A Study On The Deconstruction Narrative Of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

Doris Lessing(October 22,1919-November 17,2013)is a well-known contemporary British writer and the 2007 Nobel Prize winner.She published the first work is The Cleft after winning the Nobel Prize,which is a fable about the origin of human beings from women.It is rich in connotation and entrusts the care and expectation of the 88-year-old“literary grandmother” for all mankind.One of the core themes that Lessing studied was the relationship between men and women.She tried to reveal the core issues of the entire society and culture through the discourse space of gender.This article studies the multiple deconstructive narratives of The Cleft from three aspects: the deconstruction of history,the deconstruction of gender hierarchy and the deconstruction of anthropocentrism.The Introduction makes a comprehensive and detailed combing of the research on The Cleft at home and abroad,and basically summarizes the research ideas of this paper.The first part is the deconstruction of history.New Historicism holds that historical narration is not objective and that historiography and documents are the result of subjective creation,this idea is embodied in The Cleft,by setting up different narrative perspectives from Maire,monsters and historians,he can find that different narrative subjects have different narrative attitudes,which causes distortions in the process of history.Lessing leads readers to re-examine history,and through the analysis of historical unreliable narratives,let us who live in the present reflect on our cognition of modern history,especially the cognition of the status of men and women in current history.The second part is the deconstruction of gender hierarchy.There are differences between men and women in society,and there are also status inequalities.Although men and women have differences in physiology,personality,and social division of labor,these social divisions of labor can be exchanged,no matter which social division of labor has value,there are only differences,no good or bad.Men should not devalue women because of differences in the division of labor.Lessing deconstructed patriarchalism in The Cleft,by subverting the origin of mankind and trying to revive the goddess culture,he expressed the view that although there are differences between the sexes,they are not superior to each other,and makes people rethink the relationship between men and women.Lessing hoped to break the hegemony of men and strive for the status and discourse power that should belong to women,so as to construct a harmonious society of equality and mutual assistance between men and women.The third part is the deconstruction of anthropocentrism.The use of nested structure enables readers to read the text from different points in history,discovered in ancient oral historical records that the characteristics of women and nature are more harmonious,deconstructed anthropocentrism in the narrative discourse of Roman historians,and understood the metaphor of the cleft in the discourse of writers’ novels,reflect on the development of human civilization from different levels of historical narrative,and make people not only pay attention to the harmony of society,but also pay attention to the status quo of the whole nature.Human beings have always put themselves at the center,ignoring the power of nature.Lessing uses the deconstruction of anthropocentrism in The Cleft to tell us that if humans do not value the natural environment and are still arrogant,they will eventually destroy their own place of existence with their own hands.Humans who destroy nature will eventually be punished by nature,and humans should respect nature.By studying the multiple deconstructive narratives of The Cleft,we can find that the writer is obsessed with deconstruction in the novel,disintegrating elements such as history,gender and civilization one by one,depicting the overall collapse of the grand narrative and the individual narrative;at the same time,through narrative,she strives to transcend the relativity and nihility that may be caused by deconstruction,showing the warmth of human nature,and in a sense,it also presents a revealing vision for human civilization.