Ratna Raman - The Fiction of Doris Lessing Re-Envisioning Feminism.

The Fiction of Doris Lessing

The Fiction of Doris
Lessing

Re-envisioning Feminism

Ratna Raman

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First published in India 2021

This edition published 2021

Copyright Ratna Raman, 2021

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ISBN: HB: 978-93-90176-90-8; eBook: 978-93-90176-92-2

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Contents

This book on Doris Lessings fiction has finally taken shape around her centenary year. Lessings work is a tour de force, easily among the most significant writing of our times. My life-long affair with Lessings work began with a reading of The Golden Notebook as part of the MPhil programme at Delhi University. While I inverted an academic sand clock by registering for a doctoral dissertation, there was also a programmed biological, cultural and social clock that was being wound down simultaneously, requiring me to keep pace and work in tandem with the modern requirement of juggling multiple lives. I finished the fleshing out of my research in the interstices of times, often putting all writing on the back burner due to the insistent demands of the quotidian. This work was fuelled entirely by the hope, faith and support that family and friends invested in me.

To Subramaniam Iyer, one of the genuinely feminist men I know, I owe years of emotional and tactical support, endless rounds of tea, photocopying and more than his fair share of domesticity and parenting.

To my mother and father, for allowing me to believe that thought and writing constitute the most precious human achievement that individuals can aspire to. How I wish dad could have seen this book in print.

To Nataraj and Sandhya, my siblings, for material help and emotional bonding.

To Susan Visvanathan, for years of handholding, long conversations, reading and commenting on innumerable written drafts, unstinting support and a mellow friendship.

To Smriti and Siddhartha, my daughter and son, from whose childhoods I stole innumerable hours to read, research and write.

To Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, for an expansive and nurturing friendship and valuable advice about the dangers of going against the grain in writing a tome on a single author in postcolonial, multicultural times.

To the memory of Professor G.K. Das, who steered Lessings fiction in my direction and was also my PhD guide briefly. I am so sorry that he is no longer around to share this moment with me.

To Malashri Lal, my supervisor, whose carefully timed motivation went a long way in furthering my research.

To the memory of my grandfathers, maternal and paternal, who did not live to see me embark on this project.

For Manni Paati and Madras Paati, my late grandmothers, and their long and incredibly demanding lives to which they gave themselves selflessly.

To Natesan, Jambunathan and Tyageshwaran, my late Chittappas, who would have been delighted to see this finished book.

To Tripta Wahi for rallying around and helping me believe in myself and my work when the going got rough.

To the British Council and the Charles Wallace Trust, a delightful six weeks at The Scottish Universities International Summer School, Edinburgh and the pleasure of being in England, first hand. I would also like to thank the University Grants Commission for a Minor Research Grant.

I am indebted to the libraries of Delhi University in the North and South Campus, the CWDS library in Central Delhi and the Nehru Memorial Library at Teen Murti where the abundance of materials is offset by the helpfulness extended by library staff to nondescript scholars who are part of a free-floating, reading universe.

Some of the chapters in this book were developed from preliminary arguments presented at international conferences held in places like New Delhi, New Orleans and Plymouth. Duke University, North Carolina, made it possible for me to attend a week-long workshop on discussions around The Golden Notebook. Being on a sabbatical, away from teaching responsibilities at Sri Venkateswara College, gave me sufficient leeway to hone my writing.

To Shiv Visvanathan, Leela Gandhi, Lalitha Subbu, Kumkum Roy, Kanchana Natarajan, Bharati Sud, Anshu Malhotra and Jaya Sinha Tyagi for their interest in my work.

To my father-in-law, for a useful reader in feminist theory, and to Ahmer Anwer, Tapan Basu, Badri Raina, Sunil Charnalia, Nita Aggarwal, Rita Sahai, Rajaram Iyer and Deepa Vasudevan for helping me expand my collection of Lessings books by bringing me one book at a time from diverse parts of the world.

To Rajeev Agrawal, Veronica Rot, P.C. Jain and Anuj Prasad, for tech support and for deepening and widening my learning curve in computer literacy in my early dinosaur years.

The penultimate shout-out is for generations of students who have enabled me to hone my learning and teaching skills through long discussions around philosophy, ideas, ideologies, fiction, poetry, literature and feminism.

I end with deeply felt thanks to Chandrasekhar of Bloomsbury Publishing for evincing keen interest in my manuscript. I remain very admiring of his commitment to his metier and the energetic and professional manner in which he sets deadlines and delivers.

Thank you.

The year 2020about a hundred years after her birth in 1919echoes some of the salient features of the year Lessing was born in. The First World War had ended and Lessing would later recall her childhood years as those in which the Great War had squatted upon her. In 2020, over a century later, the terrain continues to be that of a world at waronly the war seems to have extended itself all over the world in the form of multiple hostilities in peacetime. How do we engage with Lessings work in the years after her centenary and what are the insights that a reading of her voluminous writing, fictional and non-fictional, provide to us as curious lay readers?

This book discusses Doris Lessings fiction from the middle of the twentieth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. It engages with the significance of feminism as an idea and its growth into theoretical formulations from movements that initially engaged with womens freedom, spaces and rights, to its current avatar today as a protean world view allowing for plurality and differences. The book also explores Lessings articulation of this idea of feminism in the lived realities of womens lives, through newer constructions and representations of womens identities in the fiction that she wrote as she created new personas and new contexts for modern women.