Doris Lessing’s Fiction as Feminist Projections (original) (raw)
Related papers
Female psyche in Lessing's selected fictions: A critique
Center for Academic Research and Development, 2024
The current literary study aims to investigate the psychological and emotional conflicts and the traumatic experiences of the strong female characters depicted in Doris Lessing's selected fictions. Unmatched in all literary genres worldwide, author Doris Lessing depicts both the societal structure of her age and the basic issues facing women. Lessing looks for fresh ways to portray the experiences of a woman writer who is stuck. She was raised in Africa, developed into an engaged but disillusioned communist, is a politically engaged writer, and occasionally she even plays the role of a mistress or wife. This qualitative study focuses on how Lessing aims to portray, via her astute and nuanced approach, the psychological struggles that women have while balancing marriage and love, motherhood and career, the injustice of double standards, the isolation that single career women experience, and the hollowness of marriage in the eyes of society and the established order. Through her feminist works, she attempts to rouse the women's community to fight against patriarchy. Lessing portrays her female characters with various societal issues and male-female perspectives.
Journal of critical review, 2020
In the domain of craftsmanship when all is said in done and writing specifically, the nearness of Doris Lessing couldn't be precluded as one from claiming the most powerful English authors during the 1960s. Doris Lessing is an author who is worried about the portrayal of ladies character in the West. In her eminent books, "The Golden Notebook" and "grass is singing" Lessing targets exhibiting ladies personality in Europe and any angle identified with them, for example their brain research, political lives, connection to men and youngsters, their place in a male-ruled society and their continuous endeavours to escape from the social and political abuse. The point of this paper is to introduce an honest record of female personality from a women's activist perspective.
IJRAR, 2019
Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize winner of 2007 is one of the outstanding novelists of modern English literature. In her novels, there is space for memories, retrospection, introspection, foreshadow, flashback and terrible recognitions that are hued by torment and trauma. She displays a well-crafted plot, occurrence, meditative or philosophical description that suggest the workings of the deep layers of the mind. Her writing embodies and extends open panoply of subjects explicit to late-twentieth-century consciousness: race; the conflict of the generations; psychological dimensions of male female relations; philosophical inquiries regarding life; the nature and planes of the real world; exploration of psychological illness, and modes of consciousness. Her writing portrays realism, and is packed with the technique of myth and speculation. In spite of her genius, she set her characters against the backdrop of human history to demonstrate their experience.
Feminine Psyche and Sensibility: A Critical Study of the Select Novels of Doris Lessing
Critical Review , 2020
Feminine Psyche and Sensibility is an endeavor to discharge women's from those structures that have minimized and limited them just to home and hearth; it is additionally an endeavor to reinterpret their situation on the planet. In the male-centric framework, the women lost her significance and got lesser position in the public eye; it is also an attempt to reinterpret their position in the world. In a patriarchal system, the woman lost her importance and got a lesser position in society; she became simply the puppet in the hands of the man; just dependent and inferior. Her status throughout everyday life and her character are characterized in connection with the male individuals; wings of her creative ability are cut off and they are determined as the psyche.
Autobiographical Elements in the Works of Doris Lessing
2017
To become a true scholar on the subject of the Doris Lessing protagonist is to accept the roles of her protagonists, despite their likelihood to be female, without definition or resolution. To achieve a sense of Doris Lessing‘s purpose is to accept the idea that an institutionalized purpose is preposterous, despite her common themes of madness. To appreciate Doris Lessing from a literary stance is to accept her word that she writes without any feminist persuasion. As Katherine Fishburen said, ―Through the metaphor of her fiction, we learn that the meaning of the world eludes us if we try, by constitutionalizing or labeling it, to pin it down‖ (qtd in Kaplan 90). Doris Lessing believed that instead of attempting to explain the world, we should simply experience it, and her characters reinforce this idea.
A Feminist Stylistic Analysis of Characterisation in Doris Lessings A Woman on a Roof
Global Regional Review
In her book Feminist Stylistics, Sara Mills (1995) argues that characters in texts are not simulacra of humans. They are merely words which represent men and women in accordance with stereotypes that are found in society. This study takes up D. Lessings short story A Woman on a Roof (1963/1990) and looks at the characterisation in it by using Mills model (1995) at the level of discourse. The aim of the study is to find out whether the representation of male and female characters in this story is gendered or not. The results of the study show that female characters are represented negatively while the male characters are represented positively. On the basis of these findings, it is recommended that these representational practices need to change in order to bring about a change in the thinking of the people.
The Golden Notebook (1962), written by 2007 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, Doris Lessing the well-known contemporary British woman writer, is a complex and multilayered context which is molded around a series of colorful notebooks. It portrays numerous ideas and impressions regarding the prominent role of women in mid-twenty century western culture and contributes to controversial perspectives of feminism, even though Lessing has always denied the feminism essence of her novel. However the disputant themes which come under a meticulous scrutiny here are the women's oppression, subjugation, the actual position of women in society, women's struggle for establishing their identity and obtaining the self-assertion and autonomy. The Golden Notebook is a bold attempt which exhibits a colorful picture of a world which is patriarchal dominated and combined with a society which is marked by gender-based discrimination; a society that is associated with such a male-dominance prescriptions that shut the doors of autonomy to the women. Patriarchal ideology contrast, rebelling against the rigid social codes along with defying the prescribed roles by society and eventually attempting to provide a life of wider personal freedom than the one customarily granted to women are the main concerns of the novel. Lessing applies the suppression issue as a window through which the patriarchal panorama of society is depicted. Accordingly, this text scrutinizes the novel from a socialist feminist peephole to clear out the hardships and limitations that the patriarchal structure of that time society imposed upon women and demonstrates the struggle of women for establishing their confirmed identity. Based on the findings of this research context, we discuss that the main outstanding aspects of women's life including their sexuality, autonomy, motherhood and social freedom are oppressed and overwhelmingly exploited by the patriarchal society which inferiorizes the women to a second class inhabitant. On the other hand, the female personages of the novel stand against all the pressures and discriminative looks imposed by society's codes and institutions; and rely boldly on their own capability to gain their self-defined identity and autonomy which were intruded and snatched by the male trespassers.
Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook adopts a complex profile to present its characters' complex lives. However, of all existing novel's themes it is women's oppression and subjugation that come under scrutiny here. The world this novel pictures is a patriarchal capitalist world highly unfavorable to women, and the society it portrays is marked by male-dominance and gender-based discrimination; a society in which – no matter how capable women are – their identity is defined by men and male-defined relations. Accordingly, this paper is looking at this novel from a socialist feminist point of view to identify the facets of sexual oppression and to show how the female characters resist, fight back and rely on their self-defined identity to subvert the oppressive structure they are living in. Based on the findings of this paper we argue that in the novel's world sexuality, motherhood and mothering are outstanding facets of oppression through which women are overwhelmingly oppressed and exploited by the male-dominated society that discriminates against women as a secondary inferior class. To our understanding, while female characters of the novel have to deal with a lot of pressure imposed by society's institutions (family and family-like circles) they are capable enough to shrewdly rely on their power and self-defined identity to fight back and subvert the patriarchal capitalist systems that intrude women's lives in a variety of ways. As we conclude Lessing confirms socialist feminism's argument that mothering and motherhood are facets of women's oppression, but she also believes that these two aspects of feminine life can be a part of feminine power to subvert the oppressive systems that are designed to define and enfeeble women's genuine identity.
JETIR, 2019
Doris Lessing is one of the revolutionary novelists of modern English fiction. Her writings enlarge the boundaries of fiction, experiment with different genres, and discover the world of Africa and Europe. Lessing's writing is usually a traumatic narrative of the marginalized women, who fight constantly against estrangement and subordination to seek their legitimate place in a hostile culture. The deep-rooted commonness of oppression and suffering is fundamental in the lives of her female characters. The alienation and identity crises are global problems; she has taken these problems and issues as the primary themes. In an alienated western society, she discusses the problems faced by immigrants. Isolation is often used in modern literature to express the sense of aloofness of an individual towards society and nature.