| Architectural imagery in Doris Lessing's fiction is a dynamic metaphor which reveals the artist's complex relationship to enclosure and mystical release. Lessing's use of architectural images points to a consistent artistic movement away from protective enclosing structures--social, psychic and artistic--which create dependence and pervert the personality, towards a freer structure which permits the fullest development of human potential.; A study of the rooms, walls and houses which enclose Lessing's characters initially reveals a highly negative social and psychological environment. Rooms and houses symbolize social environments which allow no freedom of movement for the characters; walls continually block character movement and communication; windows do not open up to a world of possibility. Thus the women of The Grass is Singing, "To Room Nineteen" and The Summer Before the Dark inhabit an imprisoning environment. Even the artistic structures of the fictions themselves are closed in by architectural imagery.; But while architecture is a metaphor for enclosure, it also reveals Lessing's movement towards a sacred, mystical world where human potential and the collective co-exist. The Children of Violence can be seen as a movement away from imprisoning structures, artistic as well as social. The collapsing house, a major architectural image in the series, mirrors the overall movement of the series towards the collapse of the existing social structure and the basic structure of the art work itself.; While Children of Violence ends with the collapse of structure, Lessing attempts to rebuild artistic and social structure in Memoirs of a Survivor, a novel which is formally dependent on the architectural image. Like Children of Violence, Memoirs portrays the break-up of existing social structures, but Lessing simultaneously constructs a whole new world for her characters and a new fictional architecture for her readers as well. This world is characterized by openness as is the artistic structure of Memoirs itself which defies the formal limitations of ordinary fiction. |
