Rereading Doris Lessing

Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition

Claire Sprague

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807841877, 9780807817476
• eBook ISBN: 9781469620367
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

According to Sprague, doubling in Lessing’s novels is a perfect correlative for the complexity and contradiction Lessing perceives as central to the private and collective human experience. Her doubles and multiples not only indicate the fracturing or the formation of identity but they also are among the several strategies used to project complex private and societal concerns. This study of Lessing’s dialectical imagination extends and revises earlier feminist approaches.

Originally published in 1987.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Part I
Antiphonal Narratives

1
The Grass is Singing (1950)

Roberta Rubenstein describes Julia and Jan, the protagonists of Retreat to Innocence, as a “distinctly dialectical pair, expressing antithetical issues in both political and psychological contexts” (Novelistic Vision, 50). Mary and Moses, of Lessing’s first novel about racism and repression, The Grass Is Singing, are as dialectical as Julia and Jan in conception and meaning. In their opposition and intersection the two sets of characters prefigure, as hindsight conveniently permits us to say, the themes of an entire career.

Thus, although Grass and Retreat are separated by the first two novels of the Martha Quest series, they are worth examining together. Both have been considered minor novels; both represent approaches Lessing was to redirect. Comparing them makes Retreat less of a sport, it seems to me, and situates it more clearly in the Lessing canon.

The repeated initial letters of each set of names resonate noticeably within their so straightforwardly realistic contexts. The metaphor of difference and sameness inscribed in the names “Mary” and “Moses,” “Julia” and “Jan,” excites Lessing throughout her career. Both sets are female and male; one is also white and black, mistress and servant; the other is English and European, apolitical and political. The women belong to the power elites of their respective countries. Mary/Moses, Julia/Jan—their initials suggest a sharing undercut by their more profound differences. Their names recall the incestuous Fred and Freda of the short story “Each Other” and Martha and Mark of The Four-Gated City. The incestuous element has its relevance even in these novels, especially if incest is defined, as it has been, as an act that overturns established social conceptions of priority. The reversals of priority in the relationships between Mary and Moses, Julia and Jan, contain incestuous elements that relate them to the literally incestuous Fred and Freda. In fact, the major difference between Fred and Freda and the earlier-conceived couples is their seeming peership, as opposed to the obvious inequalities that define Mary/Moses and Julia/Jan.

Writing about first novels later in a novelist’s career is dangerous sport for a critic. The critic, knowing what happened, finds it all too easy to discover a whole career in a first work. Yet what has happened cannot be ignored.

Lessing’s first novel takes an essentially documentary or case history approach to its divisions of gender, race, nationality, and class. Despite the anticipated limitations of this approach, The Grass Is Singing has an unexpected vitality and complexity that have excited a new generation of critics (e.g., Bardolph, Bertelsen, Draine, Morphet, Taylor, Weinhouse).¹ It stands on its own. It also looks ahead to other novels. (Ironically, years after Anna Wulf refused to allow her first novel to be turned into a film, her creator unbent and gave the permission Anna had denied. As Killing Heat, The Grass Is Singing now exists in film form.)

The plot has familiarity, clarity, and power, for it simultaneously acts out and subverts “the ‘black peril’ story structured around the transgression of racial and sexual taboos” (Taylor, 8). In the process of fusing the psychological and the political, Grass examines other kinds of divisions—between farm and city, dream and waking life, feeling and reason, sound and silence, name and character—divisions that Lessing will explore throughout her career.

From the opening headline, “MURDER MYSTERY,” and its one-paragraph news account, Mary has center stage as victim, a role she shares with the confessed murderer, the houseboy Moses, her husband, Richard Turner, and the outsider Tony Marston. Since the as yet unnamed black houseboy has confessed, the mystery is in the motive. In the reconstruction that is the novel, Mary becomes as much case history as individual, an exemplum of one of the opening epigraphs: “It is by the failures and misfits of a civilization that one can best judge its weaknesses.” Thus, even before the novel opens, the reader is enjoined to consider the individual and the collective together. The authorial voice tells us that Mary is a type:² “She had the undistinguished dead-level appearance of South African white democracy. Her voice was one of thousands: flattened, a little sing-song, clipped. Anyone could have worn her clothes” (46). Her “anyone” quality contains special exaggerations. Her innocence is, for example, extreme. It represents the arrested development of white southern Africans, of women especially. Lessing intrudes a long paragraph on Mary’s ignorance about her condition relative to other conditions in the world, “How could she know?” (44). She knows no history, is unaware of class or race in any genuine sense. On the personal and social level Mary’s innocence is pathological; it keeps her a child psychically and sexually. After Mary drops out of school and comes to town to work as a secretary (as Martha Quest and Doris Lessing did), she chooses to live in a girls’ club. Office life, little-girl clothes, and sexually innocent dates are her world. Her insulation is threatened when she is past thirty and unmarried. That isn’t done: “She was not playing her part; for she did not get married” (48). Given her “profound distaste for sex” (the sounds of parental intercourse still ring painfully in her memory), only social pressure could drive her to marriage.

Mary’s childhood was so close to the poverty line that she had almost been relieved when her two older siblings died from dysentery “one very dusty year.” Their deaths eased the constrictions of the family’s life. For a while the parents stopped their endless quarreling: “The loss was more than compensated by the happiness of living in a house where there were suddenly no quarrels, with a mother who wept, but who had lost that terrible hard indifference” (43). Her alcoholic father, a railway pumpman, is someone she hates. When first the mother and then the father die, Mary is presumably at least partially freed from what Martha Quest is later to call “the tyranny of the family” (A Proper Marriage, 82–83). Before her move to town, boarding school away from “her fuddled father, her bitter mother,” was her only happy time (44). In town and in the office, “sheer contentment put a bloom on her” (45).

From the placidity of her office life, Mary moves into polarity with Dick Turner, where their total incompatibility shortly surfaces. Each has entered marriage filled with illusions. Mary thinks, for example, how nice it will be to “‘get close to nature’ ” (67). Dick expects a farm wife, a worker, and a mother. “Their inexorably different minds” hasten their mutual disintegration. The obdurateness and hostility of the land and weather conjoin with their differences to ensure their defeat, madness, and death.

To these simplified polarities of male and female, town and farm, human and veld, the factor of racism is the most destructive addition. The entry of Moses into the Turner household comes when Mary is at her last turning point. Mary, Moses, and Dick make a fatal triangle in which Moses’ motive must be inferred. Social realities and narrative purpose forbid an insider’s view of Moses. Blacks have no identity for whites—as the novel insists. It is no accident that Moses is named only when he has entered a personal relationship with Mary; no accident that only one other black, Samson, who served Dick before his marriage, has a name; no accident that neither Moses nor Samson (nor Mary before her marriage) has a surname. African blacks are as invisible to European whites as Ralph Ellison’s American blacks in Invisible Man are to American whites. Ellison’s protagonist has no name at all.

Moses enters Mary’s life when she is almost totally broken, listless, indifferent, no longer energized by her various projects—chickens, a tobacco crop, a store, having a child, and so on—and still recovering from her failed flight back to town to reclaim her old job and life. At this critical juncture, “when any influence would have directed her into a new path, when her whole being was poised, as it were, waiting for something to propel her one way or the other … , her servant, once again, gave notice” (195).

His replacement is Moses, the only black ever to acquire individuality for Mary. Significantly, the special relationship between Mary and Moses begins violently when Mary whips him in the field. Moses reawakens Mary’s unresolved incestuous feelings for her father and her identification with what the authorial voice calls her mother’s “arid feminism” (44). In breakdown, dreams dramatize for the reader Mary’s imprisonment in her childhood, her failure to have resolved the limits of her relationship with her mother and her father. Social clichés expect the virile black male to lust for the white female and the white female secretly to return that desire. What Moses in fact reawakens are the only strong sexual feelings Mary has ever had, and they are connected with her father, not with her husband, to whom orthodox psychoanalysis says they should have been transferred.

Dreams are the key to Mary’s inner realities. They serve as a dramatic psychological register that the limits of Lessing’s protagonist and the novel’s narrative strategies cannot accommodate. Dreams free the limited character from the confines of limited consciousness, for only in dreams can Mary unite her past and her present. The disguised insights of dreams never appear in her waking life.

Moses is an active presence in Mary’s many troubled dreams. She is seized with terror that he will touch her in the dreams he inhabits. Three crucial dreams wake her up “sweating with fear” and wanting to end “the new human relationship” that exists between herself and Moses (218). When Dick has another bout of malaria, Moses insists on staying overnight so that Mary may sleep. That night her dreams of childhood explicitly connect Moses with the father figure and recall, for the reader, Moses’ voice, “firm and kind, like a father commanding her,” on that remarkable day when Mary permitted the barrier between white and black to break down, the day she sobbed in front of Moses and allowed him to put her to bed (212).

In the first dream, Mary’s playmates ask her how to play. This possibility of leadership is undercut by her mother, who calls her inside. Mary, feeling afraid as she enters the house, is “sickened” by the sight of her father holding her mother in his arms and runs away. In the second dream, Mary is blindfolded while her mother, brother, and sister watch. Her father catches her head and holds “it in his lap with his small hairy hands, to cover up her eyes” (226). Once again, the odors and feel of her father, her blindness, and her closeness to the father’s penis repel, frighten, and attract her: “the sickly odor of beer… her head held down in the thick stuff of his trousers—the unwashed masculine smell” (226). She panics while her father and her siblings laugh. She wakes screaming.

In the next dream Dick is dead because of the native’s negligence. Mary is relieved, exultant, and guilty. The implied identification of the three men in her life becomes explicit:

He approached slowly, obscene and powerful, and it was not only he, but her father who was threatening her. They advanced together, one person, and she could smell, not the native smell, but the unwashed smell of her father. It filled the room, musty, like animals … He came near and put his hand on her arm. It was the voice of the African she heard. He was comforting her because of Dick’s death, consoling her protectively, but at the same time it was her father menacing and horrible, who touched her in desire. [229]

The incestuous conflation of father, husband, and servant could not be more clear. The name “Moses” connotes both paternity and deliverance, and Moses indeed functions as both father and deliverer in the novel. Mary, who feels complicit in her father’s death, kills Dick in her dream (or at least represents by that death his psychic unimportance for her), but cannot kill Moses. On the contrary, she almost invites Moses to kill her. Moses, the ultimate victim, paradoxically takes on the ultimate power of dealing death. By submitting to that death, by almost seeking it out in the woods on that last night of her life, Mary performs an ambiguous act of penance.

Her death seems the only resolution to the dialectic that ties her to Moses: “They were like two antagonists, silently sparring. Only he was powerful and sure of himself, and she was undermined by fear, by her terrible dream-filled nights, her obsession” (232). The pathological white fear of black is nowhere better demonstrated than in the fear Moses continues to excite in Slatter and in other whites even after he has voluntarily given himself up to the police.

The conflation of the three men in Mary’s life is subtly and effectively accomplished. Thoroughly convincing, it shows Lessing in firm command of psychological and social meanings, able to construct and to tie together several strands of motivational matter—personal, social, racial, psychological, historical. The three men who melt into one man in Mary’s dream also recall the central footnote to the The Waste Land, which describes all the men and women of the poem as melting into the single figure of Tiresias.³ Lessing’s penchant for duplicating and merging figures becomes a lifelong fictional strategy.

The conflation of mother and daughter is less complex but more contradictory. The dream view of Mary’s mother contradicts Mary’s conscious view of her. Mary sides with mother against father and repeats in life her mother’s victim role. But the dream shows Mary’s mother in collusion with her father against Mary, as his partner and sexual mate. Mary cannot consciously accept this construction of her mother’s loyalties.

What Mary fears most, the repetition of her mother’s life, a repetition that haunts Lessing heroines, she accomplishes by marrying Dick. The authorial voice tells the reader that Mary’s nameless mother had a life “so unhappy because of economic pressure that she had literally pined to death” (45). When her mother dies, Mary abandons her pathetic and alcoholic father: “By dropping her father she seemed in some way to be avenging her mother’s sufferings” (44). In this case, as in so many others, things are either/or for Mary. Later she will see herself pitted against her husband, against the field workers, and against the stream of servants who come under her household rule and who are finally and fatally at once merged and individualized in Moses.

Marriage returns Mary to the poverty and rage of her childhood, to the cage of repetition she had hoped to escape. As soon as she crosses the threshold into her marital home, she feels “back with her mother, watching her endlessly contrive and patch and mend” (72). The language of doubling perfectly suits Mary’s duplication of her mother’s life; the memory of her mother recurs “more and more frequently, like an older sardonic double of herself walking beside her” (126). Mary’s doomed struggle to resist repetition settles her face into “two masks, one contradicting the other… Sometimes she would present the worn visage of an indomitable old woman who learned to expect the worst from life, and sometimes the face of defenseless hysteria” (126). Such physical stigmata of inner division become a regular feature of Lessing’s work.

Mary’s loyalty to her mother and hatred for her father are muddied by Lessing’s strange comment that Mary “has inherited from her mother an arid feminism, which had no meaning in her own life at all, for she was leading the comfortable carefree existence of a single woman in South Africa” (44). “Feminism” is Lessing’s word, not Mary’s or her mother’s. It rings oddly because it is outside the world of the novel—besides being used inaccurately to mean female hatred of males. The phrase “arid feminism” initiates a longterm ambiguousness about feminism in Lessing’s work and in her public pronouncements, which the internal nature of her work often contradicts. The important fact about Mary’s mother is not her “feminism,” but her imprisonment to poverty and the family.

The incestuous elements in Mary’s relationship with her father, her husband, her servant, have social as well as sexual meanings. In nineteenth-century fiction sexual meaning tended to be covert; in our time overt sexual events frequently stand for social dislocation. If we see in incest an act that overturns established social conceptions of priority, then the reversals of priority in the relationship between Mary and Moses are revealing. Moses controls Mary rather than the reverse. This is unsettling to Charlie Slatter, the upholder of white racism. If, as he says, “ ‘blacks keep women in their right place,’ ” then black males are as patriarchal as white males. For Slatter, the overturn of the proper power relationship between white and black and male and female that takes place when white women boss black men, as Mary does when Dick is sick, is a major factor in Mary’s murder: “ ‘Niggers don’t understand women giving them orders. They keep their own women in their right place’ ” (28). Slatter is no misfit in southern Africa; he prospers because he is both racist and patriarchal.⁴

Thus the internal meanings of Grass contradict the superficiality of the authorial remark about the “arid feminism” of Mary’s mother. Furthermore, the men in Mary’s life are neither free nor powerful. They are marginal and defeated. The father who attracted and repelled her and whom she blames for all the problems of her childhood is described as a cipher in his own home. So is Dick, who annoys Mary by calling her “Boss.” Moses exhibits a different kind of powerlessness. He may acquire emotional power over Mary, but he has virtually no social, economic, or political power. Both gender and race are related to power in the novel in unexpectedly complicated and contradictory ways.

Mary has never really craved power, although she can relish as well as hate her stint as field overseer. She enjoys the authority; she even enjoys using the whip which is its emblem and with which she strikes Moses. Nevertheless, Mary enjoys order, predictability, and impersonality more than she enjoys power. Office routine provided her with an ideal system: things happened safely “one after another in a pattern, and she liked, particularly, the friendly impersonality of it” (44). Mary cannot get circumscribed order and impersonality in the fields or in her farmhouse. Her speeches to the field hands on the work ethic are ludicrously out of place; she refuses to give rest breaks and is insufferably rigid as an overseer. She tries to have things “happen safely one after the other” in everything she does.

When she can totally control her projects, she is successful. But her success is based on short-lived compulsive hyperactivity. Her cleaning, sewing, painting, and chicken raising are the acts of a woman on the edge of hysteria, as the woman behind the wall in Memoirs of a Survivor is over the edge in her frantic sweeping of leaves. Mary’s hyperactivity contrasts with Dick’s incompetence. She seems related to the Lawrentian conception of womanhood in her placement of logic and dominance over feeling and submission. Whereas Dick can permit petty pilfering, she cannot; whereas Dick can joke with Samson, Mary can never joke. When Mary complains of black smells, Dick laughs and repeats what Samson once told him: “ ‘You say we smell. But to us there is nothing worse than a white man’s smell’ ” (161). In fact, one of the things Mary comes to hate about Dick is his black field-hand look. The closer Dick gets to his land, the less white, or the more black, he becomes.

Mary’s compulsive efficiency conjoins with her sexual immaturity to make a very negative picture of her. That is Lessing’s overt text. Her less overt text shows Mary functi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Rereading Doris Lessing
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Doubling as Dialectic and Repetition
• Part I. Antiphonal Narratives
• Part II. Remembering Mirrors
• Part III. Colonialism In and Out of Space
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index