Ⅱ.A Review of Spatial Criticisms of Doris Lessing

In the West,critics have noticed the importance of space in Lessing’s works almost as early as they began to study Lessing.Interestingly,this even happened before the influence of“spatial turn”extended into literary criticism.That perhaps can prove from another angle the prominence of space in Lessing’s works,even though there are few articles proving Lessing’s conscious study of spatial theory or direct contact with the spatial theorist,nor any facts to show that the critics of the spatial elements consciously draw on spatial theory to conduct their study of Lessing’s work.

Dorothy Brewster is one of those who make the earliest remarks on the spatial elements in Doris Lessing’s work.In her monograph Doris Lessing published in 1965,the first book-length study of Lessing’s fiction,she notes the prominent spatial image-the room in Lessing’s works.She remarks that“Doris Lessing’s marked interest in rooms is not just the novelist’s usual concern with background”(1986:29).She draws people’s attention to the astonishing number of rooms in Lessing’s world by making a thorough list of the room image in the books already published by then.

Frederick R.Karl makes a depth analysis of the house or room image in the two important works by Lessing:The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City,by placing Lessing in a larger literary tradition“literature of enclosure”(1972:297)which he defines as“fiction in which breadth of space is of relatively little importance.Space exists not as an extension but only as a volume to be enclosed(italics,original)in a room,a house,or even a city”(1972:297).Karl associates Lessing’s house or room image with the suffocating rooms of Pinter,Kafka and Proust.He holds that“the room is the place in which one can dream,where one can isolate oneself in neurosis or withdrawal symptoms,can seek refuge from external onslaughts too severe for the individual to withstand”(1972:298).Karl’s emphasis on the psychological significance of the room as escapism is essentially negative.He insists that for Lessing,the room is a geometric space,not the infinite space that Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane sees as central to the reliving of the cosmogony.Karl successfully foregrounds the claustrophobic quality of these spatial images.Anna Wulf and Martha Quest do sometimes seek refuge in rooms and close the door to the outside world,but they always find themselves compelled to open the doors—to investigate new spaces.In consequence,the house and room image often become less claustrophobic and present more positive qualities.

Most of the early spatial comments are remarks scattered in the discussion of the other major topics and the analysis of the spatial elements is confined to the metaphorical significance of the images of house and rooms.In The Tree Outside the Window:Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence,Ellen Cronan Rose discusses the house image in the series as the metaphor to mark Martha’s achievement of a sense of identity in her larger topic of the identity issue.Rose holds that Martha understands the house“as a model of society,whose interior somehow corresponds to her psychic configurations,and she moves easily in and through it”(1976:43).She argues that Lessing’s use of the Coldridge house as a metaphor is“inadequate”(1976:55)as it is not the real world but a“protected space within society at large”(1976:55).Roberta Rubenstein also includes a depth analysis of the house as a psychological metaphor in her major discussion of the consciousness in her monograph The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing:Breaking the Forms of Consciousness.Ruberstein holds that the stratifications of the Coldridge house in The Four-Gated City symbolizes“the constantly shifting aspects and divisions of Martha’s consciousness”(1979:138).

Gradually,scholars break through the limitation of the spatial concern in Lessing criticism to the house and room image.Mary Ann Singleton extends it to the city and the veld.In her dissertation“The City and the Veld:The Fiction of Doris Lessing”(1977),later published as a book,she focuses on the central images“the city”and“the veld”,representing civilization and the consciousness,and nature and the unconscious experience respectively.Singleton concludes that Lessing moves toward an ideal synthesis between nature and culture as she develops a new form of consciousness.Jean Pickering is another critic who widens and deepens the exploration of the spatial images.In her Understanding Doris Lessing,she notices that not only the rooms,the houses,the city,the veld are all important spatial elements in Lessing’s works.She is insightful in her interpretation of the house image:the rooms are its“inward divisions”and the city is its“outward extension”(1990:8).Pickering highlights the symbolic value of these spatial images.She associates the Turners’shack in The Grass Is Singing with the“fragility of the white settlers’inroad into the native bush”(1990:9);the state of the house with the condition of the soul in Children of Violence and Summer Before the Dark.She also pioneers in pointing out the two versions of the city in Lessing’s work:“the archetypal city of the imagination,conceived in the Western tradition”and“the twentieth-century metropolis with its impoverished slums,urban blight,and sprawling suburbs.”(1990:10)Pickering argues that the juxtaposition of the house,the city and the veld in Lessing’s work“constitute a many-voiced dialogue accommodating various philosophical concerns expressed throughout her work.”Ellen Cronan Rose focuses her attention on the city image in her article“Doris Lessing’s Citta Felice.”She says that the city is another architectural metaphor that“relates Martha to a reality that transcends the personal”(1986:142)and she argues that the significance of the city image in The Four-Gated City and the later“space fiction”lies in“its ability to conflate psyche and cosmos.”(1986:142)She thus extends the critical contemplation of the spatial image in Lessing’s works from the domestic space to the city and draws the critical attention to Lessing’s“space fiction”which is much less discussed.

Perhaps the first systematic study of the various spatial images is conducted by Jacquelyn Diane Collins in her dissertation“Architectural Imagery in the Works of Doris Lessing”(1983).Collins is innovative in finding the architectural imagery in Lessing’s works as a key to her formal and thematic strategies.She holds that architectural imagery in Doris Lessing’s fiction is a dynamic metaphor which reveals the artist’s complex relationship to enclosure and mystical release.The dissertation deals with the basic architectural images such as house,room,wall,veranda and window as an important key to Lessing’s artistic and mythic quest.Collins holds that these images represent enclosure and symbolize a highly negative social and psychological environment.Correspondingly,the artistic structures of the fictions themselves are closed in by architectural imagery.Collins continues to argue that 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.Drawing on The Children of Violence Collins concludes that there is a movement away from imprisoning structures,artistic as well as social,as is symbolized by the collapsing house,a major architectural image in the series,which Collins thinks mirrors the overall movement of the series towards the collapse of the existing social structure and the basic structure of the art work itself.It’s a pity that Collins has not included The Golden Notebook in her study.The exclusion of such a masterpiece in a comprehensive study of Lessing’s work makes it incomplete and brings flaw to its convincingness.

Since the concept of cultural geography was introduced into Lessing study in the 1990s,scholars began to explore Lessing’s work from an interdisciplinary approach.With this shift,there are fewer dissertations focused sorely on Lessing and her works.Rather,critics include her together with other writers to explore a certain theme.Peter Joseph Kalliney uses literary theory,cultural studies,and human geography to show how social space informs our understanding of narrative form in his dissertation“Cities of Affluence and Anger:Urbanism and Social Class in Twentieth Century British Literature”(2001).By reading urban fiction from the last century,the dissertation demonstrates that the modern spatial reorganization of Britain’s cities has changed the social meanings attached to narrative.In the chapter concerned Lessing,Kalliney explores the interpenetration between the postmodern form and narrative structure of The Golden Notebook and the then large postmodern social context.Ching-Fang Tseng selects Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing in the dissertation“The Imperial Garden:Englishness and Domestic Space in Virginia Woolf,Doris Lessing,and Tayeb Salih”(2004)to explore the space and the British imperial identity issue.The author argues that ideas of home/land are central to Englishness as the core identity of identity.Another book well worth mentioning is Louise Yelin’s From the Margins of Expire:Christina Stead,Doris Lessing,Nadine Gordimer(1998).According to Yelin,the three writers demonstrate three strategies for negotiating between colonial or formerly colonial“peripheries”and metropolitan“centers”,while their novels“perform the cultural work of inventing or constituting identity”(1998:165).Yelin creatively defines the new“hybrid genre that grafts the political novel or novel of ideas and the family romance”represented in the three novelist the“national family romance”(1998:171-172).This genre“narrates the ways that sexual politics,including the politics of the family,intersects with the politics of race,class,and nationality:it shows us how gender cuts across,shapes,and is in turn shaped by national location”(1998:172).

Another group of spatial criticism of Lessing is characterized by its concentration on Africa.Michael Thorpe makes a brief study of Lessing’s writing about Africa,providing a critical commentary on“its broad humanity,keen judgment,disciplined style and its love of the Africa”(1978:2)in Doris Lessing’s Africa.He attempts to“explore Doris Lessing’s Africa as dream and reality”(1978:10).To Thorpe,Africa is so important in Lessing’s works that he defines her as a“white African writer in English”.At the same time he points out that her African writing is“not limited by the word‘African’...but kept instead a clear,compassionate eye upon humanity of all she portrayed,her work transcends the relatively brief episode of white settlement and places it in firm perspective as one of the seemingly tragic histories of universal distrust and hostility between races,creeds and classes”(1978:104).The other findings in this group include Linda Susan Beard’s dissertation“Lessing’s Africa:Geographical and Metaphorical Africa in the Novels and Stories of Doris Lessing”(1979),Eve Bertelsen’s Doris Lessing’s Rhodesia:History into Fiction(1984),and Eve Bertelsen’s“Weltanschauung:Doris Lessing’s Savage Africa”in Modern Fiction Studies(1991),in which The Grass Is Singing is discussed,and major cultural source of Rhodesian reality is examined.

In China,Lessing study didn’t flourish until 2007 when Lessing won the Nobel Prize.Although started late,Chinese scholars’new perspectives to reinterpret and reassess Lessing’s works are rewarding.Spatial study of Lessing is one of the new attempts.Xiao Qinghua makes analysis of various spaces in A Home for the Highland Cattle,The Golden Notebook,The Four-Gated City,The Diaries of Jane Somers,Good Terrorist,The Fifth Child,and Love,Again in her monograph Urban Space and Literary Space:A Study of Doris Lessing’s Fiction(2008).With the theories of urban space and the thirdspace,Xiao attempts to catch the critical moments in the production of the urban space of London.Xiao’s study is marked with a cultural stand,providing a new perspective to Lessing study.Zhao Jinghui is another scholar who studies Lessing from the spatial perspective.She focuses on the urban space and the house image in Lessing’s Children of Violence.In her article“Existence Predicament in City Space:On Doris Lessing’s Series”(2011),published in Social Sciences in Ningxia,she argues that in Doris Lessing’s works,urban space does not only provide a setting,but is the expression of the writer’s personal experience and even the construction of the writer’s ideology and discourse.In“Significant Urban Spaces in Lessing’s Children of Violence”,published in Contemporary Foreign Literature(2011)Zhao holds that the imaginary presentation of ideal urban landscape and spatial structure,which runs through Lessing’s Children of Violence,dominate the reconstruction and description of urbanization in line with the mainstream ideology.In“The Spatial Metaphor of House in The Four-Gated City”in Masterpieces Review(2010),Zhao argues Lessing’s use of the house as a spatial metaphor provides a new perspective for people to observe the world and understand life.

From the literary review above,it can be concluded that space has always been one of the major concerns in Lessing’s work as the attention to it has been constant.But at the same time,as is the reception of the ingeniously conceived structure of The Golden Notebook which is left ignored for ten years after its publication,the space in Lessing’s works has not received sufficient critical focus it deserves as the related comments are often scattered among remarks about other issues.Meanwhile,the criticism is often directed at the symbolic values of the spatial elements,using psychological,Jungian and feminist approaches.Jacquelyn Diane Collins and Xiao Qinghua have made the valuable attempts at a more comprehensive study of space in Lessing’s works.Collins discusses the architectural imagery in relation with the style and technique in The Grass Is Singing,“To Room Nineteen”,The Summer Before the Dark and The Children of Violence series.Xiao analyses the production of various space which constitute the urban space of London based on The Four-Gated City,A Home for the Highland Cattle,The Fifth Child,The Good Terrorist,The Diaries of Jane Summers,and Love,Again.Based on the achievements of the earlier scholars,this book is meant to contribute to Lessing study by a systematic examination of the property of various spaces in their relation with the self in her three representative novels:The Grass Is Singing,The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City.It will be rooted in the textual analysis with the support of the spatial theories of Foucault,Lefebvre,Soja and Wesley Kort.The three novels were first published in 1950,1962 and 1969 respectively.Such a span of time and the significance of these books make it possible to find the consistence and variation in Lessing’s observation of space in its relation with self.