Lessing, Doris

Contentious Mothers and Daughters

Doris Lessing's representation of mothers and daughters in The Children of Violence (1952) encompasses the relationship of adolescent female child to conventional mother in Martha Quest (1952), the daughter's own experience with marriage and motherhood in A Proper Marriage (1954), the daughter's breaking of the bonds of conventional matrimony and childbearing in A Ripple From the Storm (1958) and Landlocked (1695), and, finally, the neurotic relationship of a middle-aged woman to her aging mother in The Four-Gated City (1969). In the novels, the mother appears as an oppressive presence in her daughter's life; she represents everything that the daughter refuses to identify with, and thus presents the female self with a major problem, the absence of an adult model and the impossibility of identification with the mother.

In Martha Quest, the heroine is a matrophobic character; she morbidly resents her mother and other middle-aged women in the town because of their conventional mind-set and much-abhorred physicality. The ugly and deformed body of the middle-aged woman is a threat to the sexually appealing female who pridefully regards her maturing body as a weapon against her mother's prudish and conventional character. Martha's resistance to her mother takes the form of an assertion of sexuality as well as intellectual freedom suggested by her provocative political readings. Body and brains are most powerful weapons against a coy and brainless femininity, Mrs. Quest tries in vain to instill into her daughter.

Paradoxically, as she asserts her deviation from the model of femininity offered by her mother, the rebellious daughter gets even more entangled in the cycle of repetition and stasis associated with matrimony and middle-class bourgeois life in the African colonies. In A Proper Marriage, Martha temporarily adjusts to conventional wifehood; her own experience of childbirth and motherhood is all the more excruciating as it submits her to the rule of biology. Martha moves to the awareness that the naturalness of motherhood is a social construct, and that both marriage and motherhood entrap women because they foreclose the possibility of growth and lead to the forced relinquishment of an active role in history. Her decision to abandon her child and marriage is the only way she perceives she can end [Page 650]her identification with an abhorred mother figure and move to a liberating assertion of sexuality and political activism as viable ways to female self-fulfillment and freedom.

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