What it means to be an intelligent, political woman two generations after Lessing. Doris Lessing’s work united mind, body and feeling. The Children of Violence series featuring Martha Quest, and above all the novel The Golden Notebook, had a revolutionary impact on a generation of women. Lessing asserted that it was possible to live an intellectual life while attached to a human body: she wrote of emotion, how hormonal changes around mood, pregnancy or menstruation might affect the life of the mind without necessarily diminishing it. Instead of needing to be separated, each aspect of existence became part of a complete whole. In a liberating form of autobiographical fiction, Lessing discounted the prevailing idea of the 1950s that an intelligent, political woman must be unwomanly, un homme manqué. She wrote with great perception on the complications of sex, and how it will tie you more closely to a particular person, which in turn risks altering your personal freedom.
As with many writers, the books she produced can be seen in hindsight as an almost inevitable product of circumstance. Before she had reached the age of 30, she had married, had two children, divorced, married again, had another child, divorced again, and sailed to London with one child. She was escaping the constriction of poor, rural white Rhodesian life, her creative revolt against which had led to her being spied on as a communist by the colonial police. Her education was almost entirely self-generated, done from reading and conversation. When she reached London she had not yet published a book; ahead of her lay achievement and fame: more than 60 books, and the Nobel prize for literature.
Revolutionary … Doris Lessing circa 1950. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images
For Lara Feigel, at a time of her own frustration with social and biological expectation, Lessing offered a model of feminism “in which it was more important to live fully than to live contentedly”. She writes movingly of her maternal ambivalence, loving her son even while not wanting him to distract her from her necessary thinking and writing, and yearning for another child even while her marriage is falling apart. A reader in modern literature and culture at King’s College London, Feigel has something of Lessing’s diligent energy on the page, and in Free Woman she succeeds in making an extraordinary meditation on what it means to be a clever, engaged woman two generations after Lessing.
For Lara Feigel, at a time of her own frustration with social and biological expectation, Lessing offered a model of feminism “in which it was more important to live fully than to live contentedly”. She writes movingly of her maternal ambivalence, loving her son even while not wanting him to distract her from her necessary thinking and writing, and yearning for another child even while her marriage is falling apart. A reader in modern literature and culture at King’s College London, Feigel has something of Lessing’s diligent energy on the page, and in Free Woman she succeeds in making an extraordinary meditation on what it means to be a clever, engaged woman two generations after Lessing.
The ostensible starting point for her book is a sense of resentment against being coopted into the conventions surrounding a series of friends’ weddings. Wondering about the choices made by herself and her contemporaries, she tunes in to the powerful voice of Lessing. “I could hear her sentences in my ears as I sat below a hundred metres of tasteful Liberty print bunting that the bride, her sister and their mother (three intelligent and expensively educated women) had sewn by hand.” Like Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook, she wants to be free and to exist independently of others in a way that now seems to be falling out of fashion, as the sacrifices of an earlier generation are taken for granted. “It seemed to me that Anna’s refusal to define herself primarily as a wife, mother or lover was a significant part of the audacity of The Golden Notebook.”
Feigel’s account of her sexual awakening is endearingly bookish, with crushes on Mr Rochester and Ralph Fiennes
Feigel acknowledges that the freedom she desires and expects is less about freedom from servitude or want than about freedom to do as you please and exist outside categories of attachment, and hence is predicated on advantages of class, race and money. The reason this privilege does not sink the book is because she approaches her reordering of life around the precepts of Lessing and her protagonists with such focused earnestness, and with a classical, precise use of language. An account of her teenage sexual awakening is endearingly bookish, with crushes on Mr Rochester and “the Ralph Fiennes of The English Patient”.
Free Woman is structured on themes found in Lessing’s writing, and involves close reading of her books as well as a measure of biography, combined with journeys to places and people of importance in her life. Although this is always interesting and mainly accurate (she mistakes the composer Philip Glass for the object of desire in Lessing’s 1996 novel Love, Again), it is perhaps the autobiographical representation that is in the end most compelling. Her technique is scrupulous, sparing neither herself nor others in a chronicle that is physically and intellectually intimate, in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Confessions, who had “resolved upon an enterprise which has no precedent … My purpose is to display to my fellow mortals a portrait in every way true to nature.”
In contemporary terms, her model may be Rachel Cusk, who displays a similar lack of interest in the feelings of people around her in favour of fidelity to her art. Feigel journeys to Zimbabwe to examine the sunset at the farm where the child Lessing lived, and goes to Los Angeles to meet her lover and chronicler, Clancy Sigal. Smaller than she had anticipated, “He was wearing a baseball cap labelled ‘Secret Agent’ and a T-shirt and shorts that were not the costume of an ageing Lothario.”
Doris Lessing in 2007 Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian
It is in the analysis of Sigal and his relationship with Lessing that I felt most strongly the difference in the way men and women may react to the same story. Feigel is outraged on Lessing’s behalf that he claims not to have been attracted to her, and was “dismissing her aged 37 as a kind of ageing witch”. But Sigal, seven years her junior, was mentally ill, a wandering, faithless wannabe novelist who had been raised in a Chicago slum by a single mother. Living with Lessing in London, he felt hard done by, complaining bitterly that she was a “Stakhanovite” with “a furious and almost cosmic creative energy”. She treated him maternally in return, cooking him fine meals and continuing as she always did with her work. As a successful writer, Lessing used her pain from the relationship as a learning experience, examining the ways in which men and women react to situations of extreme emotional stress. In a reversal of the usual literary man-woman relationship, Sigal was crushed by the industry and stability of the established novelist, and in years to come would seek to create many Lessing-like characters and caricatures in his books, while always asserting his indifference to her work. He does not come out well.
Feigel has thought seriously about the meaning of freedom at different points in history, and about possible social mechanisms to escape “the limits of admissible thought”. Her quest in Free Woman to do things differently is too sincere to be self-indulgent. Unlike Lessing and Sigal in postwar London, she is part of a contemporary world that maintains rules that are nominally liberal but utterly constricting in their peer-pressured mental boundaries. “Now that we had fewer restrictions than their generation had done, there was less possibility to enjoy the feeling of moving beyond constraint, which itself constituted an experience of freedom,” she concludes.
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