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Introduction: Lessing and the Family

Family has been a central concern in the work of Doris Lessing since she published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950). This book explores the treatment of family in selected fiction by Lessing. It looks at how Lessing’s relationship to political and mystical philosophies shapes her representation of the family and considers the ways in which she problematises the family and celebrates alternative families. In her fiction, the family is represented as an ideological construct rather than a biological relationship, and through her work she reveals this ideology by illustrating that the family shapes and is shaped by the interests of the wider society in which it is found. Lessing’s fiction challenges the promotion of traditional family values, presenting them as concepts that ‘discipline’, in a Foucauldian sense, individuals into gendered roles and hierarchal relations.¹ Performance of gender roles, specifically men as breadwinner and women as homemakers, heterosexual marriage, raising children as obedient individuals are some of the traditional family values. These values are equated with social stability, shaping the ways in which wider society is organised. However, Lessing’s fictional family challenges this stability, celebrating individual demands and choices.

Debrah Raschke, Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, and Sandra Singer argue that ‘Lessing’s fiction and non-fiction demand a reformulation of some of our most taken-for-granted assumptions about the contemporary world and how we relate to that world’.² In this work, family is shown to be one of the taken-for-granted institutions that Lessing seeks to reformulate in her fiction. Overall, this book suggests that Lessing celebrates varied forms of family. In this way, Lessing’s fiction challenges the limitations and a single meaning of ‘the family’.³ In a broader sense, she is preoccupied with family in her fiction not as an institution to be discarded, but rather as a social concept to be critiqued and reconfigured for the ←17 | 18→benefit of individuals and society. Thus, this study establishes the importance of the family in Lessing’s fiction, and proposes that Lessing introduces non-normative families without being anti-family. The term non-normative family is employed to refer to the ways in which Lessing’s family deviates from the established norms of the traditional family such as biological connectedness, gender and hierarchal relations.

The book also considers Lessing’s literary explorations of the family in the context of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism. It is divided into four main chapters that address these themes. The chapters are arranged in a thematic order that chronologically reflects Lessing’s relationship with political movements, mysticism and the environment. In this sense, the theme of the family is discussed in relation to issues of class (communism), gender (feminism), mysticism (Sufism), and the environment (postcolonial ecofeminism) by focusing on two novels per chapter. Chapter One on communism analyses The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Sweetest Dream (2001); Chapter Two on feminism examines The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988); Chapter Three on Sufism considers The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Ben, in the World (2000); Chapter Four on postcolonial ecofeminism explores The Grass Is Singing (1950) and Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999).

The novels examined in each chapter share common themes but were written in different decades. The rationale through this pairing is, firstly, to follow changes in Lessing’s representation of family over time; secondly, to explore if her standpoint in relation to communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism also changes between the two texts; and, thirdly, to demonstrate how these changes affect her treatment of the family. The book focuses on a novel from the period in which she first engages with a set of ideas, or a philosophy or a political movement, alongside a later novel. This approach to studying Lessing’s work is in line with Roberta Rubenstein’s argument that ‘[e];ach of Doris Lessing’s novels is both a movement forward and a return to the concerns of her earlier fiction at deeper levels of meaning and complexity’.⁴ The book moves ‘forward and backward’ between the early and late novels to explore the evolution of Lessing’s treatment of family. The selected texts cover the period from the early 1950s, when Lessing published her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, up until the late 2000s when she produced one of her last novels, The Sweetest Dream. The eight novels analysed in the book reflect developments in Lessing’s representation of ←18 | 19→the family, covering a fifty-year period of interest in this concept. Together, they demonstrate how Lessing reflects and anticipates socio-historical and political developments in the history of the family, and suggest how her fiction extends theories and views of family rather than just mirroring them.

This work focuses on texts in which family emerges as a central theme. Thus, it focuses on Lessing’s literary fiction rather than her science fiction and short stories. It also focuses on novels that have received relatively little scholarly attention in relation to communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism, especially compared to the Children of Violence Series (1952–1969) and the novel for which Lessing is most famous, The Golden Notebook (1962). I aim to illustrate that each of the chosen novels offers an equally strong engagement with these political and philosophical movements. In Chapter One, I offer a reading of The Good Terrorist and The Sweetest Dream within the context of communist/Marxist theories of family, as these novels feature communes as alternatives to the traditional family. In Chapter Two, I show how The Summer Before the Dark and The Fifth Child present a vigorous critique of women’s oppression in society and the family, yet they have not received attention from feminist critics to the same extent as The Golden Notebook. In particular, The Fifth Child shows that the oppressiveness of the family extends beyond women to children. In 1987—two years after the publication of The Fifth Child—Barrie Thorne observes that ‘children remain relatively invisible in most sociological and feminist literature’.⁵ She further argues that ‘our ways of thinking about children reflect adult interest and limit understanding of children’s experiences and actions.’⁶ The fact that the novel is not only about a mother but also about a child contributes to re-visioning feminist scholarship, acknowledging children’s agency and subordination in the family. While The Fifth Child foregrounds women’s ongoing oppression in relation to domestic and childrearing responsibilities, The Summer Before the Dark illustrates how domestic oppression is translated into wider society, making women invisible in the relative absence of their domestic responsibilities.

The Memoirs of a Survivor has been referred to as one of Lessing’s first Sufi-themed novels. However, in Chapter Three I introduce Ben, in the World as another essential Sufi novel to expand discussions on Lessing and Sufism. Even the title of this novel evokes the Sufi teaching ‘Be in the world but not of it’ that warns individuals against the falseness of social roles and materialism. In Sufism, ←19 | 20→the human being is considered to be limited by the particular dimension and conventions they live in. ‘Be in the world but not of it’ is a way of illuminating the mind of its potentials and of the existence of multi-layered dimensions that the human mind if not the physical body can travel to. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, the act of penetrating through the walls, as practiced by the unnamed narrator, can be an example of this. Reading Lessing’s early and late Sufi novels in relation to the family reveals what I call the ‘Sufi family’ and ‘Sufi parenthood’. These terms denote non-normative families, as the Sufi relationships deviate from mainstream definitions of the family and gendered parenthood. The ways in which these terms contribute to the emergence of Sufi theories of family illustrate how Sufism benefits from Lessing’s fiction.

Lastly, Chapter Four offers a postcolonial ecofeminist reading of Lessing’s early and late postcolonial novels, The Grass Is Singing and Mara and Dann, in terms of the family. Such an analysis asserts the significance of the environment in Lessing’s fiction, as these novels have benefited from postcolonial criticism in relation to issues of race, gender, and colonialism at the expense of an analysis of the effect of the environment on Lessing, who lived in close contact with the natural world.⁷ A postcolonial ecofeminist reading illustrates that the changes in Lessing’s attitudes towards the environment initiate changes in her representation of the family. This chapter shows that Lessing’s treatment of family moves from dystopia (in The Grass Is Singing) to utopia (in Mara and Dann). With this move, Lessing transforms the oppressive family ideology into an egalitarian and non-normative one.

Lessing and the Family: From the Personal to the Political

Lessing’s critique of the family was shaped by her childhood and adulthood long before it became one of the core themes in her novels. The familial problems Lessing experienced in her personal life influenced the ways in which she problematized the family in her fiction. Lessing experienced different forms of family at different stages of her life. The first one was the biological family into which she was born; the second was her conjugal family established via marriage, divorce, and the bearing of children; the third was her political family, created through her involvement in communism; and the fourth was the family created by her decision to become a single and adoptive parent. In each of these ←20 | 21→families, Lessing faced different problems in various roles, including daughter, wife, mother, and single parent. On a personal level, Lessing transgressed family conventions, and traditional family values by not being what was considered a proper daughter, nor later a good mother and wife, and even within her political family she was not a communist enough.

The family into which Lessing was born was an ideal example of a traditional 1950s family, one marked by a gendered division of labour: her father, Alfred Taylor, was the breadwinner, whilst her mother, Emily Taylor, was the homemaker. Lessing, was not happy in her own biological family, as she explained in an interview: ‘My position in the family was such that I was very critical, and fairly early on’.⁸ She contested traditional family as practiced by her parents: ‘I cannot remember a time when I did not fight my mother. Later, I fought my father too’.⁹ During her childhood, Lessing witnessed that gender dynamics introduced two different images of family, firstly as a haven for men from the outside world, and secondly as a domestic prison for women, resulting in two unequal experiences. Whereas Alfred and Lessing’s brother, Harry, benefited from the privilege of exploring the outside world, her mother was confined to the domestic sphere and denied the same privilege enjoyed by men. Lessing, too, was exposed to sexism early on, as she mentions in her autobiography: ‘[W];hat I remember is hard, bundling hands, impatient arms, and [my mother’s] voice telling me over and over again that she had not wanted a girl, she wanted a boy. I knew from the beginning she loved my little brother unconditionally, and she did not love me’.¹⁰ Therefore, Lessing not only experienced sexism as part of women’s assumed inferior status in the settler society of Southern Rhodesia, but she also encountered it from another woman, her mother.

In the patriarchal, colonial settler society of Southern Rhodesia, where Lessing lived both as a child and adult, women were discriminated against through gender dynamics in the family. As both family and colonialism are sustained through male hegemony, giving birth to a male won women social approval. While her brother was loved unconditionally, Lessing’s acceptance in the family and society was conditional upon her adoption of feminine traits such as passivity, care, nurture, tolerance and compassion. Emily tried hard to mould ←21 | 22→Lessing into the image of a ‘proper’ daughter, but she refused to be an extension of her mother. Lessing initially did this by exploring the African landscape during her childhood, a privilege denied to women. The African bush, a space forbidden for white women represents Lessing’s early contact with the natural world and rebellion against gender limitation. She writes: ‘I used to prop the door with a stone, so that what went on in the bush was always visible to me’.¹¹ She then dropped out of her girls’ school at the age of fourteen in Salisbury, and finally left her biological family behind at the age of fifteen for an independent life. These departures indicate that Lessing was willing to contest the limits of gender in practice, which was later reinforced through her writing. Lessing could not change the biological condition of being a woman, but through her writing she could subvert the familial and social conditions that make women inferior in family and society.

Lessing deviated from the conventions of the traditional family in her marriages, too. At a time when divorce was understood as evidence of a woman failing to be a proper wife and mother, and therefore threatening social stability, Lessing nevertheless survived two family breakups, successively in 1943, leaving her children Jean and John with their father, Frank Wisdom, and in 1949 from her communist husband, Gottfried Lessing, becoming a single mother forever.¹² These years also marked the golden age of the traditional family, which defined women in relation to their roles as wives and mothers, homemakers and responsible for raising obedient children. Her divorces can be read as indicative of her challenge to prevailing ideas about gender. Moreover, her radical decision to leave her two small children behind while moving to London in 1949, which she defined as ‘committing the unforgivable’, also revealed that what is promoted as a haven was indeed a prison for women. Lessing, as she mentions in her autobiography, had no choice other than to escape from this prison in order to achieve freedom as a writer:

For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn’t the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother.¹³

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Unlike her mother and the majority of women who accepted family as their fate and motherhood as their reward, Lessing resisted convention and chose instead to pursue a career. She escaped from the dominant ideologies of family and motherhood to ‘recreate herself as a writer’.¹⁴ As such, her concern was not to protect the family ideology and properly raise children in a family situation, but instead to create a family liberated from traditional ideologies and establish a more equal society for all in her fiction. She states:

It was the way of life I had to leave … I explained to the babies that they would understand later why I had left. I was going to change this ugly world, they would live in a beautiful and perfect world where there would be no race hatred, injustice and so forth … I carried, like a defective gene, a kind of doom or fatality, which would trap them as it had me, if I stayed. Leaving, I would break some ancient chain of repetition.¹⁵

This passage is key to following Lessing’s critique of family ideology and her celebration of non-normative families, which would later emerge in her fiction. Although Lessing literally left her children behind, the passage clearly indicates that her intention was to leave ‘the way of life’ in which power dynamics of race, class, and gender distorted individuals’ lives and created an unjust society. The irony of the ‘defective gene’ she mentions implies a social construction of motherhood, which functions as the key determinant of children’s lives, with daughters positioned as extensions of their mothers and sons of their fathers. Family ideology promotes mothers as a means of shaping the future in accordance with societal expectations, yet Lessing leaves this ideological responsibility behind to assume a new responsibility: changing the world and family for the better, not as a mother but as a writer.

Lessing’s interest in communist politics instilled in her a new sense of family, both on fictional and non-fictional levels. Her new family meant a unit of people who gathered for a common cause in a non-hierarchal manner. Contrary to the taken-for-granted definition of the family, which implies the legal union of a heterosexual couple who live in a common residence with their genetic offspring, this new family was not restricted by any residence, legal union, or biological ties. Lessing had experienced this new type of family when she assumed responsibility for Jenny Diski, the classmate of her son, Peter. This relationship was later represented in Lessing’s novel The Memoirs of a Survivor, which introduced ←23 | 24→the idea of non-gendered parenthood in place of gendered motherhood. In this novel, Emily Cartright is left as a teenager with an unnamed narrator, who assumes responsibility for her. The pair have a non-biological, non-hierarchical, and non-gendered relationship, reflective of the non-normative mother/daughter relationship between Lessing and Diski. This illustrates that it was the ideology of motherhood, not parenthood, which Lessing abandoned when she left her family, which is eventually reconfigured in her fiction.

Once free from the traditional family on a personal level, Lessing was able to critique its ideology and promotion of inequalities. Through her writing, Lessing explores the ways in which family ideology can be subverted and reconstructed to the benefit of individuals and society. Writing about the family signalled Lessing’s shift from being a subject of the family to making it a subject of her work. Therefore, Lessing’s fiction not only mirrors the troubles of her own personal family life but also shows how family relates to wider social problems engendered by patriarchy.

The Family in Lessing’s Fiction

By focusing on the family, this book illuminates Lessing’s wider themes, concerns, and broader social critique. It is through the family that Lessing comments on social inequalities and environmental degradation in her fiction. For example, the families in The Grass Is Singing, the Turners and the Richards, reveal how hierarchies of gender and race sustain the patriarchal systems of colonialism and the family. Single parent families in The Golden Notebook illustrate that women can find diverse means of personal fulfilment beyond the family, such as in a career. The family in The Summer Before the Dark suggests that the situation in the 1970s still has not improved for women who participate in wider society as they are still not released from the oppression of domesticity. Alternative family arrangements are employed in The Good Terrorist to counter the New Right’s call for a return to ‘family values’ during the 1980s. The Lovatt family in The Fifth Child reveals the ideological interconnectedness between family and educational and medical institutions in stigmatising and oppressing individuals through bodily norms and gender roles. The novel also explores societal expectations of what is considered normal and abnormal. Mara and Dann details how patriarchal systems not only distort the human mind but also cause environmental degradation. The Lennox family in The Sweetest Dream explores the inadequacy of left-wing politics to represent womanly concerns. A comparative reading of these novels illustrates that family not only relates to social problems, but also becomes a means of exploring solutions to these problems in Lessing’s fiction.

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The significance of the family needs to be appropriately established in order to follow Lessing’s shifts at various stages of her writing between the political and mystical movements of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism. It is through the family that Lessing tests the capacity of these movements in bringing real change. At the same time, Lessing explores the gaps in these movements and suggests the ways in which they can intersect to create equality and a more just society. For example, a focus on the family demonstrates that Lessing’s feminism and Sufism intersect in a way that challenges gender oppression, and creates what I term ‘Su-feminism’. The identification of intersections between these movements enables Lessing’s fiction to be read anew in relation to family, gender and her wider concerns.

The trends and changes in Lessing’s social vision can also be followed through the family. Cornelius Collins suggests that Lessing’s vision ‘grew more radical and her analysis of global conditions more severe’.¹⁶ This becomes particularly evident in the context of the family. For example, while Lessing critiques traditional family arrangements in her early writing between the 1950s and 1970s, her evaluation of the family becomes more radical as she explores non-normative kinship from the late 1970s onwards. A focus on family illustrates that Lessing’s vision expands from women to humanity (including men) and then to the environment; she achieves this by revisiting her earlier concerns. While women’s oppression in the family was among Lessing’s earlier preoccupations, this concern, thanks to her involvement with Sufism, expanded towards a consideration of the oppression of humanity in the family and society. The late 1990s, with the publication of Mara and Dann, witnessed Lessing’s increasing environmental concerns. In the novel, the irresponsible occupation of land and exploitation of natural resources threaten all living organisms with extinction. Lessing protests human exploitation of the environment and challenges patriarchal systems to introduce a new family in her utopian continent, called Ifrik.

Critical and Theoretical Approach

Lessing’s ongoing interests in issues of class, gender, mysticism, and the environment justify chapters on communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism, respectively. In the early 1940s, Lessing was a member of the ←25 | 26→Communist party as part of her anti-racist activism in Southern Rhodesia. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed Lessing’s ambivalent relationship with feminism. Although her work, The Golden Notebook, anticipated and promoted the Women’s Liberation Movement before key feminist texts such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Lessing refused it to be labelled a feminist text: ‘But this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation’.¹⁷ The late 1960s witnessed Lessing’s dissatisfaction with political movements for their limitations, as she later explained: ‘I have long recognised that the salvation of this world cannot lie in any political ideology’.¹⁸ The blind spots in political ideologies led her to explore a non-political philosophy, Sufism, which demonstrated a wider concern for humans as a species rather than particular groups. For Lessing Sufism was a way of escaping from the prisons of conventions, dogmas, and prescribed behaviours to bring about real freedom and change in the family. The idea of the family as a prison parallels Sufi belief, as Lessing mentions: ‘Well, the Sufis say we live in such a prison, and it is their concern to give us equipment to free ourselves’.¹⁹ In her collection of essays Prisons We Choose to Live Inside (1986), Lessing recalls her interest in different ideas: ‘examining ideas, from whatever source they come, to see how they may usefully contribute to our lives and to the societies we live in’.²⁰ Sufism was one of these ideas in which Lessing became interested, and she employed it in her fiction during the 1970s for the creation of non-normative families and society.

In the 1990s, Lessing expanded the scope and criticism of this ‘prison’ to include environmental problems in her fiction. Contrary to her early depiction of environment as passive and controlled by men in The Grass Is Singing, she empowers environment in such a way that it pays back to human exploitation. The duration between the two novels points at her increasing environmental concern, and it is in line with her expanding vision, namely, a shift in focus from human concerns to planetary ones. At that time, when environmentalism was the concern of critical debates both in the US and Western Europe, Lessing wrote Mara and Dann, exploring corresponding environmental problems and debates. This book explores Lessing’s interest in communism, feminism, Sufism, and ←26 | 27→postcolonial ecofeminism, along with aspects of her dissatisfaction with each through a focus on the family as she employs these theories and philosophies in her critique of this institution.

Communism and the Family

In her fiction, Lessing tests the capacity of communism in eradicating social injustices and bringing real change to families. The communist vision of the future family was adopted by Lessing during her active membership in the Communist Party and later in her writing. In Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, she mentions her enthusiasm for a new form of family: ‘[M];y first duty is to my new family, my real one, and they really care for me, they understand me, but my former family did not really love me and understand me.’²¹ Here, Lessing makes a distinction between her biological family and her ‘new’ family. While the former represents a prison to escape, which Lessing viewed as collaborating with evil systems of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, her new family is a way of fighting against these systems.

Lessing’s views on the family are more in line with those of Karl Marx than Friedrich Engels. Marx is in favour of a realigned family, whereas Engels seeks the abolition or dissolution of the family through a communal way of living in the communist society.²² In her fiction, Lessing neither abolishes nor dissolves the idea of the family, but rather imagines its reconfiguration in the best form possible. While Alice Mellings in The Good Terrorist abandons her own bourgeois family in the hope of creating a new type of family in a political commune, the Lennox family of The Sweetest Dream is gradually transformed into a commune, accommodating individuals and political figures to create a new sense of family. In 1982, Ferdinand Mount argued that ‘the appearance of communes, squads and kibbutzim is a new development which may bring about the collapse or transformation of the family’.²³ Lessing’s novels, those that I call her communist texts, present communes as alternatives to the traditional family. In The Good Terrorist, Alice, the squatter, tells her mother: ‘we are going to pull everything down. All of it. This shitty rubbish we live in. It’s all coming down (italics original)’.²⁴ The pronoun ‘we’ stands for Alice’s new friends, while ‘it’ denotes the ←27 | 28→traditional family and the ‘shitty rubbish’ women’s traditional roles in it. Like Lessing, Alice abandons her biological parents and pursues the dream of a new family through communism.

The ways in which communism offers an alternative form of the family also calls its limitations into question. The idea that a communist family would follow the overthrow of the existing economic system means ignoring ongoing women’s oppression in the family and inequalities in wider society. Lessing, rather than waiting for this overthrow, experiments with the communist family in her fiction by exploring whether a woman’s condition would differ in new family arrangements. Engels writes about the situation of women in The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State (1884), suggesting that ‘the modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed slavery of the wife’.²⁵ In this slavery, while the husband represents the bourgeois, his wife stands for the proletariat. Man’s control of woman, ‘is rooted in the fact that he, not she, controls the property’.²⁶ Lessing is quick to see the gap between theory and practice in the communist view of the family. In The Good Terrorist and The Sweetest Dream, she highlights how communism fails to put theory into practice when it comes to women and family. Both Frances and Alice, the protagonists of the respective texts, are burdened by heavy domestic responsibilities for the sake of ‘revolution’. Their conditions confirm the concerns of feminists in spotting the gender blindness of communism. Citing Margaret Benston, Rosemarie Putman Tong states that a ‘change to communal eating arrangements […] might simply mean moving a woman from her small, private, individual kitchen into a large, public communal one’.²⁷ The Good Terrorist and The Sweetest Dream illustrate that gender roles remain unchanged in what is supposed to be a radically new household that is not controlled by men in the form of private property. Lessing highlights the gender-blind aspect of Marxist/communist theory, suggesting that the new family remains a utopia, or ‘the sweetest dream’, as the title of the later novel hints. In this way, she problematises both the traditional family and communist theory. Lessing critiques the bourgeois family and imagines new forms of kinship in her fiction. However, her critique of communism also presents the ←28 | 29→communist family as hypocritical, as it recognises the plight of women yet fails to liberate them from domesticity.

Feminism and the Family

Lessing’s ideas about family became more radical through her gender-based critique of the institution in the early 1960s. Her exploration and analysis of the family coincides with the rise of second-wave feminism. Although Lessing was ambivalent towards this movement, her novels align with a feminist critique of women’s oppression in the family and exclusion from politics and society. Her long-celebrated novel, The Golden Notebook, was regarded as a key feminist text in terms of illustrating that women can contribute to politics and have a career, and they can sustain a family without needing men. The novel was also an important text in terms of reflecting Lessing’s ideas about non-normative family arrangements, as it details the lives of two single parents, Anna Wulf and Molly Jacobs. Such families were considered to be deviant and even a threat to social stability at that time. The novel explores educated, middle-class women rejecting the image of the happy housewife, a myth that was further subverted the following year when Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.²⁸

Feminist theory presented a systematic critique of the family by analysing multiple overlapping factors such as marriage, reproduction, child rearing, domesticity, parental roles, and childhood. Lessing, too, is critical of family as a patriarchal institution that reproduces conservative gender roles. Like feminists such as Friedan, she takes traditional family as the main source of inequalities in society. The link between family and society in regards to the equality that Lessing persistently represented in her fiction early on was later pronounced by contemporary feminist family critics such as Susan Moller Okin: ‘Without just families, how can we expect to have a just society?’²⁹ Lessing’s ambivalence towards feminism is also reflected in her view of the family that at some points contradicted radical feminists. While Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer focused on opting out of family and asserted separatism as solutions to the problems of patriarchy, Lessing writes about the liberation of the ←29 | 30→family from the patriarchal ideology and social politics, rather than the liberation of women from the idea of the family altogether.³⁰

Sufism and the Family

Unlike communism and feminism, Sufism does not have an established theory of family. Therefore, Lessing’s representation of the family benefits from Sufi thought indirectly, hinting at ways in which Sufi principles and tenets could be employed to critique traditional family arrangements and to introduce non-normative ones. For example, gender plays a significant role in creating and sustaining the family ideology. It is due to gender that women and men are regarded as two different beings in a hierarchy. In contrast, Sufism suggests that although ‘in this world of duality we may find ourselves in different forms, ultimately there is no male or female, only Being’.³¹ The ultimate point one can reach in Sufism is to recognise one’s own capacities as a Being regardless of social roles and constructions. In Sufism traditional family, political parties, parenthood, and group minds of all kinds are regarded as the ‘constrictive collective’. Humans experience the loss of identity in these roles, what Sufis call ‘the false self’.³² Sufism stresses the importance of individualism in order to reach the real self, and in this regard, women are no different from men. Just as ‘male attributes of strength and determination also belong to women’, so too do ‘the feminine attributes of receptivity and beauty also belong to men’.³³ The non-hierarchical and non-gendered nature of Sufism inspires Lessing’s creation of non-normative families.

Lessing’s novels highlight the intersection of feminist and Sufi concerns. This intersection gives rise to ‘Su-feminism’.³⁴ In The Female Eunuch (1970), Germaine Greer talks about the ‘organic family’, which destabilises the relationship between biological parents and children to critique the role biology has in ←30 | 31→sustaining the traditional family: ‘[t];he point of an organic family is to release the children from the disadvantages of being the extensions of their parents so that they can belong primarily to themselves’.³⁵ Lessing represents this ‘organic family’ in her personal life with Jenny Diksi, and her Sufi themed novels, The Memoirs of a Survivor and Ben, in the World. In the first novel, protagonists, Gerald and Emily establish a commune where they raise unrelated children, destabilising the tie between child and parent. The sense of ‘organic family’ is hinted at through their deviations from social conventions. There are not any hierarchies or gender divisions between these children as they have not lived within traditional family arrangements before. She introduces Ben as a Sufi in the latter novel. As a victim of the traditional family as represented in The Fifth Child (1988), Ben’s journey towards self-actualisation is accompanied by Mrs. Ellen Biggs, standing as a non-biological parent in his life. Therefore, Lessing’s fictional children in these novels do not internalise the gender roles of their parents, as highlighted by Greer. To borrow a phrase from Greer, Ben and the children in Gerald’s commune ‘initiate their own capacities’, which is in line with Sufi teaching. This is an example of the intersection of Lessing’s Sufism and feminism.

The term Su-feminism indicates that Lessing’s Sufism expands her feminist critique of the family by providing a new form of arrangement in which gendered parental roles are minimised. The labour motherhood involves was considered to be the main source of women’s oppression in the family and of their disadvantage in the society. For example, Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) argues that new reproductive technologies and shared childcare would free women from the burden of pregnancy and birth, and a maternal role that guaranteed female oppression. Analysing the traditional family from a Sufi perspective brings a strong critique of hierarchies and parental roles in the family and reveals ways in which non-normative family arrangements could emerge. Sufism prioritises the idea of unity and oneness, without any discrimination. In this way, Lessing’s Sufism, I suggest, expands and contributes to her desire to eradicate gender-based segregation in both family and society. This suggests that her ambivalent relationship with the Women’s Liberation Movement can be reconciled through exploring the ways in which her feminism and Sufism intersect.

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Postcolonial Ecofeminism and the Family

Lessing’s increasing interest in environmental politics during the late 1990s also shapes her representation of the family. Growing up in the colony at Southern Rhodesia, she witnesses overlapping connections between unjustified subordination of women and destruction of environment. Both environment and women are controlled and exploited through gender with the former feminised, and the latter’s roles naturalised within the patriarchal systems of colonialism and the family. Lessing’s treatment of the environment links to her reconfiguration of the family and women’s domination. A comparative reading of her early and late postcolonial novels, The Grass Is Singing and Mara and Dann suggest that Lessing recovers environment from its submissive and exploited position, which in return enables her to challenge patriarchal systems and reconfigure her non-normative family. In Mara and Dann, Lessing creates a utopian continent, Ifrik, and looks for reasons for and solutions to environmental problems. Derek Wall, in Green History, argues that

the concept of ‘utopia’, variously translated as nowhere (utopia) or ‘perfection’ (eutopia), has powerfully inspired the Green movement. Greens would argue that to solve ecological problems requires the transformation both of institutions and of the individual, resulting in the creation of a new society.³⁶

Lessing’s fiction mirrors the link between utopia and the Green movement. At the end of Mara and Dann, Lessing introduces her utopian family that adopts an eco-centric farming method with its members in neither hierarchal relations nor mastery over the environment. The Empire, which once ruled Africa on behalf of the British Royal Family, as shown in The Grass Is Singing, is contested and replaced by a utopian environmental family in Ifrik. The fact that Mara, the feminist explorer, rejects the idea of getting married to her brother to revive the Royal family implies that she challenges colonial and hegemonic control of the environment in Ifrik. Lessing’s modifications in her representation of the environment, from The Grass Is Singing to Mara and Dann, are translated into modifications in her representation of the family. Using these two novels, a postcolonial ecofeminist reading can provide fresh insights that acknowledge the significance of Lessing’s representation of the family in postcolonial literature.

←32 | 33→

Intersectionality in Lessing’s Fiction

The combination of postcolonial and ecofeminist concerns in The Grass Is Singing highlights the intersectionality that characterises Lessing’s fiction. The family is a locus where hierarchies of race, class, and gender converge as different but intersecting forms of oppression. Family can then be defined as a complex ideological construction in which various forms of social hierarchies are performed and spread to the rest of society. A single critical approach to the family fails to recognise intersecting power relations that disadvantage particular groups of people. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 theory of intersectionality suggested that the oppression of black women can only be understood by looking at the intersection of womanhood and blackness.³⁷ The intersecting lens, as understood from Crenshaw’s perspective, warned scholars and social movements that ‘address[ing] injustice towards one group may end up perpetuating systems of inequities towards other groups’.³⁸ In her 1985 novel The Good Terrorist, Lessing addressed the intersection of inequalities long before Crenshaw’s theory, highlighting that communist/Marxist theory is gender-blind because it focuses on the oppression of the proletariat, a term used for men. As in the example of Alice Mellings, women are not considered a social class and therefore are excluded from the communist critique of a class-based system, though capitalism benefits enormously from their labour and oppression. The intersectional approach establishes the significance of family in understanding multiple sources of oppression in Lessing’s fiction, such as gender, sexual orientation, class, race, and bodily norms. Lessing’s fiction intersects political theories of communism, feminism, environmentalism and Sufi mysticism to address if not unpack entwined forms of oppressions in the family.

Exploring the family through the intersections of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism contests the power dynamics that oppress individuals and exploit the environment. Communism critiques the family for its relation to capitalism and sustaining a class-based society, feminism identifies the family as having created gender inequalities and promoting a patriarchal society, Sufism resists any form of prescribed human behaviour on which ←33 | 34→the traditional family relies, and postcolonial ecofeminism illustrates how the patriarchal systems of capitalism, colonialism, and family cooperate not only in oppressing people based on colour, gender, and class but also exploit the environment and other living organisms. In the same way that multiple forms of oppression intersect and sustain what we call ‘the family’, the approaches of communism, feminism, Sufism, and postcolonial ecofeminism intersect in Lessing’s fiction to introduce non-normative families. The novelty of my approach lies in the fact that it considers family through an intersecting lens to illuminate the ways in which Lessing critiques and reconfigures the traditional institution of the family.

Overview of Key Thinkers and Theories: ‘The Family’ and Families

The question of whether the family as a concept is functional or dysfunctional has opened contemporary debate. Discussion has developed from two contradicting views: either accepting a single meaning of ‘the family,’ or critiquing the existing form of the family as a way to acknowledge diverse human relations within the context of ‘families’. Ronald Fletcher named the latter group as ‘abolitionists’, claiming that they are ‘radically […] mistaken’ in their view of family and marriage.³⁹ On the other hand, the functionalists’ assertion that the family is an ‘unchanging, biological, heterosexual and natural’ entity has historically been challenged through revolts by new generations who oppose traditional restrictions on sexual behaviour, protests by women against their imprisonment within the wife-mother role, and gay rights movements.⁴⁰ The development of the Marxist critique of ‘the family’, diverse feminist approaches, and the emergence of radical anti-psychiatry movements have put the functionality of ‘the family’ into question, critiquing it as an instrument of capitalist and patriarchal oppressions and as destructive of individuality. These approaches and movements have critically analysed family as part of their demand for social change rather than taking its existing form for granted. Such discussions have presented ‘the family’ as either all bad or neither good nor bad but in need of reconfiguration against the functionalist’s promotion that the family is all good. The rise of gay and lesbian movements has moved these discussions a step ←34 | 35→further to ask the crucial question about what could be considered a family. This question has been key to the emergence of non-normative families, which have occupied the political agendas of the New Right that defends family values and New Labour, which is in favour of alternative families. Although the family has varied in its forms considerably historically and geographically, I am focusing on the family in the US and the UK in the twentieth century because this was the context in which Lessing was writing, and this is where her work is widely read.

The Functionalists: The Stable Family

Changes to the family in the UK came following the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the last year of that decade and into the 1940s. Economic hardships caused family breakdowns not through divorces but abandonments when men either chose to leave to live somewhere else or went off to war. Women had to be both the caregiver and the breadwinner, and the number of female employees in the workforce, especially in clerical and service positions, increased. All of these changes signalled women’s changing roles and hence the perceived changes in the family to follow in later decades. Therefore, the emergence of functionalist family theories were responses to these changes in an attempt to assuage anxiety about social change and reassert the old order. Functionalist theories associated the word ‘family’ with the legal union of a heterosexual couple and the production and raising of biological children, and the preservation of this unit has been linked with social stability. The theoretical definition of the family has been systematised and supported by the functionalist school of thought.

Functionalism, having its origins in the writings of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, emphasises the importance of stability and consensus for a society to exist. Each aspect of a society, such as education, media, government, economy, religion, and family, is dependent on the others. For example, religion emphasises the importance of establishing families and promotes seniority of individuals when they assume their roles as husband/wife, and further as mother/father. Schools help families to raise children in accordance with dominant values, and in return children are expected to become good citizens by fulfilling their duties in wider society, such as paying their taxes and contributing to a stable economy. Similarly, mothers are considered good citizens as long as they are occupied with their familial responsibilities, including raising well-behaved children who will go on to be the next generation of a stable society. As such, any problem, dysfunction, or even change in any of these aspects is considered ←35 | 36→to affect the overall stability and structure of society. Compared with other social institutions, family has been afforded the utmost importance in functionalist theory, as it is where members of a society are reproduced and ‘equipped’ with their roles before they join the wider world and its institutions.⁴¹

Functionalist theories of family reached the height of their power during the 1940s and 1950s. During these decades the traditional family was promoted as the ideal form for social productivity, integration, maintenance, and continuity. The writings of Talcott Parsons and George P. Murdock shaped traditional family ideologies both in those and later decades to follow. Murdock defined family as including an ‘adult of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted of the sexually cohabiting adults’.⁴² For a unit to be called a family, according to his definition, is dependent on a sexual relationship approved by society and the existence of children. For Murdock, the family is a universal human institution and should be the same everywhere, as it meets the basic biological and societal human needs such as protection, reproduction, shelter, socialisation, economic support, and regulating relationships between the sexes. Writing in the 1950s, Parsons theorised the gender division of labour with what he termed the ‘expressive’ and ‘instrumental’ roles of women and men, respectively. Occupying the expressive role, women, according to Parsons’s theory, are placed at the centre of the family as homemakers, providing love, affection, care, and all other necessary emotional support for family members. On the other hand, men’s instrumental role as breadwinners is defined in relation to their presumed strength, leading to their occupation of political, economic, and military arenas. Men’s roles, according to Parsons’s theory, are considered to be more challenging and stressful as they require involvement in wider society, necessitating a minimal role in relation to domesticity and childcare.⁴³

For functionalists, gender roles are ‘natural’ and ‘unchanging’ as a result of perceived biological differences between men and women. For example, women were expected to be carers because of their ability to bear children. Diverse definitions of the family as ‘nuclear’, ‘traditional’, and ‘biological’ refer to the ‘unchanging’, ‘natural’, and ‘universal’ roles women and men are supposed to ←36 | 37→perform in their families. Theories emphasising women’s role as carers also came into being during this period. In 1953, John Bowlby hypothesized the child’s tie to his mother, arguing that infant and mother biologically need to stay in contact with each other. According to his hypothesis, children’s primary attachment is to their mothers, and the former need a stable and secure relationship with the latter if they are to develop personally, emotionally, and physically. Inadequate maternal contact in early infancy, for Bowlby, would cause serious problems in future stages of development. This would mean problematic individuals threatening social stability.⁴⁴ These theories illustrate that in the same way the family is situated at the centre of all other institutions for social stability, so too are women placed at the centre of the family, with its success positioned firmly on their shoulders. Therefore, from the functionalist perspective, a malfunction or a change in women’s roles would mean a dysfunction or a change in the family, which would in return threaten the entire social system.

The Family in Marxism/Communist Theory

While Marxism and communism share similarities, the former is a political theory that analyses class-driven inequalities in existing society, whereas the latter is a political system that theorises an egalitarian future society. Marxism views society and its institutions as structured by capitalism, which is established upon an uneven class conflict between a small and elite group called the bourgeoisie and a large number of working class people called the proletariat. The bourgeoisie, having the economic power, control the means of production and labour, keeping the proletariat oppressed due to the unequal distribution of economic power and labour. In Marxist/communist theory, the production of food and material objects are necessary if humans are to survive. Therefore, productive activity is key to the ways in which the ordering of a society and its institutions are created. The function of the family is to sustain the operation and reproduction of capitalism over time.⁴⁵ The Marxist school of thought critiqued the modern family as a state apparatus controlling individuals in accordance with capitalist imperatives.

Communist theories of the family mainly originate from the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Rather than offering a systematic critique of ←37 | 38→the family, especially in relation to gender inequalities within society, communist theory focuses more on the relation between capitalism and the family in sustaining a class-based society through production and reproduction.⁴⁶ Marx and Engels write about the transformation of the economic structure, which they believe would bring a change in the elements of superstructure such as family and religion in the communist society. Therefore, it is taken for granted that economic transformation will bring a change in the function of the family. Richard Weikart summaries Engels and Marx’s critique of the family in three main points. They offer ‘a depiction of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of the contemporary bourgeois family, the historicisation of the family, i.e. historical account of the origins and development of the family in the past; and a vision of the future “family in communist society” ’.⁴⁷ The bourgeois family refers to an economic unit that controls modes of production and reproduction on behalf of capitalism. It provides a ready and free labour force through unpaid housework, childbearing, and childrearing. Capitalism exploits the labour in the family as a way to benefit from the working class (mostly men) at a maximum level in the production.

In The Principles of Communism (1847), Engels presents the influence of the communist society on the family. At the very beginning of his analysis, he defines communism as ‘the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat’.⁴⁸ Engels argues that in communist society, the relations between the sexes will be transformed into a purely private affair, so society would have no intervention into these relations at all. In order to achieve this, he proposes the abolishment of private property and suggests the communal education of children:

With the transfer of all means of ownership into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of the society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not.⁴⁹

For Engels, private property and children are the ‘two bases of the traditional marriage’ that ensure the dependence of women on men, and children on their ←38 | 39→parents. Moreover, as private property is transmitted from one generation to another in accordance with male lineage, it reproduces the sexual division of labour in each succeeding generation. Alexandra Kollontai, a twentieth-century communist writer, identifies the establishment of communal kitchens, raising children communally, weakening the parent-child bond, and the abolishment of inheritance and private property as the characteristics of the future family in communist society.⁵⁰ In particular, her reference to kitchens and children signals women’s traditional role and ongoing oppression in families. Also, the abolishment of inheritance, which is wealth passed through male generations, would mitigate the continuing transfer of male hegemony.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), drawn from Friedrich Engel’s and Karl Marx’s notes, the former successively analyses the evaluation of different family forms in primitive societies as identified by the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan: ‘The Consanguine, the punaluan, the pairing, the patriarchal and the monogamous families’. For Engels, the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century elevated with it the monogamous family, which controls sexuality. In his analysis, Engels concludes that the family and labour are two different modes of production, which have a determining effect on the creation of a class society:

According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: on the one side, the production of the means of existence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social organization under which the people of a particular historical epoch and a particular country live is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other.⁵¹

As the communist/Marxist ideology envisages ‘a classless society’, it aims to regulate both modes of production in a way that would eradicate any class stratification in society. Among its proposed stages of economic development, communism will be the last stage where the whole society will be transformed into one family rather than being divided into different classes of family (that is, working, middle, and upper). Instead of analysing the family with regards to individuals (either women, men, or children), communism focuses on the ←39 | 40→relation between reproduction and capitalism, which transforms family into an economic unit together with ‘sex role differentiation’. As Irene Bruegel argues:

Capitalism exploits the differentiation of the sexes. It does this by differentiating between ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’, using women both as a cheap labour for employment in the more marginal and insecure jobs, and as a reserve army of labour. […] Thus it is in the interests of capitalism as a system to sustain sex role differentiation and the family as a reservoir of potential (latent) labour power.⁵²

Through this role differentiation, capitalism creates a ready human labour force, and women’s participation in the market offers an opportunity for cheaper labour due to their socially specified inferior role at home. Therefore, as Heather A. Brown highlights in Marx on Gender and the Family (2012), Marx and Engels indirectly argue that ‘since the origins of class-society exists in the family, a classless society cannot be created and maintained so long as familial and gender oppression exits’.⁵³ Lindsey German, a Marxist feminist, explains the relation between reproduction and capitalism: ‘Reproduction through the family is not a separate mode, but part of the superstructure of capitalism. Abolition of the capitalist system – a revolutionary overthrow of society – means the capitalist system of reproduction, the family, cannot survive intact’.⁵⁴ The Marxist/communist ideology envisages the transformation of the family via the economic transformations in historical development, say, from capitalism to socialism. In this sense, it critiques the family with regards to the material conditions such as private property that cause the inequalities between the sexes in society.

In Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (1976), Eli Zaretsky argues that the family is ‘already an integral part of the economy under capitalism’, and the bourgeois view that presents the family as ‘the basic unit of the society’ regardless of the individuals or classes ‘reinforce[s]; the deeply rooted traditions of male supremacy’.⁵⁵ In Marxist and functionalist views of the family alike, men have been the reference and norm against which everything else is measured and discussed. From a functionalist perspective, women’s roles as mothers and wives contributed greatly to the sustenance of a stable society. Marxist/communist ←40 | 41→views critiqued this society for creating an unequal distribution of power and labour between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, while ignoring a greater unequal distribution of labour and power relations existent between men and women in the family. Women have been at the very centre of these theories, but their labour in the family has been excluded or made invisible. Feminist movements, contrary to Marxist and fundamentalist views, have prioritised womanly concerns and their problems in the family. The invisibility of women’s labour and their exclusion from wider society and from Marxist theory and politics have been what energised diverse feminist movements—liberal, radical, and Marxist—as part of their critique of the family.

Feminism and the Patriarchal Family

There have been diverse feminist views of familial arrangements, but feminists agree that families are ideological and political structures where humans become gendered. The central focus in feminist criticism is on the effect the family has on women. Feminist theory critiques the traditional family as a patriarchal unit. The patriarchy thrives through unequal treatment of men and women in family and society. For example, men benefit from women’s service in the family, and they are also privileged by a lack of competition in the relative absence of women in wider society. Women’s oppression under their assumed natural roles as wives, mothers, and daughters creates ways in which they are disadvantaged in public spheres through being given work akin to their familial obligations. Feminists claim these roles are ‘not natural but grow out of and are the expressions of a complex series of social relations: patriarchy, economic systems, legal and ideological structures, and early childhood experiences and their unconscious residues’.⁵⁶ In other words, gender roles are learned and therefore can be changed in favour of an egalitarian family and society.

By focusing on women’s conditions in the family, feminists challenge patriarchal ideology, operating as a means of ‘holding together and legitimising the existing social, economic, political and gender systems’.⁵⁷ The feminist critique of the family therefore puts extant social, political, economic, and patriarchal systems into question. In their critique, feminists analyse sub-systems of family such as marriage, pregnancy, childrearing, and domesticity as key to the construction and eradication of gender inequalities. Each feminist movement has critiqued ←41 | 42→the family as a site of female oppression and gender inequalities. Although feminist critiques of the family vary in their orientations and emphasis, they all, with their distinctive and specific concerns, look at the ways in which family and its obligations are central to women’s oppression and so, the creation of an unjust society. It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that the feminist perspectives called for equality in all spheres of life. These calls ‘contributed greatly to the changes in family law’ such as The Abortion Act 1967 and The Divorce Reform Act 1969 in the UK, which successively enabled women to have control—though limited—over their sexuality and made divorce relatively easier.⁵⁸

All feminist movements agree that gender roles have shaped human behaviours in a way that disadvantages half of society (women). On the other hand, behaviours that are not generated by gendered extremes, such as strong men and weak women, would relieve the pressures on men, women, and children, and enable them to focus more on their individual capacities rather than gendered ones. For example, a family where parenthood and domesticity are shared equally would not only lessen the burden on women, but it would also contribute to men’s capacities as nurturers. This would in return mean equal participation in wider society, enabling women to fully enter the public sphere and develop their human potentials. Variations in feminist movements are not due to ambivalence, but rather suggest that what is a problem for women is a problem for the entire society, requiring multiple solutions from distinctive perspectives.

Liberal Feminism

The recognition of the family as a subject of feminism dates back to the early years of liberal feminism in the late eighteenth century. Mary Wollstonecraft advocated an egalitarian transformation of family and society where women could have the same rights as men. She critiqued patriarchal relations and inequalities in the family. With the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft called for equality in marriage, access to paid work, and women’s education. She argued that men and women are equal in the eyes of God, and therefore men need to follow the same moral and virtuous values expected of women.⁵⁹ In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, in his ←42 | 43→The Subjection of Women (1869), highlighted family ‘as a school of despotism, in which virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished’.⁶⁰ These virtues can be transformed into freedom with a just family: ‘The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom’.⁶¹ Mill sees the family as a sphere where women need to spend their energies to gain equalities in wider society. This is because a virtuous family, for Mill, is a prerequisite for justice in other social and political spheres. Both Wollstonecraft and Mill acknowledged family as central to women’s development as much as it is to do with their oppression.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal feminists acknowledged women’s oppression in the family, but their solutions still confined women to the domestic situation. In her Three Guineas (1938), Virginia Woolf’s position on the family significantly differed from those of Wollstonecraft and Mill. She viewed the patriarchal family to be a prototype of fascism for creating a male-dominated sex-gender system, and hence producing unequal distribution of power between the sexes. Woolf explores the ideological connection between private (family) and public (society) spaces: ‘the tyrannies of and servilities of the one are the tyrannies of and servilities of the other’.⁶² Therefore, the eradication of tyranny in the private sphere is key to ending it in public. Woolf illustrates that the exclusion of women from public affairs, denying them representation in public positions of prestige and power, renders society far from democratic. She goes on to contend that the continual relegation of women to the family and domestic sphere is the reason for their absence from public affairs as well as their lack of power within their families.

In the early 1950s, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) challenged the ways in which femininity is constructed. Her argument that ‘[o];ne is not born, but rather, becomes, a woman’ explains that femininity and the traits attributed to women (for example passive, nonessential, and secondary) are not the result of biological, psychological, and intellectual differences between men and women, but rather are the products of differences in their situations.⁶³ Questioning the validity of women’s ‘biological role’ as carers and nurturers would mean putting the biological family under scrutiny. The call to overthrow the myth of the ‘happy ←43 | 44→housewife’ and involve women in ‘meaningful works’ for self-fulfilment came in the early years of second-wave feminism. With the publication of The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan challenged hegemonic sexism in the United States by exposing the myth that the roles ascribed to women were natural. For Friedan, the marketing industry and companies that sold household products benefited from the myth of the ‘happy housewife’, creating the ways in which familial problems are ignored. The ‘feminine mystique’, which resulted from women’s confinement to unending domestic responsibilities, was the reason for the ‘problem that has no name’, a term Friedan employed to explain women’s ongoing dissatisfaction in the family during the 1950s and 1960s. She encouraged middle-class educated women to minimise their familial obligations and involve themselves in ‘meaningful works’ such as careers, with the aim to develop their talents and potential. The argument was that the inclusion of women in public affairs and the workplace would solve their unhappiness and create a more egalitarian society.⁶⁴ Since the 1960s, liberal feminism has been key to women’s demand for equal rights in wider society.

Marxist Feminism

Marxist feminism critiques the family as a site of women’s exploitation under the economic system of capitalism and gender oppression under patriarchy. The writings of first-generation Marxists such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx determined that women’s liberation was dependent upon the economic transformation from capitalism to socialism. However, Marxist feminists such as Heidi Hartmann consider this to be unrealistic and suggests that ‘women should not trust men to liberate them after the revolution’.⁶⁵ This is because it would mean the acceptance of women’s ongoing oppression until a particular yet undefined stage, one determined by men. Therefore, Hartmann calls for a synthesis of Marxism and feminism, abstaining from a relationship in which the latter is subordinate to the former.⁶⁶ In this regard, Marxist feminism expands the Marxist theory of class by looking at gender and hence at the ideological connectedness between ←44 | 45→capitalism and patriarchy. Hartmann argues that while capitalism creates a hierarchal labour structure, patriarchy based on male hegemony determines the ordering of this structure, resulting in women being connected with the private and men with the public.⁶⁷

It is in the family that women carry out their assigned tasks under the name of supporting men and children, including by cooking, doing laundry, cleaning, and childrearing. However, in socialist and communist movements, women at home were not recognised as a social class and hence their labour in the family was excluded from a discussion in relation to capitalist modes of production. Yet the tasks women carry out are key to sustaining capitalism, as they reserve a free and ready labour force required for production. Marxist feminism enabled the recognition of women as a social class and their labour in the family as part of the economy under capitalism. Eli Zaretsky critiques Juliet Mitchell and Shulamith Firestone’s conceptions of the economy, which he argues signifies ‘the production of goods and services to be sold’.⁶⁸ For Zaretsky, this conception recognises that a woman hired to cook in a restaurant performs an economic activity, but it does not extend the same recognition to a housewife who cooks for her family. Such an understanding therefore excluded housewives and families from revolutionary politics and the struggle between ‘economic classes’.⁶⁹ Marxist feminism challenges capitalism’s control of the family and men’s control of women, hence women’s double oppression under the workforce both at home and in public.

Radical Feminism

The main feminist objection towards the family has been a ‘[c];ritical analysis of the family, and efforts to change traditional family arrangements’, which inflicted upon women oppressions including domesticity, marriage, reproduction, and childrearing.⁷⁰ Family has long been associated with the biological, natural and universal, as it is considered the domain of birth, nurturing, and other such events. This understanding was promoted by the nineteenth-century evolutionists who associated women with ‘an unchanging biological role’ while viewing men as ‘the ←45 | 46→agents of all social processes’.⁷¹ The term biological family, which was built upon the biological distinction between men and women, underwent a vigorous challenge and critique from radical feminism.

The start of the second-wave feminist movement in the early 1960s radically questioned the main reasons behind women’s oppression in the family and larger society. During this time, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, and Germaine Greer introduced a wide range of theoretical perspectives that called for a radical approach to feminism, one that considered biological differences between men and women as the main reason for the oppression and exploitation of the latter. The family is where women’s sexuality and reproduction are controlled by biology. In the patriarchal systems of family and society, men benefit from the daily support of women directly, and so create and contribute to situations in which women are oppressed. Therefore, radical feminists also hold men responsible for female subordination. In the late 1960s, radical feminists in the United States argued that patriarchy was evident in all societies as the root of gender oppression. For them, patriarchy was perpetuated by the family, which they argued needed to be abolished in order to remove the conditions that oppressed women.⁷² In the early 1970s, Firestone proposed pregnancy and motherhood as the conditions that create women’s exploitation and oppression. As a solution, she envisioned a post-patriarchal society in which ‘tyranny of the biological family would be broken’ and where ‘[t];he reproduction of the species by one sex […] would be replaced by […] artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either’.⁷³ Although Firestone’s solution of alternative reproduction methods was found to be utopian in the following decades, her discussion was essential in demystifying the relation between reproduction, motherhood, and patriarchy, and in enabling other critics to explore these concepts. Radical feminists offered ‘new reproductive technologies’, advocated ‘opting out of family’, and proposed ‘separatism from men’ as solutions to end women’s oppression.⁷⁴ These suggestions, though radical in mood, opened the path for ←46 | 47→exploration of alternative kinship and human relations that can be considered within the context of non-normative families.

Psychoanalytical Feminism

During the 1970s, feminist criticism took a new direction, one that expanded existing criticism into a psychoanalytical approach.⁷⁵ This led feminists to analyse the family in relation to early childhood experiences, motherhood, childrearing, and reproduction. The studies of Nancy Chodorow and Dorothy Dinnerstein focused on understanding ‘inequality between sexes, certain differences between the sexes, and misogyny originating from prevailing child rearing arrangements’.⁷⁶ For psychoanalytical feminists, gender inequalities were based on an individual’s unique psycho-sexual development, not their biological differences. Early childhood experiences were key to the construction and promotion of gender roles in wider society, as boys and girls learn to be different by internalising the traits of masculinity and femininity that they witness in adults. Chodorow highlights the centrality of mothers in orienting boys and girls into different developmental paths. For example, boys learn to separate themselves from their mothers and identity with their fathers, and hence assume male supremacy. This departure results in boys developing autonomy and a less dependent persona, and reduces their capability for intimate and emotional relationships, which in turn suits them better as they mature and enter the public domain and assume their role as breadwinners. On the other hand, girls are not allowed to identify with their fathers but only with their mothers, which makes them less prepared for life in the public sphere but better suited to private spaces, including the family. They are also taught to perform traits of intimate personal and emotional relationships such as nurturing, care, and support.⁷⁷ The solution identified by psychoanalytic feminists was dual parenting, which they envisioned would enable children to break away from viewing parenthood in a gender-categorised way. As ←47 | 48→a consequence, children would be able to experience both parents as self and other, and participate equally in private and public domains.

Gay Men, Lesbians and the Family

The very formation of the traditional family is built upon heterosexuality, so it could not historically accommodate gay men and lesbians. Starting from early childhood experiences, boys and girls are raised successively in line with the image of the dominant man and the submissive woman. Early on, children are indoctrinated into playing with the ‘right’ toys, those that connote boyishness and girlishness, even when these do not correlate with the individual child’s inclinations. When it comes to their adolescence, they are ‘expected to prove [themselves] socially to [their] parents as members of the right sex by either being a “right” man (oppressive) or a “right” woman (oppressed)’.⁷⁸ According to heteropatriarchal ideology, a ‘right’ man is attracted to women; a ‘right’ woman is attracted to men. The attributes of hegemonic masculinity and femininity and heterosexuality embodied in the traditional family are presented as biological and hence unchangeable. Therefore, any deviation from these attributes is met with alarm and considered within the range of ‘abnormality’. As such, people who do not conform have been labelled as ‘deviants’, ‘neurotic’, ‘sick’, or ‘bent’, and as a potential threat to the family unit and social stability. Consequently, gay men and lesbians have been thrown out of their homes, not allowed to have family, pressurised into marriage, ostracised from social groups and sent to psychiatrists who historically deemed same-sex desire a mental disorder to be treated. For example, APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders included homosexuality as a sexual deviation in the form of a pathologic behaviour from the first edition in 1952 up until 1973.⁷⁹ The term was updated when the Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry Federal Council declared homosexuality not an illness. Gay people contested the claim that differences between men and women were normal, viewing it as propaganda of the patriarchal family and sexism, rather than the truth. In this way, they stepped out of the traditional notion of the family arrangement and rejected gender roles designed by society. Their critique of the heterosexual family puts the entire sexist culture ←48 | 49→and its institutions into question, alarming politicians and prompting them to call for a return to ‘family values’.

The first manifesto of the Gay Liberation Front was declared in London in 1971, which was followed by the first Gay Pride in 1972. The manifesto details the oppression of homosexual people through ‘physical violence and by ideological and psychological attacks at every level of social interaction’, including in both the public and private domains of family, school, media, employment, community, and the law.⁸⁰ It offers solutions for gay people to bring revolutionary change to the whole society rather than temporary reforms, and contends that a real change for all lies in subverting the patriarchal family and sexism by allying with the Women’s Liberation Movement: ‘The end of sexist culture and of the family will benefit all women, and gay people’.⁸¹ Therefore, the manifesto calls gay people to rise up and step out of imperatives determined by the dominant heteronormative society and family.

Political Lesbianism

Political lesbians and lesbian separatists contributed to the validity of non-normative families in challenging homophobia and backlash against lesbians. During the 1970s many lesbians had their children taken away from them based on the assumption that a lesbian could not be a ‘proper’ mother. During the 1970s and 1980s, a group of radical feminists voiced their support for political lesbianism, which fought against what Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality and sexism by advocating lesbianism as a positive solution to women’s oppression.⁸² The divergence of political lesbianism from mainstream feminism moved the discussions of family into a new phase, in which women were invited to reject heterosexual relations and to embrace liberation in practice. For example, Ti-Grace Atkinson and Alice Echols considered married women to be ‘hostages’ trapped in the ‘anti-feminist’ institution of marriage and heterosexuality.⁸³ Shelia Cronan suggested the abolition of marriage for women’s freedom, ←49 | 50→as it ‘constitutes a slavery for women’.⁸⁴ Roxanne Dunbar stressed the importance of demanding ‘full-time childcare in public schools’ to free many women and enable them to make decisions, suggesting that the demand ‘alone will throw the whole ideology of family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and [they] can fight collectively’.⁸⁵ Andrea Dworkin called upon women to renounce ‘all forms of male control and male domination’, and to destroy ‘the institutions and cultural valuations which imprison [women] in invisibility and victimization’.⁸⁶ For Dworkin, the patriarchal system created a timeless cycle of victimisation for individuals:

Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s daughter is a victim, past, present and future. Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.⁸⁷

Marilyn French critiqued the family as promoting female subjection through male control of women’s sexuality. She further added that while women have always been subjects of disempowerment, degradation, and subjugation, men, particularly in the West, have ‘exploded in a frenzy of domination, trying to expand and tighten their control of nature and those associated with nature—people of color and women’.⁸⁸ Marilyn Frye highlighted the connection between male dominance and naturalisation of female heterosexuality for perpetuating patriarchal systems.⁸⁹ Shelly Jeffrey co-wrote Love Your Enemy? The Debate Between Heterosexual Feminism and Political Lesbianism (1981) with the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, arguing that ‘[a];ny woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations ←50 | 51→stronger’.⁹⁰ Claiming that ‘[f]eminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice’, political lesbianism critiqued the idea of reconfiguring familial arrangements as impractical as long as the heterosexual relations continue.⁹¹ Their solutions, though radical in tone, challenged the single form and meaning of the family, and celebrated families of choice.

Queer Kinship and Families of Choice

A significant challenge to the traditional family has come from lesbians and gay men, who have destabilised the heteronormative nature of the family by living outside traditional family arrangements. Judith Stacey introduces the concept of the postmodern family condition, in which as she contends, choice determines family composition. She maintains that the postmodern family ‘is not the next stage in an orderly progression of stages of family history; [it] rather […] signals the moment in that history when our belief in a logical progression of stages has broken down’.⁹² The way in which gay men and lesbians form their families represents the break-down in the history of the heterosexual family. For example, Cheshire Calhoun contends that lesbians are uniquely positioned to violate the conventional gender expectation that they, as women, would be dependent on men in their personal relations, would fulfil the maternal imperative, would service a husband and children, and would accept the confinement to the private sphere of domesticity.⁹³

By avoiding heterosexual and conventional gender relations, gay men and lesbians create ways in which the perpetuation of sexism and the gender role system are avoided, being replaced instead by alternative and liberated lifestyles. Gay men and lesbians have also illustrated that family composition can be determined by choice rather than being imposed by biology or dominant ideology. This has developed the idea that families can exist in a variety of forms and ←51 | 52→purpose, depending on the demands of the individual. The struggles of gay men and lesbians, therefore, represent a transition from the dominant family ideology to a new phase, one characterised by the ‘chosen family’. This concept contrasts with the compulsory heterosexual nature of the family. In a chosen family, human biology does not determine the ordering of parental and sexual relationships. This family promotes the idea that human sexuality ‘is a choice, and [humans] are not destined to a particular fate because of [their] chromosomes’.⁹⁴ For example, women do not have to be mothers—or primary carers—just because they are born female, and being male does not privilege men to be relatively free from parental responsibilities. Instead, the idea of parenthood is equally shared by both parties in a non-hierarchical manner. This, in return, creates ways in which children are raised free from gender constraints. For Kath Weston, ‘familial ties between the same sexes, [which] are not grounded in biology or procreation, do not fit any tidy division of kinship into relations of blood and marriage’.⁹⁵ Therefore, prevailing family ideology and gender roles are not transferred across generations.

The chosen family replaces traditional family arrangements, such as heterosexual marriage, gendered parenthood, and biological kinship, and introduces non-normative arrangements such as same-sex marriage, same-sex parenting, and non-biological kinship. In deciding whether or not to have children, gay men and lesbians have challenged the family ideology that promotes having children and raising them within a heteronormative family, in line with gender roles. These non-normative arrangements initially incurred a backlash, as they were considered to be deviant and a threat to social stability. However, the struggles of gay men and lesbians to receive equal rights in the public domain have paved the way for chosen families to be gradually recognised and legalised.⁹⁶ Gay men and lesbians have put into practice the long feminist fight against gender oppression by establishing non-normative family arrangements and celebrating sexual diversity.

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The New Right and After: The ‘Pretended’ or Alternative Families

Feminist and gay challenges to the traditional family have not passed without resistance. During the 1980s, stable families were part of the New Right’s policy and its vision of a stable society. Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) declared that ‘a nation of free people will only continue to be a great nation if your family life continues and the structure of that nation is a family structure’.⁹⁷ This conservative notion of the family structure reinforced a sharp distinction between private and public spheres in which women and men were successively situated. This distinction was sustained through ‘stable’ families, which in Diana Gittins’ view ‘shaped the ways in which government policies were perceived and regulated’.⁹⁸

The period in which the New Right came to power was marked by changes in the way families were perceived and formed. In particular, traditional family values were challenged by the rise of the Gay Liberation Movement, radical feminists’ attack on family values, easier access to divorce and cohabitation, advanced birth control methods, and technologically assisted reproduction. Thus, the claim that the nuclear family is a natural and unchanging unit came under scrutiny. The New Right was alarmed by these changes and declared that the family was in a state of crisis, one that was likely to cause wider social problems. Rather than acknowledging underlying causes of social problems in the economy, education, and health sector, the New Right pointed to the family as the site where social problems could be solved. For example, Thatcher stated, ‘You have to accept that these problems will occur, but it is best to have them solved within the family structure and you are denying the solution unless the family structure continues’.⁹⁹ According to the Tories, individuals were threatened with social instability if they were not part of a family. Under the New Right, the family once more functioned as a disciplinary institution where women and ←53 | 54→children could be controlled by men in an attempt to avoid social problems such as AIDS.

In the 1980s, the New Right defended their notion of ‘family values’ by actively discouraging homosexuality through the education system. Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988) prohibited the endorsement of homosexuality, stipulating that ‘a local authority shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality; promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.¹⁰⁰ Homosexual parents and their children were reconfigured as a ‘pretended family’, a stance that dismissed of possibility of an alternative family. Cheshire Calhoun explains the ideological motif behind targeting a specific group and accusing them of destroying family values:

In periods where there was heightened anxiety about the stability of the heterosexual nuclear family because of changes in gender, sexual, and family composition norms within the family, this anxiety was resolved by targeting a group of persons who could be ideologically constructed as outsiders to the family.¹⁰¹

The New Right was unsettled by homosexuality not because it was a threat to the well-being of families and individuals, but rather because, in their view, it had the potential to dissolve the traditional family ideology that structures social, economic, and governmental systems. Thatcher declared that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families’.¹⁰² Her emphasis on ‘individual men and women’ hints at their roles in the gendered system of family required for social stability. Homosexuality was seen as a danger to the gendered roles of individual men and women, in part because gay men were perceived to be ‘feminine’ and lesbians as ‘masculine’, thus subverting preconceived notions of masculinity and femininity.

In 1991, the New Right’s insistence on a single form and meaning of the family was opposed by the Labour Party, when Labour MP Harriet Harman called for recognition of alternative families in family and public policies:

Family policy needs to recognise that families come in all shapes and sizes… to claim one kind of family is right and others wrong can do considerable harm by stigmatizing ←54 | 55→those who live in a non-traditional family setting. Public policy cannot alter private choices, but it can mitigate the painful effects of change.¹⁰³

Harman maintained that the formation of a family depends on individual choices. The state’s responsibility, for her, was to support these choices rather than impose a monolithic form of the family that disregarded individuality and variety. Her speech also acknowledged the stigmatisation of individuals who live outside the traditional family arrangements. Harman’s emphasis on choice as a criterion for family formation was key to countering this stigmatisation and introducing further legal steps for chosen families.

The years 1994 and 2000 witnessed developments in the rights of chosen families. The legal age of consent for men engaging in homosexual acts, previously set as 21 in 1967, was lowered to 18 by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and finally to 16 by the amendment to the Civil Partnership Act 2000. The equalisation of the age of consent illustrated that chosen families started to gain the same rights as traditional families. In particular, the Adoption and Children Act (2002) and the Civil Partnership Act (2004), introduced by New Labour and supported by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, was a milestone in the legal recognition of non-normative human relations within the context of a family. The acts granted same-sex couples the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual couples who chose civil marriage and adoption in the United Kingdom. Therefore, the hegemony of the traditional family as unique, natural, and universal was put into question on legal grounds. The act also represented the transition from the family of fate imposed by the collective to families of choice, voluntarily selected by individuals. So, although homosexuality had been dismissed as a ‘pretended family’ earlier, it was later acknowledged in law under a broader and more inclusive definition of family. It is against this backdrop of new ideas about family, that Lessing reimagines family in her fiction.

Overview of Existing Criticism: Lessing and the Family

Scholars agree that family is a major concern in Lessing’s fiction. However, there is as yet no robust account of Lessing’s fictional family in the large body of critical work on her fiction. In 2007, Susan Watkins suggested that family is one of the ‘issues that [is] clearly at the forefront of [Lessing’s] most recent work’.¹⁰⁴ In ←55 | 56→2010, Robin Visel issued a call to read Lessing’s novels ‘anew in the twenty-first century’.¹⁰⁵ Notwithstanding, the existing criticism on Lessing rests more on how she is critical of the traditional family arrangements. In other words, there has yet not been much attention paid to Lessing’s representation of non-normative families. The tendency in critical studies has been to identify Lessing’s critique of traditional family as an institution that is oppressive to women. This tendency has revealed the ways in which Lessing’s treatment of family has benefited from feminist criticism, largely missing insights from communism, Sufism and postcolonial ecofeminism. This has created the risk of reading Lessing as only critical of the traditional family arrangements, and her fiction as only concerning women’s issues. As such, non-normative families have remained evident but underdeveloped themes in Lessing criticism.

Non-biological and non-normative families have received relatively less critical attention from Lessing scholars. Anthony Chennells and Watkins approached the Lennox family in The Sweetest Dream as a non-biological one. Chennells contends that the presence of two adopted African children means that family ‘is more than a shared genetic inheritance’ in Lessing’s fiction.¹⁰⁶ Watkins offers a similar reading of these adopted children, suggesting that their inclusion in the Lennox family signals ‘a new sense of community, family and home.’¹⁰⁷ I read the Lennox house within the context of a commune as an alternative to the traditional family arrangements. The kinship relations in the Lennox family evoke forms of blended and biracial families that challenge a single meaning and form of the family. Reading Lessing’s short story “Each Other”, Judith Kegan Gardiner discusses Lessing’s employment of incest rhetoric as a narrative strategy to titillate ‘her readers while exploring […] themes of identity, family, social convention, and sexuality […].’¹⁰⁸ This reading is valuable in terms of highlighting Lessing’s reference to non-normative families and human relations. I argue that the rhetoric of incest serves to enhance Lessing’s critique of kinship and blood for the purpose of introducing non-normative families. Lessing employs incest trope in Mara and Dann as a strategy to cross the borders of the traditional family and conventional thinking.

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The significance of non-normative families, kinship and alternative domesticities has recently been recognised by Lessing scholars in MLA 2018, in the panel titled ‘Alternative Domesticities in the Works of Doris Lessing’, followed by the publication of a cluster of articles in volume 36 of Doris Lessing Studies in December 2018. This issue focused on Lessing’s representation of ‘non-biological families, non-normative affiliations, and unconventional households’, chiefly by offering fruitful insights on how her fiction engages with works written by others, such as Jenny Diski, Lara Feigel and Vladimir Nabokov.¹⁰⁹ Focusing on Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), alongside Jenny Diski’s memoir, In Gratitude (2016), Susan Watkins introduces the concept of ‘apocalyptic imaginative memoir’ that she observes Lessing and Diski develop as a way to ‘imagine the transformation of conventional mothering and family’.¹¹⁰ Watkins’s comparative reading of their works as examples of such ‘apocalyptic imaginative memoir’, and their concurrent lived experimentations with new images of the mother/daughter relationship, demonstrates how Lessing’s fiction genuinely offers ‘a new form of family’ through ‘a new genre’.¹¹¹

I examine The Memoirs of a Survivor and Ben, in the World as Sufi novels that illuminate the ways in which Lessing ‘problematises and reconfigures the family’ both at personal and fictional levels.¹¹² I further suggest that ‘the simultaneous presence of Diski and Sufism in Lessing’s life allows her to realign family and parenthood in her fiction’.¹¹³ My reading of the novels through a Sufic lens introduces three novel concepts, ‘Sufi family’, ‘Sufi parenthood’, and ‘Su-feminism’, which together demonstrate Lessing’s resistance to ‘social conventions [and] power structures, specifically here, in the example of parenthood and family’, through new forms. Terry Reilly examines the traces of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1995) in and through Lessing’s novella “The Grandmothers” and Diski’s memoir In Gratitude, illustrating how these works intersect in their representations and reworking of alternative and taboo familial relationships. He argues that ‘Lessing ←57 | 58→and Diski are linked in that they reference Lolita as a way to expand the notion of traditional family to include the alternative relationships that they explore’ in their texts.¹¹⁴ Reilly’s article is an example of how Lessing’s fiction is transformative of conventional and taboo family relationships. Taken as a whole, this issue has been key in demonstrating how Lessing’s fictional family transforms ‘conventional ways of thinking and writing’ in a collaborative and bidirectional manner through the works of others.

When family is addressed by critics in Lessing’s fiction, it has mainly been read in relation to ideas from the anti-psychiatry movement. R.D. Laing has been influential for Lessing scholars in understanding the origins of schizophrenia in the family. James Arnett reads the Children of Violence series by employing insights from Laingian family theory and progressive politics to ‘undo the logic of the family.’¹¹⁵ He suggests that ‘fighting so hard to preserve the self’, as Martha Quest does, is indeed a way of preserving historical circumstances that have constructed the self. The solution to the distorting effects of the family lies in the dissolution of oneself by becoming schizophrenic. Therefore, schizophrenia is not to be seen as a problem but a way of escaping from the conventional family. Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) mirrors Laingian family theory. Professor Charles Watkins suffers from a mental breakdown due to being stuck between his family obligations and his own sense of self. Lessing extends Laing’s theory, including men as sufferers of schizophrenia alongside women to suggest that the family is equally oppressive to men and women alike.

The Fifth Child also evokes a Laingian theory of the family when Harriet Lovatt has an unwanted child. She has to decide either to accept her son, Ben, or send him away as the destroyer of the family happiness. Ben’s assumed abnormalities create a tension in Harriet as the mother. Laing wrote: ‘A crisis will occur if any member of the family wishes to leave by getting the “family” out of his systems, or dissolving the “family” in himself. […] Dilemmas bound. If I do not destroy the “family”, the “family” will destroy me.’¹¹⁶ This dilemma creates a conflict for Harriet between either destroying or protecting her family or the family. Rather than destroying the family or letting it destroy her, Harriet dissolves the idea of ←58 | 59→the family in her mind. The conflict is resolved when she saves Ben from the straightjacket he is made to wear in the institution for his assumed abnormality. The fact Ben is transferred between the disciplinary institutions of school and hospitals reveal Michael Foucault’s idea of family as an interlocking disciplinary mechanism.

Lessing scholars have considered The Fifth Child as challenging traditional family arrangements. Watkins reads the novel as a critique of Thatcherism and its promotion of family values.¹¹⁷ Clare Hanson also introduces Ben Lovatt as ‘a signifier of difference who […] challenges normative family values […].’¹¹⁸ The Fifth Child is a key feminist text that shows how the family situation can be oppressive to men and children beyond women. By depicting Harriet’s relationships with her children, husband and parents, Lessing illustrates how the ideology of the family cannot accommodate difference and is oppressive to its members. Jeanie Warnock argues that the mother-daughter relationship is a recurring theme in Lessing’s fiction whereas critical studies overlook father-daughter relationships which could offer new readings, especially considering Lessing’s conflicts with her own father.¹¹⁹ In my reading of The Fifth Child I illustrate that Ben is not an extension of his father, which challenges the patriarchal ideology and its continuance.

Several Lessing scholars have discussed Sufism in Lessing’s fiction and the ways it has influenced her style, technique and language. Muge Galin’s Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing (1997) is the first complete critical assessment of Sufism in Lessing’s fiction. For Galin, Sufism sheds a new light on Lessing’s work. She suggests that it is thanks to Sufism that Lessing writes with ‘self-assurance’, and becomes ‘more didactic’ in her writing.¹²⁰ Following communism and feminism, Lessing employs a non-political philosophy of Sufism in ←59 | 60→her fiction that adds novelty to the content of her writing and style. Contrary to her ambivalent relationships with communism and feminism, Lessing expresses an open interest in Sufism. However, Galin’s assertion that Lessing becomes ‘more didactic’ contradicts the very nature of Sufism which avoids didacticism to enable individuals’ potential for self-learning. As shown in Chapter Three, this is evident in Memoirs and Ben, in the World in which Emily and Ben follow the Sufi way as free from any prescribed behaviour and conventional thinking.

Galin proposes that Sufism ‘will not only complicate our understanding of [Lessing’s] work but also reshape our assessments of its quality’.¹²¹ In a similar fashion, Nancy Topping Bazin celebrates Lessing’s move into Sufism, suggesting that her ‘ideas have been nourished and clarified through her interest in Sufism’.¹²² This book offers ways of reassessing Lessing’s work and Sufism within the context of non-normative families.

There have been several discussions of Memoirs as a Sufi novel, but these do not link Sufism to the family. For example, Roberta Rubenstein reads the novel as a breakthrough in Lessing’s fiction ‘rendering […] the mystical path of self-transcendence’.¹²³ Muge Galin takes The Memoirs of a Survivor as a Sufi novel which ‘traces the steps a would-be Sufi takes toward enlightenment’.¹²⁴ When Memoirs is read in relation to the family, there is no connection made between family and Sufism in the novel. Watkins suggests that ‘the narrator experiences the collapse of civilized society and the nuclear family’.¹²⁵ For Sunita Sinha, the novel demonstrates Lessing’s ongoing interest in alternative groups to the nuclear family structures, and ‘the degeneration of atmosphere, the collapse of law and order and material infrastructure led to the breaking of stable, biologically related families’.¹²⁶Although critics spot the representation of the family either as Lessing’s view of the family or her interest in the alternative structures, there has yet not been a reading that examines the connection between Sufism and Lessing’s representation of the family. Gerald’s commune functions within the context of a non-normative family that reflects Sufi principles. Therefore, Sufism enables a shift from the collapse of the nuclear family to Lessing’s creation ←60 | 61→of non-normative families in the novel. A focus on the family also contributes to studies of Sufism as there has yet not been any detailed studies or theories of how Sufism deals with the institution of the family. This is because, unlike political movements, which prescribe certain behaviours within the family, Sufism avoids any form of prescriptive behaviour in order not to limit individual development.

There have also been readings that unpack the relationship between patriarchal systems of colonialism and family. Reading The Fifth Child, Debrah Raschke highlights the ‘domestic scene […] as a breeding ground for colonial domination’.¹²⁷ The book employs employ Raschke’s argument to reveal an ideological interconnectedness between family and colonialism in The Grass Is Singing. It is shown that, in the same way that the colony is domesticated by the empire, women and people of colour are domesticized through family. Anthony Chennells, a notable postcolonial critic of Lessing’s work, explores Lessing’s connection to African land, stating ‘the empty country, untouched by man, has capacity to offer men and women new relationships […]’.¹²⁸ In Mara and Dann, Lessing creates her own utopian African continent, Ifrik contrary to the one dominated by colonial activity as a way to reconfigure human relations within the context of non-normative families. Though being a recurring theme, the significance of the family has not yet been adequately established in the existing criticism.

The book offers a rationale of reading family within three phases as political, mystical and planetary throughout Lessing’s fiction. In this way, the family illuminates Lessing’s legacy and ever broadening perspective from woman to human then to the planet. The ways in which Lessing critiques and reconfigures family in her fiction offer solutions to problems that threaten humans and the planet. The pull between individuals’ desire to achieve a full human identity and their need to feel a part of the collective is negotiated through Lessing’s reformulation of the family. This book also extends existing criticism by showing that Lessing’s fiction suggests more than her critique of traditional families, introducing non-normative families and kinship with alternative domesticities. Moreover, Lessing’s fictional family is shaped by her environmental concerns and interest in mysticism. Critics have addressed these themes without linking them to family. The inclusion of these themes in exploring Lessing’s representation of the family shows how Lessing’s fiction can be reassessed. Such a reading, ←61 | 62→for instance, acknowledges that Lessing seeks to liberate the family from ideology rather than individuals from the idea of family.

Chapter Summaries

Chapter One, Communism and the Family, considers Lessing’s representation of communes in the context of non-normative family arrangements. Communist ideology offers such arrangements in theory, including communal kitchens, shared raising of children, and relationships outside the sanction of marriage, all of which have the potential to subvert the conventional family ideology and its oppression, especially in relation to women. Alice in The Good Terrorist and Frances in The Sweetest Dream test the capacity of communism to introduce these arrangements in practice. However, Lessing illustrates that communism fails to liberate women from domesticity even in non-typical family settings. In these political communes, women are ironically represented as the proletariat while men, who are comrades, are portrayed as capitalists who benefit from women’s labour.

Chapter Two, Feminism and the Family, takes the conventional family as a locus of gender oppression and the source of other inequalities in wider society. It focuses on the main elements of the family, such as marriage, reproduction, motherhood, child-rearing, and domesticity, employing insights from feminist critique of the family. The chapter also problematises the family as, to borrow from Foucault, a disciplinary institution that ideologically cooperates with wider disciplinary institutions, such as schools and medical establishments.¹²⁹ The chapter illustrates that Lessing’s ambivalence towards feminism can partly be explained by her interest in other forms of oppression upheld by the family. Lessing writes about feminist issues, but she is not just a feminist writer, as her explorations include other forms of oppression such as bodily norms besides gender, as can be seen in the example of Ben Lovatt. The chapter positions The Fifth Child and The Summer Before the Dark as key post-1970s feminist texts. Although they have been overshadowed by The Golden Notebook, these novels offer equally strong critiques of women’s oppression in society and, more specifically, in the family.