THE FREE WOMAN AND THE TRADITIONAL WOMAN IN NOVELS BY DORIS LESSING: ANALYSIS AND POETRY

The principal aim of this study is to reveal how the heroines of Doris Lessing's novels resemble traditional women, thereby providing a way of understanding the contradictions in her heroines' natures. A number of literary critics have assumed that the risk-taking actions of what Lessing calls free women are a guide to liberation, and that Lessing's heroines successfully construct freer personal identities and more responsible social behavior.;Lessing's novels, in sum, perpetuate the idea that woman is a necessarily helpless victim of society and her own biology. The Lessing heroine succeeds neither as a traditional woman nor as a professional woman. This study details the following stages in Lessing's notion of the free woman: (1) The free woman, as exemplified by Martha Quest in the novel of the same name, becomes aware of the repressive forces which may determine her life, but is unable to prevent herself from assuming traditional roles; (2) The free woman, in the role of mother, as exemplified by Martha Quest in A Proper Marriage, fails to construct a positive image of motherhood, because of her negative relationship to her own mother. In order to retain her own identity, she exiles herself from all traditional roles; and (3) The free woman exhibits traits of dependency and passivity which lead to her victimization in sexual and emotional relationships to men, even outside social structures which reinforce these traits. In novels like The Golden Notebook, The Four-Gated City, The Summer before the Dark, and The Memoirs of a Survivor, Lessing suggests woman's self-destructive traits are rooted in her own biology. The later heroine's response to her own hated female nature is a flight from sexuality and emotion, resulting in mental and physical breakdowns which Lessing often portrays as states of higher awareness or spiritual transcendence.;This study points out the dangers of equating the free woman's progressive villification of sexuality and emotion and her relinquishment of her female identity with a path toward liberation. Lessing conveys her own negativism and fatalism about women's ability to actively construct positive female identities by detailing her heroines' failures. While acknowledging Doris Lessing's important contribution to understanding the social and psychological impediments to women's freedom, this study aligns itself with a contemporary feminism which suggests women can liberate themselves by affirming and integrating all their capacities--sexual, emotional, and intellectual.;Following the critical study is a series of original poems on the roles of woman as daughter, wife, mother, lover, and worker. Through the expressive mode, the writer of this study presents counterbalancing positive images of womanhood.;Yet, her typical heroine seems involved in an irreconcilable conflict between being a woman and being a person. She finds the roles of daughter, wife, mother, lover, and worker so contaminated by societal repression that engagement in any of these functions signifies a loss of self. In addition, she is unable to reconstruct any of these roles to conform to her own values since she has no positive model of womanhood. The free woman's definition of being a woman resembles the victimized life of Mary Turner, the protagonist of Lessing's first novel The Grass Is Singing. Turner, the prototypical traditional woman, conforms completely to social norms in all her roles, and is unaware of the societal forces that lead to her victimization. While the free woman is conscious of the forces that doom women to repeat the pattern of their mothers' lives, she retains such traits as passivity and dependency which make her behave in ways that conform to tradition.