and consciousness struggle against her body and biological
determinism, such that she becomes compartmentalized and loses self-unity. Throughout
the series, these dualisms of the mind and body plague her; she remains caught in the
binary opposition between women and men that characterized society during the decades
encompassed by the series. While her mind actively desires nonconformity and
autonomy, her body is dragged into what she perceives as physical, female
acquiescence—sexual intimacy, pregnancy, heightened emotional states. Considering
Martha’s conflicted identity, Rose observes that Martha’s body is “antithetical to her
desire for freedom, free spirit.”2 Indeed, Martha sees her female identity as contradictory
to her quest for autonomy; identifying closely with male epic heroes, she sees her biology
as an enemy and an obstacle. When she is fuller-figured, Martha is reminded of the
maternal past which she has rejected. Therefore, in questing to bypass conventional
2 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 35.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 127
womanhood, she employs various strategies of deprivation. By controlling her physique
through willful starvation, she attempts to claim the agency and autonomy associated
with the male body.
Martha experiences starvation on multiple levels, physical and intellectual: she is
constantly dissatisfied with herself, her environment and her relationships. Her “thin
phases” occur during times of activity that end in momentary transcendence followed by
a recurring sense of futility: when she flees from home, when she engages in Communist
politics, and when she descends into “madness” in the basement of the Coldridge home in
London. As early as adolescence, she uses self-starvation as a form of resistance; by
controlling her “female self,” she rebels against nature. Throughout the pentalogy,
whenever her body is “plump,” Martha considers it to be unruly and not her own. Her
mother affirms this notion; for Mrs. Quest, “plumpness” is equated with adolescence,
subordination, and the need for concealing clothing.3 As Sarah Sceats observes, for
Martha, being thin equates with being free and defiant. According to Sceats, in Children
o f Violence and other works by Lessing, self-starvation is related to personal
empowerment, enlightenment and control. Repeatedly, Sceats notes, Martha rejects the
pleasures of eating;4 she rejects food as an extended rejection of Mrs. Quest’s mothering
as well as her matronly body.5 Sceats calls attention to the fact that Martha never eats
sweets, a fact that troubles Mrs. Quest, who offers them to Martha, perhaps in order to
3 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 51. 4 Sarah Sceats, “Eating, starving and the body: Doris Lessing and others,” in Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 76. 5 Ibid., 74.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 128
undermine her discipline and reconstitute her feminine figure. Martha receives a
“perverse, self-denying satisfaction”6 from starving herself. The opposite of self-
indulgence, self-denial becomes her bridge from youth to maturity, from female
acquiescence to female self-sufficiency.
Transitioning from childhood to adulthood, Martha turns to books for answers to
the internal division between mind and body. Kneeling before bookcases, she seeks
intellectual nourishment in literature:
Books. Words. There must be surely some pattern of words which would neatly and safely cage what she felt—isolate her emotions so that she could look at them from outside. For she was of that generation who, having found n nothing in religion, had formed themselves by literature.
But despite her wealth of books and years of formal education, Martha cannot find
sufficient stimulus or fulfillment; the Cohen boys and her parents’ bookshelves offer her
books she has already read and, though she ceaselessly searches for progressive models
of female experience, she cannot find her radical desires documented in the literature she
reads. She reads, hoping to assuage her hunger: “She went through the house searching
for something different. It was full of books.. ..These she had read before, and she now
read them again, and with a feeling ofbeing starved.”8 But to her disappointment, she
remains hungry, unsatisfied, and in need of other forms of nourishment.
Her hunger, Lessing implies, comes with the territory—with the Southern African
and post-World War II English landscapes that are insufficient for, even hostile to female
6 Sceats, “Eating, starving and the body,” 75. 7 Ibid., 84. 8 Lessing, Martha Quest, 43.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 129
self-actualization. Indeed, the depiction of hunger as a widespread malaise seems
especially ironic in Children o f Violence. Though Martha is not the only character in the
series who suffers from an eating disorder,9 she is the only character who uses willful
starvation as a form of social and biological resistance. Choosing voluntary starvation,
Martha intentionally rejects traditional notions of the female body in order to claim a
new, liberated physique that she believes is strong, autonomous, and full of agency.
Despite the fact that she does not entirely triumph through self-starvation, her relentless
desire to transcend the societal limitations associated with female biology are noteworthy
and commendable. Her hunger incites her to enact a revolution of the self, of her self,
that involves reshaping her body and, ultimately, her mind.
Thus, although she is unique in her resistance, she is also representative of the
collective society as, throughout the series, Lessing brings “hunger” to the forefront in
the novels as a condition that many of her characters share and from which they suffer.
With numerous references in the series to food preparation and Martha’s “thin” or “fat”
phases, coupled with the lack of love, pleasure, and familial support, Lessing invites
readers to examine the society as one of deficient nourishment for its inhabitants. She
calls attention to the overwhelming degree of intellectual, physical, emotional, and
spiritual starvation that affects human beings in the twentieth century. Martha and her
peers suffer from malnourishment and starvation which exist as collective phenomena
9 Sceats, “Eating, starving and the body,” 77.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 130
despite gender, class, racial, and geographic boundaries. Thus, Martha is uniquely
“hungry” in terms of acquiring personal rights, autonomy, and freedom.
Though she is the protagonist of the series and heroic in many of her attributes,
Martha digresses from self-empowerment into self-destructive behavior as a consequence
of her self-starvation methods. Despite the validity of her desire to transcend traditional
social roles and her pursuit of self-empowerment, Martha undercuts her own agency. As
Sceats astutely observes, Martha undermines her quest for autonomy when she “conforms
to visual expectations as part of the inescapable patterns of womanhood.”10 In agreement
with Sceats, I find that Martha is considered most attractive by men as well as most
receptive to their advances when she is exceptionally thin. For example, she receives
positive affirmation for her “thinness” from Thomas Stem, who becomes her lover and
adores her body. During the initial stages of their relationship, Martha elicits approval
from Thomas for her physique; she surmises that their mutual attraction is based, in part,
on her thinness. She asks him, “You find me attractive because I’m all thin and tense and
difficult?”11 knowing that he does, and he quickly consents.
Ironically, Thomas idealizes Martha’s body according to his perceptions of her
biological difference. Loving the parts of herself that he loves, she falls into the trap of
self-objectification: “She searched for and loved, every frail or delicate line in herself as
he did. She wished herself as fragile as a bird’s skeleton for him who loved so much
10 Sceats, “Eating, starving and the body,” 77. 11 Lessing, Landlocked, 101.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 131
what he was not—the qualities of delicacy, grace.”12 Her thin yet strong body becomes a
means of connecting herself and aligning herself with men as well as with love—both, it
seems, in retaliation against her mother in particular as well as her female biology in
general. Yet Lessing enables the reader to see the paradoxical nature of Martha’s
situation; although resistant, Martha remains caught in the inescapable pattern of female
behavior that is characterized by self-deprecation and parodying acts of autonomy.
Paradoxically occupying the role that she intellectually denies, Martha is caught, the
narrator sarcastically notes, “sitting, as it were, for the [imagined] portrait: pretty young
woman in a lovely dress. She tried to be only that, nothing more.”13 Thus, Martha
deviates from her quest for autonomy by starving herself; despite her efforts to reject the
burdens associated with womanhood as well as her attempts to affiliate herself with men,
she remains chained to the historic precedent of female objectification.
From adolescence to adulthood, Martha pursues the privileges that she associates
with maleness, such as power, intellectual prowess, intimacy, and freedom. When she
pursues self-occupancy, it is because she idealizes the m ale protagonists of her literature,
and all of the authors that she admires, not surprisingly, are male. Additionally, she
reveres the Cohen boys as her intellectual mentors and longs to have the same privileges
as her younger brother. His experiences reflect mobility and independence; unlike
Martha’s life, his life is an extreme source of pride for her parents. In fact, the Quests
take immense pride in their son’s schooling and engage in gender preference to the extent
12 Lessing, Landlocked, 125. 13 Ibid., 180.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 132
that Martha feels compelled to be like a boy when she is young. Even her childhood
friend, Mamie Van Rensberg, thinks she “behave[s] like a clumsy schoolboy.”14
Ultimately, as a middle-aged woman, Martha faces an identity crisis that is related to her
gender. She tells her psychotherapist, Dr. Lamb, that her “mother was a woman who
hated her own sexuality and hated mine too. She wanted me to be a boy always—before
I was bom.”15 While Martha’s father attempts to be sensitive and supportive of Martha
and their relationship is fond and intimate, he also likens her to a son and nicknames her
“old chap.” Thus, while Martha shapes her identity as a woman according to social
models such as magazine models,16 she psychologically claims affiliation with men and
shapes herself according to male gender roles. Consequently, she experiences a sense of
self-division; subconsciously, she develops a sense of self that includes a female body
and a male mind.
Wishing to divest herself of a fully feminine body, Martha makes herself as
“unfeminine” as possible to reject conventional and biological expectations of femininity.
In A Proper Marriage, she chooses to cut her hair short as a form of rebellion against her
matronly friend, Stella, who advises her to pursue “proper” haircuts and hairstyles.
Following her pregnancy and the birth of Caroline, Martha regains control of her body
and herself by starving: “By dint of literally not eating anything, she had.. .gained that
slimness which had been hers before she had married....She was herself, though a new
14 Lessing, Martha Quest, 24. 15 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 241. 16 Lessing, Martha Quest, 61.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 133
self.”17 While I agree with Rose’s suggestion that Martha’s “declaration of
independence” involves “transforming] the soft curves of recent maternity into a brittle
shell of stylish androgyny,”181 derive a different conclusion from Martha’s action. From
Rose’s perspective, this act of transforming herself is evidence of Martha’s “illusory
■ progress.”19 I maintain the opposite: that Martha claims the bodily shape that counters
her feelings of imprisonment and offers a sense of masculine freedom and self-control.
Martha’s rebellious behavior continues throughout the series, culminating in The Four-
Gated City— ihQ final novel of pentalogy—in which she fully embraces “unorthodox”
female living conditions, identifies with Lynda Coldridge as a fellow telepath and
visionary, and permits herself to become unhygienic and disorderly. Rebellion, in this
regard, involves being “improper”—having short, unruly hair and disregarding the
conventional standards of female beauty. It also involves being in control of her body
and exhibiting immense self-discipline concerning food.
But early in the series, Martha’s fluctuations in body weight and shape lead her to
ironical extremes of selfish self-occupancy and selfless disembodiment. Vacillating back
and forth, she shifts between wanting to be herself and wanting to free herself from
biology’s demands on her body, such that she repeatedly loses her sense of self and
ceases to feel comfortable in her own skin. Inadvertently, she becomes a detached
17 Lessing, A Proper Marriage, 206-207. 18 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 45. 19 Ibid., 43.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 134
observer of her own body. As John Berger explains this sense of double-consciousness in
Ways o f Seeing,
She comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success o f her life. Her own sense o f being in herself is supplanted by a sense o f being appreciated as herself by another2
On the one hand, by choosing a life of action, Martha succeeds in combating the
traditional female role of simply “being.” Yet she does not succeed entirely because she
negatively internalizes the male gaze and becomes the “surveyed female” that Berger
0 1 ' claims is the result of women watching themselves being looked at by men." In this
respect, she becomes “occupied” and taken over—which contradicts her original pursuit
of self-possession and empowerment:
Soon she fell to inspecting her own body according to that other standard, ‘long, lean, narrow,’ but it was difficult to respect that standard when she saw herself naked, and soon, with frank adoration, she fell into a rite of self- love. ...[H]er body lay unmoved and distant, congealing into perfection under ■ the eyes of this lover.. ,.[S]he thought of the ugly scar across her mother’s stomach, and swore protectively to her own that it would never, never be so marred; she thought of Mrs. Van Rensberg’s legs, and with tender reassurance passed her hands over her own smooth brown legs, murmuring that it was all right, all right, nothing would hard them.22
Thus, there is a schism in Martha’s consciousness as a consequence of the
opposition between her desires and societal pressures to conform to conventional
20 Berger, Ways o f Seeing, 46 (emphasis mine). 21 Ibid., 47. 22 Lessing, Martha Quest, 199.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 135
womanhood. Inadvertently, she succumbs to an internalized critical presence. In the first
volume, Martha Quest, Lessing gives this facet of Martha’s consciousness many names;
it is “a dispassionate eye” that focuses on the causes of her misery.23 It is also referred to
as “the detached observer” and “the clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead,” as
well as a “gift” acquired through book learning.24 Thus, it is both symptomatic and
characteristic of her unique consciousness; it is both Martha’s “weapon” and her
“guardian” that protects her from the divisive, war-torn society as well as from biological
determinism.
But she discovers that this astute consciousness makes her miserable at times, and
her penchant for over-analyzing leads her to near self-destruction. Hinting right from the
beginning of the series at the ways in which this “tool” is potentially dangerous, Lessing
interjects a self-reflexive imperative into the narrative: “Martha caught herself up, already
bad-tempered and irritable: she must not analyze, she must not be conscious; and here she
was, watching the movements of her mind as if she were observing a machine.” Such25
comparison to a machine seems particularly persuasive because, from the onset of the
series, Martha is, in fact, continuously self-dividing into a compilation of parts.
Throughout the entire series, from Martha Quest to The Four-Gated City, Martha feels
like a machine that is breaking down:
It was almost with the feeling of a rider who was wondering whether his horse would make the course that she regarded this body of hers, which
23 Lessing, Martha Quest, 18. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 73.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 136
was not only divided from her brain by the necessity of keeping open that cool and dispassionate eye, but separated into compartments of its own... There were moments when she felt she was strenuously held together by nothing more than an act o f will.26
Lessing uses the language of the technology to describe the ways in which people,
dehumanized by the wars and violence of the twentieth century, are numb, dismantled,
live automatically—even traditionally—and, therefore, lack the creativity and original
consciousness which Martha struggles to preserve.
By the time she reaches England as a middle-aged woman, Martha feels
overwhelmed by inner divisions which few people understand. She finally realizes her
psychological and physical plight as one that is perpetuated by a narrow-minded,
restrictive society. Having gained exceptional wisdom and insight into her situation as a
middle-aged woman in England, she says: “The trouble is, you have to choose a slot to fit
97 yourself to, you have to narrow yourself down for this stratum or that.” Ultimately,
when Martha reaches England, she slims down to the point of inhabiting nothing,
claiming no home, no identity, and no dependencies. As a forty year-old woman, she
occupies no self; she does not even lay her own claims to selfhood any more.
In the early sections of The Four-Gated City, Martha is disembodied to the point
that she no longer even claims a personal name. When asked for her name by a stranger,
she says she is “Phyllis Jones.”28 But she is not Phyllis Jones, nor is she “Matty,” her
parodying adolescent personality, nor is she “Martha Hesse.” She is not even “Martha”:
26 Lessing, Martha Quest, 86-7. 27 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 25-6 (emphasis mine). 28 Ibid., 17.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 137
“ordinary Martha too had moved away, could be looked at.. .was not important.”29 When
she visits Jack, a lover with whom she briefly stays, he tells her she has become an “old
woman” who scares him.30 Divested of names, Martha feels “stripped” down to her core
significance: “a soft dark receptive intelligence, that [is] all.”31 But beneath the dark
space, Martha feels a “maniacal” presence that oppresses her and that occupies territory
behind the alert and watchful area, like a malignant persona stalking her consciousness.
Realizing that this she/he/it32 presence, “silent watcher” and “witness,”33 has been
her most consistent companion since adolescence, Martha breaks down under the
pressure to remain whole in a society that increasingly fragments and dissolves, with its
most fundamental premise being immense pain. Martha’s sentiments, her increasing
sense of self-dissolution and incompleteness, are reflected in the narrative form itself,
which Lessing describes as “shot to hell.”34 Purposefully chaotic, the narrative form
illustrates the schisms in Martha’s consciousness as well as reflects the social chaos that
characterizes the series. Martha, searching to preserve her present, as well as remember
the past and plan for the future, faces an existential crisis that is cosmic in scope and well
beyond her ability to contain it. The narrator offers the reader an intimate glimpse into
Martha’s consciousness:
29 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 38. 30 Ibid., 50. 31 Ibid., 38. 32 Ibid., 238. 33 Ibid., 229. 34 Bamouw, “Disorderly Company,” 30.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 138
She fought. Who fought? .. .When scents, sounds, pictures, words went, she remained. Who? If one day she found herself memoryless in a new city, and they said, What’s your name, she might say, let’s see. Rosalind Macintosh. Or Montague Jones. Why not? The sense of herself which stayed had no sex. Suppose shutting her eyes, holding that sense, that presence, she imagined herself into the body of a man? Why not. An elderly man.. .Why not? Or a young man.. .Or even, letting the sense of herself go into a different shape, a horse, a small white horse. ...Who are you then? Why, me, of course, who else, horse, woman, man, or tree, a glittering faceted individuality of breathing green, here is the sense of me, nameless, recognizable only to me. Who, what?35
Fearing that she has developed schizophrenia and aware that such a state of being is
socially unacceptable, Martha seeks professional help from Dr. Lamb in order to resolve
her identity crisis. Longing for sanity and a unified sense of self, she expresses a desire
to “preserve the best part” of herself as well as to “kill that person, send her, it, him,
away, make it be silent.”36
As the series reaches its climatic point and Martha faces the potential death of
sanity as well as autonomy, the English landscape faces apocalyptic destruction as well.
Everyone, in fact, is occupied by a self-hating persona and hatred is a massive social
current that pervades society and can be “tapped into.” Buckling under the pressure of
destruction, Martha increasingly dissolves, disintegrates; relinquishing her autonomy, she
sees herself as an extension of others and part of humanity. While Rose asserts that self
division becomes Martha’s strategy for coping with the world that paradoxically keeps
her “shut-in and stuck in the infantile stage of development,”37 I disagree. Rather,
33 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 232-3. 36 Ibid., 238-9. 37 Rose, The Tree Outside the Window, 36.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 139
Martha’s self-division ultimately leads to a transcendent notion of self. By the end of the
series, Martha eventually finds “something different” as a result of figuratively shifting
her method of bodily resistance from narrowing, or slimming, to self-expansion. As a
wiser and more experienced woman, Martha ultimately realizes the erroneous nature of
narrowing oneself and—shifting from her earlier slimming tactics—decides to pursue.
intense self-discovery and internal expansiveness. She further develops her individual
capacities, such as her resolution to conquer her “inner demons,” in order to assist the
greater human collective. Thus, her self-focused, adolescent desire to resist
interconnectedness and remain self-contained is ultimately and more positively replaced
with a selfless desire to connect with “the human mind” and “chart new territories” in the
service of egalitarian survival.
Martha eventually recognizes that her mind and body are part of the societal
entities, not self-contained dimensions of her private personality. Through telepathy and
extrasensory communication, she relinquishes possessiveness of “Martha” in order to
transcend, perhaps most significantly, self occupancy, ultimately realizing that her “self’
is a free-roaming spirit that she must set free. Not even she should possess it. Her closest
communicant and guide, Lynda Coldridge, teaches her how to relate to others in new
dimensions, and Martha finds a desirable alternative to the loneliness and solitude of her
youth. Communing with Lynda and other visionaries through a variant of consciousness
that is socially-deemed “madness” because of its unconventional characteristics, Martha
no longer wishes to occupy herself; rather, she shares herself and joins a community with
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 140
humanitarian aims and capacities that assist in human salvation, ha agreement with
Rubenstein’s assertion that Martha’s “abnormal consciousness” saves her,381 see Martha
as a protagonist who achieves a level of transcendence that involves neither excessive
selfishness nor extreme selflessness. Rather, she arrives at a unique identity which
strikes a balance between the personal and the collective, the feminine and the masculine,
the rational and the irrational. After becoming the liberal yet matronly presence of the
Coldridge house, Martha looks for yet another identity and role, and this final
transformation requires the expansive training of her senses. By communing with Lynda
interpersonally, she realizes that there is a mystical, existential form of living that
surpasses her self-contained style of living.
When Martha eventually acquires the sensitivity and acute perception of a
visionary, she recognizes the world as a trans-communicative space and this adds to her
radical, revolutionary character. The narrator describes Martha’s new vision, her new
conceptualization of the four-gated city that is no longer hierarchal as it once was for her:
“The door had opened, as it tends to do, just under Martha’s eyes, where it had been
standing open for a long time now, unobserved, if she had only cared to look just there,
had not looked in the wrong places.” To be a humanist and visionary, Lessing suggests,
is to assume responsibility for affecting positive change in society: “not merely a
question of preventing an evil, but of strengthening a vision of good which may defeat
38 Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing, 39. 39 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 372.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 141
the evil.”40 Martha eventually acquires a humanist perspective and, as a visionary, she
learns that she is specially equipped with extra senses, forethought, and the capacity to
affect positive change. She learns to “see” differently and more perceptively, translating
her premonitions, however terrible, into messages that others will understand. By truly
connecting with Lynda, Martha fills the inner empty space, enabling her to genuinely
move beyond selfish or “infantile” needs. With Lynda, who was unfairly labeled by
society as a child and considered a “cripple” because of her unique telepathic abilities and
visions, Martha feels unified internally as well as “tapped into” and united with others.
She says, “It was not far off being inside Lynda’s head.. „[T]his stream ran through her
mind beside her own stream, or sometimes displaced it.”41 Together, they cultivate their
unique capabilities; by the end of the series, they are able to warn the group of
“children”—the Coldridge children and their friends—of impending apocalyptic disaster.
Martha, no longer possessive of her self when the series concludes, instead
possesses a superior vision of personal capacity that, when linked with the larger society,
can effectively counter the destructive chaos and hatred of society and unify the self as
well as unite human beings. As a medium of transpersonal communication, she becomes
a powerful “conduit” of wisdom and emotion who accepts the roles of prophet and
visionary. Thus, her focus turns away from her “small personal self’ and toward society
and collective salvation. Ultimately, this is Martha’s gift: she defines a revolutionary
female existence in which one inhabits relationships and residences by personal choice
40 Lessing, A Small Personal Voice, 6-7. 41 Lessing, The Four-Gated City, 498.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 142
and will, not by compulsion or convention. Retaining her earliest instinct of rebellion, of
fighting, she preserves this trait but refocuses her capacities to become a representative, a
voice, of Lynda and persons with variant consciousnesses, oppressed Africans, orphaned
and displaced children. Her will saves her—despite the seeming void of godlessness and
destruction—and enables her salvation. Martha also contributes to the survival of Mark
and Francis Coldridge and their respective communities that endure biological disasters
at the end of The Four-Gated City. By resisting convention, avidly pursuing self
exploration, and then developing the capacity to transcend selfishness and the personal
ego, Martha Quest ultimately discovers that her quest for radical change was not in vain:
her self is important and worth protecting from restrictive traditions and multiple forms
of occupancy. As Doris Lessing suggests by the end of Children o f Violence, the self
cannot survive in solitude or selfishness, but is worth sharing, exploring, and setting free
so that ultimately, in Walt Whitman’s words, it can “contain multitudes.”
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION
When conversing with Doris Lessing, some scholars have noted that it is
“something like a battle” because of Lessing’s interest in steering, perhaps even
controlling, discourse.1 This seems to be a fitting description of the author who,
especially in Children o f Violence, emphasizes the necessity of women waging personal
battles against oppressive conditions in order to achieve liberation for themselves and
future generations. Martha Quest, modeled after Doris Lessing, is at odds with
convention and polemical throughout the series, engaging in recurring conflict and
personal battles throughout the novels. Her multi-decade journey leads her through
multiple versions of social warfare and “occupancy,” as she consistently defends herself
against domination and possession by others and violence, each of which threatens to
restrict her to social conventionality. Though too defensive at times—resistant even
when it is counter-productive—Martha is a prototypical Lessing protagonist; though her
quest for liberation occasionally derails into conformity, Martha consciously fights for
herself and for the right to establish an identity that is revolutionary and contemporary.
Beginning with adverse conditions and fighting against negative capabilities, Martha
“works through” destruction to successfully construct positive internal and external
conditions. In this regard, Martha is a realistic character, endowed with
1 Rowe quoting Eve Bertelsen in “Doris Lessing,” 112.
143
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 144
representative qualities that invite readers to consider themselves in her; their struggles
against conformity and the dissolution of society may be seen as analogous to her own
struggles. The novels offer a progressive portrait of a young woman’s personal growth
and maturation—her intellectual and experiential development that lead her to personal
and communal salvation. By inviting the reader to consider Martha as she goes through a
series of changes that culminate in transcendence, Doris Lessing invites readers to
embrace notions of personal and social change that include radical revisions of familial,
romantic, and self-love. Ultimately, Martha quests for a livable existence, rejecting mere
survival. Desiring pleasurable relationships and cooperative environments, she aspires
for wholeness—a synthesis of self and other, white and black, female and male, young
and old. As psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin explains in The Bonds o f Love, “the first
step toward unraveling the bonds of love” is not to “undo” them, but to “disentangle
them; to make of them not shackles but circuits of recognition.”2 This vision of
interpersonal relationships—of unknotting the dysfunctional kinks in order to make
endearing links between herself and others—incites Martha to repudiate what she
considers to be substandard personal and social conditions in Zambesia and England,
eventually creating for herself and others “the four-gated city.”
As readers, we are asked to take Martha’s “vision” of self and communal
wholeness as indicative of Lessing’s ideals for contemporary society. Reflecting intense
self-exploration, highly-developed intelligence, and the rejection of occupancy, Children
2 Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and The Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 221.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 145
o f Violence represents key concepts pertaining to artistic and social activism that Lessing
endorses and invites readers to explore. After having repeatedly rejected all of the
traditional female roles, including daughter, wife, mother, domestic, and Party servant,
Martha rebuilds herself as a visionary, a survivalist, and an activist. Shifting from self
containment to intersubj ectivity, she finds allies who share her passion for freedom and
her vision of an ideal society that is both reformist and Edenic. Eventually—after many
years of struggle—her youthful vision becomes her reality: her consciousness transforms
imaginative ideals into physical sanctuaries, cities in the desert, for her loved ones.
Lessing marshals the agency and transformative power of her fiction in The Four-Gated
City, she imbues Martha with a spirit that ceaselessly pursues and eventually helps to
foster positive changes that are desperately needed in society. Thus, while the self may
be “small and personal,” it is nonetheless capable, if conscious and willing, to transcend
the limiting and destructive conditions of contemporary society.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Works [in chronological order]
Lessing, Doris. Martha Quest. Vol. 1, Children o f Violence. London: Michael Joseph, 1952. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins Books, HarperPerennial edition, 1995 (page references are to the reprint edition).
. A Proper Marriage. Vol. 2, Children o f Violence. London: Michael Josesph, 1954. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins Books, HarperPerennial edition, 1995 (page references are to the reprint edition).
______. A Ripple from the Storm. Vol. 3, Children o f Violence. London: Michael Joseph, 1958. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins Books, HarperPerennial edition, 1995 (page references are to the reprint edition).
______. Landlocked. Vol. 4, Children o f Violence. London: MacGibbon and Kee Limited, 1965. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Reprint, New York: HarperCollins Books, HarperPerennial edition, 1995 (page references are to the reprint edition).
______. The Four-Gated City. Vol. 5, Children o f Violence. London: 1969. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, Alfred A. Knopf edition, 1970 (page references are to the reprint edition).
______. A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Edited with an introduction by Paul Schiueter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
Secondary Works[in alphabetical order]
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics o f Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Foreword by Etienne Gilson. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
146
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 147
Barnouw, Dagmar. “Disorderly Company: From The Golden Notebook to The Four- Gated City” Contemporary Women Novelists, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1977. 30-54.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated and edited by H. M. Parshley. Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1949; New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1989 (page references are to the reprint edition).
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Fie Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998.
Berger, John. Ways o f Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1977.
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Feminisms: an anthology of literary theory criticism, and eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Hemdl. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997. 347-61.
Foster, Thomas. Transformations of Domesticity in Modem Women’s Writing: Homelessness at Home. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. 1-25.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Introduction by Anna Quindlen. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
Fullbrook, Kate. “The Presentation of the Self in Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest. Women’s Writing 1945-60: After the Deluge, ed. Jane Dowson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 179-90.
Gage, Diane Burdick. “Fictive Figurings: Metacommentary on Doris Lessing’s ‘Children of Violence.’” Dissertation Abstracts International. Ann Arbor: Michigan. 39: 1978.
Gardiner, Judith Kegan. Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics o f Empathy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition^ Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.
______. Doris Lessing: The Poetics o f Change. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 148
Hite, Molly. The Other Side o f the Story: Structures and Strategies o f Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Holmquist, Ingrid. “From society to nature: a study of Doris Lessing’s ‘Children of Violence.’” Ph. D. diss., Goteborg University. Gothenburg Studies in English 47. Goteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis 1980.
Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Urbana:Novel. University of Illinois Press, 1975.
Karl, Frederick R. “Doris Lessing in the Sixties: The New Anatomy of Melancholy.” Contemporary Women Novelists, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1977. 55-74.
Knapp, Mona. Doris Lessing. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1984.
Newquist, Roy. “Doris Lessing.” Counterpoint. New York: Rand McNally and Company, 1964. 414-24.
______. “Interview with Doris Lessing.” A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Edited with an introduction by Paul Schlueter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. 49-60.
Pierpont, Claudia Roth. “Memoirs of a Revolutionary: Doris Lessing.” Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. 223-49.
Porter, Nancy. “Silenced History— ‘Children of Violence’ and ‘The Golden Notebook.’” World Literature Written in English 12. University of Texas, Arlington (1973): 161-79.
Reed, Christopher. Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, and Domesticity. London: Yale University Press, 2004.
Rendell, Jane. “Disorderly Bodies and Spaces: Mobility.” Pursuit o f Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 130-40.
Rigney, Barbara Hill. “‘A Rehearsal for Madness’: Hysteria as Sanity in The Four-Gated City.” Madness and Sexual Politics in the Feminist Novel: Studies in Bronte,
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 149
Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. 67-89.
Robinson, Sally. “Repetition and Resistance in Doris Lessing’s Children o f Violence.” Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 29-75.
Rogers, Jaqueline McLeod. “Masculine Story/Female Experience.” Aspects o f the Female Novel. Wakefield, New Hampshire: Longwood Academic, 1991. 13-37.
Rose, Ellen Cronan. The Tree Outside the Window: Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence. New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1976.
Rowe, Margaret Moan. Women Writers: Doris Lessing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision o f Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms o f Consciousness. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979.
______. “The Room of the Self: Psychic Geography in Doris Lessing’s Fiction.” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 5 (1979): 69-78.
Sage, Loma. “Lessing and Atopia.” Doris Lessing: The Alchemy o f Survival, eds. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose. Ohio University Press, 1988.
Saxton, Ruth and Jean Tobin. Eds. Woolf and Lessing: Breaking the Mold. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Sceats, Sarah. “Eating, starving and the body: Doris Lessing and others.” Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Cambridge: Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 61-93.
Schlueter, Paul. The Novels o f Doris Lessing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.
Sprague, Claire. Ed. In Pursuit o f Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
______. Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition. Chapel Hill: University o f North Carolina Press, 1987.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 150
St. Andrews, Bonnie. “Love and Aging: Lessing and the Female Exile.” Forbidden Fruit: On the Relationship Between Women and Knowledge in Doris Lessing, Selma Lagerlof, Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood. New York: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1986. 111-54.
Stem, Frederick C. “Doris Lessing: The Politics of Radical Humanism.” Doris Lessing: The Alchemy o f Survival, eds. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose. Ohio University Press, 1988.
Watkins, Susan. “Going ‘Home’: Exile and Nostalgia in the Writing of Doris Lessing.” Women’s Writing 1945-60: After the Deluge, ed. Jane Dowson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 191-204.
Whittaker, Ruth. “The Children of Violence.” Modern Novelists: Doris Lessing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. 35-60.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.