Fatality And Freedom

Doris Lessing(1919-2013),winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007,is a didactic and prolific British writer revered as “the greatest writer after Virginia Woolf”.As an extraordinary mix of various fame and honor,Lessing recollected her unusual early life by writing autobiographies in her twilight years.Under My Skin,published in1994,includes the experience of her first thirty-year life.Born in Persia(now Iran)in1919,Lessing moved to Southern Rhodesia(now Zimbabwe)with her family and back to London in 1949.Martha Quest,the first novel of Children of Violence pentalogy,came out in 1952.The heroine Martha Quest in the namesake novel became another success character following Mary Turner in The Grass is Singing,Lessing's maiden work.The target novel,Martha Quest,was published at postwar Britain when the country was shrouded in darkness with the whole society undergoing an explosion of social injustice,political conflict,sexual discrimination and culture shock.Cultivated in the troubled times,Lessing was self-taught and shouldered the responsibility for reflecting social facts and finding solution to social problems through writing.With inexhaustible energy,Lessing kept on writing in different genres and trying on various themes all her life.Lessing's work aims to express the spirit of the time including the themes of race,class,self identity,sexual relations,the relationship between the individual and the community,mother and daughter relationship,ecological environment,human future and other modern crises.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter is an introduction.It mainly introduces Doris Lessing and her literary creation,provides a systematic review of literature at abroad and home,and states the significance of this thesis.The second chapter recommends the theory of postcolonialism and discusses the two target works.Chapter three and four are the core content of the thesis.This part deals with the experience of Lessing and her heroine Martha,interpreting the characteristics of the Other and analyzing the colonial hinted social space to better understand the postcolonial effect embedded in people's mind and living space.Intertextual analysis of the two books will be made to explore what and how the author's life experience influences her writing,which is the innovation of the paper.The last chapter is a conclusion.Through close reading and intertextual analysis,the dual vision applied by Lessing will be unveiled.At the meantime,the analysis under the perspective of post-colonialism will demonstrate the contemporary significance and pedagogical meaning of Lessing's work and encourage the reader to rethink of Lessing study.