Time Bites by Doris Lessing
Sep. 30th, 2006 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalena I am a great admirer of Doris Lessing. Her books are not easy to read, and I do not always agree with their ideological basis, but I absolutely respect her. She is the kind of writer I hope to be: honest, unflinching, a chronicler of her opinion and time. I've found her writing to be invaluable in its window to vanished worlds. I read her for the same reason I read other female writers of the 20C, to try to understand what it means to be a woman in this modern century, to try to get a glimpse of the experience and history that I feel has been hidden from me.
Lessing is about the same age as my grandmother, but she can tell me about things of which my grandmother would never speak. (War, sex, communism, the fight for recognition and equality, aging, ideas, facism, cruelty within the familial structure, failure, what it's like to get caught up in ideas that ultimately turn out to be false idols, spirituality, drug use, etc.)
I finally picked up a collection of her essays at the library last week, and surprised myself by gobbling most of it up in the course of the week. Time Bites is several dozen short pieces she has written over the years: book reviews, speeches, op-ed, primarily on literary themes. It is an absolute jewel of a collection, and much easier to read than her long, plodding, novels with all the intelligent, opinionated, polemicism I love about Lessing, without the lengthy chronicle of detail or the passage of time.
I would recommend this book as a sort of short-hand version of Lessing's ideas, obsessions, and style, without having to read her entire autobiography or novel. But I'm not sure that someone who has never read Lessing would appreciate it, or that it is indicative of her usual style. As someone who has been slowly reading Lessing over the past five years (I can only read Lessing when the news cycle is slow, I've discovered world events intrude break the hermetic seal on her novels and the intermingling of the two to be terrifying) the collection is a reminder of WHY I keep reading her long and disturbing novels. On some level Lessing makes me feel understood and a part of something, I would consider her a part of my literary family. (I wonder how she and Joan Aiken would get on?)
But without a doubt the essay that grabbed me the most was the first one in the book about Jane Austen. I can't remember which lj person it was who asked, "What's the deal with Jane Austen?" This person was guided to Fay Weldon's (another writer I respect and consult on the topic of the 20C women's experience, though she does not have nearly the moral weight of Lessing and is generally less thorough and reliable, though definitely more fun to read*) Letters to Alice Upon First Reading Jane Austen. The opening essay of Lessing's book is on Jane Austen and her links to Rousseau's Enlightenment. Not only is it a lovely summation of many of the ideas contained in Weldon's book, it is considerably less snobbish.
Again we have the description of women's lifes during the period, and an attempt to show the revolutionary roots of an idea we now take for granted: marrying for love.
As I have been much preoccupied with the question of love & marriage this week, the essay gave me an absolutely visceral reaction. Not only does Lessing acknowledge that though the insecure existence of spinsterhood was unenviable, it might have been preferrable to the dangers and discomfort of childbearing that was the lot of a married woman. Lessing writes:
In Pride & Prejudice is a painful moment which is very easy to overlook as it is presented as comedy. Elizabeth has been invited to marry one of the unpleasantest men in literature, Mr. Collins. Had she agreed, she would have ensured her family's safe future in a house which would belong to him on the death of her father. But she refused. Jesting about it with her friend and sister Jane she says there is no future for her unless another Mr. Collins turns up, and proposes. There is a horrid truth there. The novel does not paing a picture where eligible and sensible (not the same thing) men abound. On the contrary, the young women are all on the lookout for a husband - no husband, no future - and the young men are spoiled for choice.
It is at this point Weldon supports her stance with statistics. How England was actually rather short on men generally due to the war. Weldon goes into the economics of the situation, as well as what life may have looked like for someone who did not have the fortune of a middle-class birth. Lessing skips on to say,
...one's blood does suffer a chill, even a brief one, even now, looking back at the fate of women, their choices. Elizabeth turned down appalling Mr. Collins but could have remained insecure all her life. Incidentally it is interesting that teacher inviting students to read Pride & Prejudice report that many of today's young women have so little sense of history, or of the history of women, or of their own good fortune, that they say things like, 'Why didn't Elizabeth and Jane get jobs? WHy were they always going on about getting husbands?' [Weldon's Letters addresses these questions, and this ignorance, at length.]
Elizabeth sad No to Mr. Collins and flouted the conventions of the time.... To say 'I don't love him' was [is!] a recent right.
Lessing takes aligns this new choice to Rousseau and La Nouvelle Heloise. "This writer, this novel, had realigned women's expectations and their self-definition," says Lessing. She goes on to cite examples of P&P adhering to the new model, citing Elizabeth's objections to the "un-gentlemanly" proposal of Mr. Darcy.
Elizabeth refuses Darcy out of the new morality, superior to his, and while obeying the stultifying eyes-lowered maidenly correcness demanded by the situation, she clearly does not feel inferior to him, even while he is telling her she is.... Here we have this uppity young woman Elizabeth, first refusing to marry a disagreeable man, though she could secure her family's future by doing it, and then saying no to a very rich nobleman because of his arrogant behavior. This was, indeed, a new thing in the model. This is why P&P was so immediately popular: it defined, in the person of Elizabeth Bennet, how young women were thinking about themselves, as violent a change as happened later, in the twenties and the sixties.
Clearly, the books value to Lessing is in what it reflects about what women think of themselves. (Oddly, that's the same reason I read Lessing.) She has further discussion of the new morality, including descriptions of the characters ending with, "So when you look at it, Elizabeth is the only female with anything like the moral size and weight to take on Darcy, and he is the only man equal to her."
And there it is. My own problems with marriage, and my own reason for declining my last offer of marriage (though it would've come with considerable financial security.) I cannot marry where I am not treated as an equal. Sure, it could be couched in terms of love or happiness, but my distress about marriage generally is a sense that it still does not reflect equality.
Before I return to this thought, I absolutely must include that Lessing recognizes the fallacies of the romance.
I am not the only one to think Darcy would not marry Elizabeth. Aristocrats do not marry poor middle-class girls much encumbered with disagreeable relatives. Yes, you believe it for the space and time of the tale, and that is all that is needed.... It all appeals to our nursery memories.
She goes on to quote Barbara Cartland (grande dame of romance genre) who when asked why her stories all had the same plot replied, "There is only one plot. You need a girl who knows she is underestimated, in love with a difficult, problematical, or wicked hero who recognizes her worth. She will cure him, she is sure, but the story must end with the wedding, before she discovers that no, she will not change him."
Well, there isn't much equality in that, now is there?
And here we are, at the end of my cascade. The idea of women's expectations and self-definition beg the question of, "How are women thinking about themselves now?" And more personally, if Elizabeth's choices have the weight of new morality, what does it say about my own?
I am absolutley willing to acknowledge that my whinging about weddings is in part due to the grief that it is a ritual in which my own morality has not allowed me to participate. I have not found anyone who is my equal, or (perhaps more to the point,) will treat me as an equal within the confines of a relationship. I believe that many marriages still take place out of a desire for stability and security, and that what occurs in some marriages has very little to do with love, and even less to do with equality. I believe that marriage is an institution that expects more from women than men. And I struggle to understand that if all the above are true (and my observations, like Jane's, leads me to believe that it is so) why women are so eager to enter the union?
Unlike Austen's heroines we have the option of jobs and birth control. I would hazard a guess that our lives as women will contain considerably less physical and emotional distress. So why are we defaulting to the "nursery memory" (or reptile mind!) Why do women still buy into this fallacy? (And what to men think they're getting out of marriage these days, when their traditional responsibilities as providers have been considerably diminished by women working outside the home.) In what new ways are women redefining themselves and their relationships?
I want to acknowledge I seem to have an unwholesome preoccupation with this subject, and that it probably isn't fun to read about. I want to add that I mean no disrespect to those of you who have chosen matrimony for whatever reasons.
Oh well, perhaps if I am very lucky, another Mr. Collins will come along.
* Lessing's women often seem isolated, a solitary female in a world of men, more strongly identified with the masculine power structure, without being allowed to belong. No wonder she was so moved by the "native question." In contrast Weldon's women are always part of a carping circle of females who are all extremely dishonest about themselves and the other players in their lives, whose dysfunction, unexamined, leads to mass chaos in their lives. Usually everyone is sleeping with everyone else's husbands, while pretending that this is either normal, or that it isn't actually going on. Both authors seem to be writing the same novel over and over again. Lessing's primary preoccupation being the impact of ideology on a person's life (and the difficulty of being that solitary female in a man's world) focusing on communism and feminism, while Weldon seems to be writing about the problematic results of "free love" and dishonest relationships, focusing on Shaw's philosophy of "life force," feminism, and the problematic relationships women have with other women. Both authors decline to be called feminists, despite the considerable impact their books had on the women's movement.
P.S. While I am looking at this essay in the very specific light of my own experience, there is a larger question that remains unaddressed, which is the legacy of humanism, and why 200 years later we still have such a difficult time addressing people as equals.
Lessing is about the same age as my grandmother, but she can tell me about things of which my grandmother would never speak. (War, sex, communism, the fight for recognition and equality, aging, ideas, facism, cruelty within the familial structure, failure, what it's like to get caught up in ideas that ultimately turn out to be false idols, spirituality, drug use, etc.)
I finally picked up a collection of her essays at the library last week, and surprised myself by gobbling most of it up in the course of the week. Time Bites is several dozen short pieces she has written over the years: book reviews, speeches, op-ed, primarily on literary themes. It is an absolute jewel of a collection, and much easier to read than her long, plodding, novels with all the intelligent, opinionated, polemicism I love about Lessing, without the lengthy chronicle of detail or the passage of time.
I would recommend this book as a sort of short-hand version of Lessing's ideas, obsessions, and style, without having to read her entire autobiography or novel. But I'm not sure that someone who has never read Lessing would appreciate it, or that it is indicative of her usual style. As someone who has been slowly reading Lessing over the past five years (I can only read Lessing when the news cycle is slow, I've discovered world events intrude break the hermetic seal on her novels and the intermingling of the two to be terrifying) the collection is a reminder of WHY I keep reading her long and disturbing novels. On some level Lessing makes me feel understood and a part of something, I would consider her a part of my literary family. (I wonder how she and Joan Aiken would get on?)
But without a doubt the essay that grabbed me the most was the first one in the book about Jane Austen. I can't remember which lj person it was who asked, "What's the deal with Jane Austen?" This person was guided to Fay Weldon's (another writer I respect and consult on the topic of the 20C women's experience, though she does not have nearly the moral weight of Lessing and is generally less thorough and reliable, though definitely more fun to read*) Letters to Alice Upon First Reading Jane Austen. The opening essay of Lessing's book is on Jane Austen and her links to Rousseau's Enlightenment. Not only is it a lovely summation of many of the ideas contained in Weldon's book, it is considerably less snobbish.
Again we have the description of women's lifes during the period, and an attempt to show the revolutionary roots of an idea we now take for granted: marrying for love.
As I have been much preoccupied with the question of love & marriage this week, the essay gave me an absolutely visceral reaction. Not only does Lessing acknowledge that though the insecure existence of spinsterhood was unenviable, it might have been preferrable to the dangers and discomfort of childbearing that was the lot of a married woman. Lessing writes:
In Pride & Prejudice is a painful moment which is very easy to overlook as it is presented as comedy. Elizabeth has been invited to marry one of the unpleasantest men in literature, Mr. Collins. Had she agreed, she would have ensured her family's safe future in a house which would belong to him on the death of her father. But she refused. Jesting about it with her friend and sister Jane she says there is no future for her unless another Mr. Collins turns up, and proposes. There is a horrid truth there. The novel does not paing a picture where eligible and sensible (not the same thing) men abound. On the contrary, the young women are all on the lookout for a husband - no husband, no future - and the young men are spoiled for choice.
It is at this point Weldon supports her stance with statistics. How England was actually rather short on men generally due to the war. Weldon goes into the economics of the situation, as well as what life may have looked like for someone who did not have the fortune of a middle-class birth. Lessing skips on to say,
...one's blood does suffer a chill, even a brief one, even now, looking back at the fate of women, their choices. Elizabeth turned down appalling Mr. Collins but could have remained insecure all her life. Incidentally it is interesting that teacher inviting students to read Pride & Prejudice report that many of today's young women have so little sense of history, or of the history of women, or of their own good fortune, that they say things like, 'Why didn't Elizabeth and Jane get jobs? WHy were they always going on about getting husbands?' [Weldon's Letters addresses these questions, and this ignorance, at length.]
Elizabeth sad No to Mr. Collins and flouted the conventions of the time.... To say 'I don't love him' was [is!] a recent right.
Lessing takes aligns this new choice to Rousseau and La Nouvelle Heloise. "This writer, this novel, had realigned women's expectations and their self-definition," says Lessing. She goes on to cite examples of P&P adhering to the new model, citing Elizabeth's objections to the "un-gentlemanly" proposal of Mr. Darcy.
Elizabeth refuses Darcy out of the new morality, superior to his, and while obeying the stultifying eyes-lowered maidenly correcness demanded by the situation, she clearly does not feel inferior to him, even while he is telling her she is.... Here we have this uppity young woman Elizabeth, first refusing to marry a disagreeable man, though she could secure her family's future by doing it, and then saying no to a very rich nobleman because of his arrogant behavior. This was, indeed, a new thing in the model. This is why P&P was so immediately popular: it defined, in the person of Elizabeth Bennet, how young women were thinking about themselves, as violent a change as happened later, in the twenties and the sixties.
Clearly, the books value to Lessing is in what it reflects about what women think of themselves. (Oddly, that's the same reason I read Lessing.) She has further discussion of the new morality, including descriptions of the characters ending with, "So when you look at it, Elizabeth is the only female with anything like the moral size and weight to take on Darcy, and he is the only man equal to her."
And there it is. My own problems with marriage, and my own reason for declining my last offer of marriage (though it would've come with considerable financial security.) I cannot marry where I am not treated as an equal. Sure, it could be couched in terms of love or happiness, but my distress about marriage generally is a sense that it still does not reflect equality.
Before I return to this thought, I absolutely must include that Lessing recognizes the fallacies of the romance.
I am not the only one to think Darcy would not marry Elizabeth. Aristocrats do not marry poor middle-class girls much encumbered with disagreeable relatives. Yes, you believe it for the space and time of the tale, and that is all that is needed.... It all appeals to our nursery memories.
She goes on to quote Barbara Cartland (grande dame of romance genre) who when asked why her stories all had the same plot replied, "There is only one plot. You need a girl who knows she is underestimated, in love with a difficult, problematical, or wicked hero who recognizes her worth. She will cure him, she is sure, but the story must end with the wedding, before she discovers that no, she will not change him."
Well, there isn't much equality in that, now is there?
And here we are, at the end of my cascade. The idea of women's expectations and self-definition beg the question of, "How are women thinking about themselves now?" And more personally, if Elizabeth's choices have the weight of new morality, what does it say about my own?
I am absolutley willing to acknowledge that my whinging about weddings is in part due to the grief that it is a ritual in which my own morality has not allowed me to participate. I have not found anyone who is my equal, or (perhaps more to the point,) will treat me as an equal within the confines of a relationship. I believe that many marriages still take place out of a desire for stability and security, and that what occurs in some marriages has very little to do with love, and even less to do with equality. I believe that marriage is an institution that expects more from women than men. And I struggle to understand that if all the above are true (and my observations, like Jane's, leads me to believe that it is so) why women are so eager to enter the union?
Unlike Austen's heroines we have the option of jobs and birth control. I would hazard a guess that our lives as women will contain considerably less physical and emotional distress. So why are we defaulting to the "nursery memory" (or reptile mind!) Why do women still buy into this fallacy? (And what to men think they're getting out of marriage these days, when their traditional responsibilities as providers have been considerably diminished by women working outside the home.) In what new ways are women redefining themselves and their relationships?
I want to acknowledge I seem to have an unwholesome preoccupation with this subject, and that it probably isn't fun to read about. I want to add that I mean no disrespect to those of you who have chosen matrimony for whatever reasons.
Oh well, perhaps if I am very lucky, another Mr. Collins will come along.
* Lessing's women often seem isolated, a solitary female in a world of men, more strongly identified with the masculine power structure, without being allowed to belong. No wonder she was so moved by the "native question." In contrast Weldon's women are always part of a carping circle of females who are all extremely dishonest about themselves and the other players in their lives, whose dysfunction, unexamined, leads to mass chaos in their lives. Usually everyone is sleeping with everyone else's husbands, while pretending that this is either normal, or that it isn't actually going on. Both authors seem to be writing the same novel over and over again. Lessing's primary preoccupation being the impact of ideology on a person's life (and the difficulty of being that solitary female in a man's world) focusing on communism and feminism, while Weldon seems to be writing about the problematic results of "free love" and dishonest relationships, focusing on Shaw's philosophy of "life force," feminism, and the problematic relationships women have with other women. Both authors decline to be called feminists, despite the considerable impact their books had on the women's movement.
P.S. While I am looking at this essay in the very specific light of my own experience, there is a larger question that remains unaddressed, which is the legacy of humanism, and why 200 years later we still have such a difficult time addressing people as equals.
