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Against Occupancy: Martha Quest's Multiple Forms of Resistance In 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
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