Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Novels of the 50s
- 3 The Golden Notebook and the end of Martha Quest
- 4 Explorations of Inner Space
- 5 Canopus in Argos: Archives
- 6 Jane Somers and a Return to ‘Realism’
- 7 Novels of the 90s and After
- 8 Language and the Shaping of the Short Story
- 9 Non-fiction
- 10 Epilogue
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - Explorations of Inner Space
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Novels of the 50s
- 3 The Golden Notebook and the end of Martha Quest
- 4 Explorations of Inner Space
- 5 Canopus in Argos: Archives
- 6 Jane Somers and a Return to ‘Realism’
- 7 Novels of the 90s and After
- 8 Language and the Shaping of the Short Story
- 9 Non-fiction
- 10 Epilogue
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the 50s and 60s, a number of novels had explored the problems of female identity, which was often presented as threatened by submission to a partner, or by society's expectation of submission to its tenets. For instance, in Veronica Hull's novel The Monkey Puzzle (1958), the protagonist, Catherine, becomes a student of philosophy because, as it appeared to Lessing's young Martha, ‘to her, her existence was so tenuous that it needed the thoughts of others to confirm it’. When the reassurance she needs fails to materialize, she breaks down, her family have her committed to a mental hospital, and when she gets out, she has to establish who she is for herself. Like Martha, she links her struggles to establish her identity on the personal, private level, with a realization of the follies of society at large, concluding that,
considering that the commonplace and necessary facts of money, sex and death were taboo in many houses it was not surprising that such far-fetched horrors as war and madness overcame people almost without their putting up much resistance. (MP 106)
Hull's novel takes the same line as Foucault and such anti-psychiatrists as Laing in their exposure of forms of society that Noam Chomsky describes as offering ‘free choice with a pistol to your head’. Society may force into madness those who do not subscribe to its precepts, or may label them as mad – or they may seek to escape by a descent into breakdown, as in Lessing's The Golden Notebook. This is not, of course, to deny the existence of mental illness as a devastating condition in its own right, as Lynda Coldridge's sufferings show: true breakdown is the price she pays for her persistent efforts to breakthrough, to achieve a more profound understanding of human consciousness. Hannah Green's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964) poignantly captures the life in hospital of a young girl diagnosed as schizophrenic, together with the reactions of her doctors and family. As is suggested in Hull's novel, and in Lessing's novels of the 50s and 60s, since the madness of the world is a distinct possibility, its ability to label individuals as insane is questionable; and labelling, the power of words to compartmentalize, is of course a key element in these novels.
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- Information
- Doris Lessing , pp. 33 - 43Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2014