摘 要

近年来，随着学术界对女性意识研究的深入，许多文学史家开始重新审视和研究女性作家。我们自然不该忽视多丽丝·莱辛。她在女性文学中占有一席之地，对后世的影响颇深。尽管她本人似乎不愿意被定义为“女权主义作家”，但她对女性问题感同身受，一生都予以重视。多丽丝·莱辛作品中的重要主题即是现代女性所面临的困境以及她们如何寻求自身的解放。本文从莱辛的经典作品之一《第五个孩子》入手，小说讲述了一对婚后过着幸福家庭生活的夫妇，大卫和哈里特，由于计划之外出现的第五个孩子，使得这个看似完整的家庭最后分崩离析的故事。本文以哈里特为核心，对小说中出现的女性问题进行了分析。从女性主义的角度看，这本书中的女性经历可以帮助更多的女性更深入地了解自己并重新思考自己的成长路程，这对妇女的未来发展具有重要意义。另外，由此更深入地了解多丽丝·莱辛，比如她对女权主义的看法或她的写作特征等等。

关键词：女性主义；女性主体性；第五个孩子；多丽丝·莱辛

Abstract

In recent years, with the deepening of the study of female consciousness in academic circles, many literary historians began to reexamine and study female writers. Naturally, we should not ignore Doris Lessing, who occupies a place in female literature and has a great influence on later generations. Although Lessing seemed reluctant to be stereotyped as a “feminist writer”, she was sympathetic to women’s issues and gave prominence to them all her life. The important subjects in Doris Lessing’s works are the dilemma faced by modern women and the way they seek their own liberation. This thesis topic begins with one of her classic works, The Fifth Child, about a couple, David and Harriet, who have been living a happy life after marriage. But the fifth child Ben, who appears out of the plan, breaks the original happiness of this seemingly complete family. The paper selects the Harriet as the core to analyze the women’s issues. From the perspective of feminism, the women’s experiences in the book may help more women know themselves better and rethink their growing process. It is meaningful for women’s future development. Also, we can have more in-depth knowledge about Doris Lessing, such as her notions about feminism or her writing features.

Key Words: Feminism; Feminine Subjectivity; The Fifth Child; Doris Lessing

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Doris Lessing and Her Works 1

1.2 Plot of The Fifth Child 2

1.3 Literature Review 3

1.4 The Significance and Layout of This Paper 4

2 Absence of The Feminine Subjectivity 5

2.1 Giving up Career 5

2.2 Superiority Feeling of Reproductive Function 5

2.3 Obedience to Patriarchal Control 6

3 Awakening of The Feminine Subjectivity 8

3.1 Resistance to Family Pressure 8

3.2 Resistance to Social Pressure 8

4 Lost of The Feminine Subjectivity 10

4.1 Returning to Mainstream concepts 10

4.2 Self-doubt for Family Disruption 10

5 Conclusion 12

5.1 Summary 12

5.2 Further Study 12

References 14

Acknowledgements 16

An Analysis of Feminism in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child

1 Introduction

Doris Lessing and Her Works

Doris Lessing was born on 22nd October, 1919 in Kermanshah, Peria(now Iran). Her original last name was Tayler and her parents were British. When Lessing was five years old, her father Alfred Tayler who yearned for pastoral life moved to Southern Rhodesia(now Zimbabwe) and worked in a farm with his whole family. Here she spent most of her childhood alone in a small sparsely populated town. The farm life was not so good for Lessing’s father, but it was the paradise of her fantasy.

In her early hard life in Africa, she was self-educated by reading very widely. Those nineteenth century novelists, such as Dickens, Gibbling, Stendahl, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, became Lessing’s most important spiritual companion and laid a solid foundation for her literary career. Actually, the country where she spent the earlier part of her life plays a key role in her novels.

At the age of sixteen, she started her first job in a lawyer’s office. Then she worked as telephone operator, nanny, stenographer and so on successively. In her youth, she actively devoted herself to the left-wing political movement against colonialism and once participated in the Communist Party. During the Second World War, Lessing took a keen interest in politics, and she began to get into the anti-colonial left-wing political movement as a Marxist.

Lessing married twice and divorced, with three children. In 1939, Lessing married a civil servant called Frank Wisdom and gave birth to a boy and a girl. The marriage lasted for four years. Her second husband was a German Communist named Gottfried Lessing. They got married in 1945 and had a boy Peter, but their marriage also lasted only four years. After that, Lessing has not remarried.

After her second marriage ended, Lessing moved to London with her baby boy Peter. At that time, she was desperately poor and all her property was the manuscript of The Grass is Singing. She began her new life as a certified writer at thirty years old. In 1950, The Grass is Singing won very high praise in Britain as soon as it was published. In the 1950s and 1960s, The Western feminist movement began to break out. Influenced by the idea of freedom and equality in the French Revolution, women’s feminist consciousness began to awaken (Song, 2014:13). Lessing created a series of works named “Children of Violence” under the influence of the prevailing communism in Europe. The entire series describes the life process of a modern woman deeply and forcefully. These works are set in Africa, reflecting the hard life of women in the society full of the questions of times, such as gender conflicts, racial discrimination, contradictions between colonies and colonists.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Lessing began to pay attention to the psychological state of people in modern society. Her writing ideology also changed a lot. The work that expresses her creating thoughts in this period best is The Golden Notebook (1962). This work profoundly analyses the harm that political persecution, social unrest and class struggle bring to human beings, especially to women. It finally makes Doris Lessing win the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. She is the eleventh female writer to win this word and also the oldest person(Wang amp; Xiang, 2015:238). Works such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) excavate the deep human consciousness and psychological world, while the works such as The Summer Before the Dark and The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984) express the call for women’s self-consciousness awakening.

Lessing’s literary creating thoughts in her later years were no longer limited to the concerns of women and the times, but put women’s issues in the space of science fiction for a more profound discussion. In addition, Lessing also wrote works such as Love, Again (1996) and The Grandmothers (2003) in her later years. These books concern about the love and living conditions of elderly women and are regarded as Lessing’s returning works. They also have obvious elements of paying tribute to her early works.

Plot of The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child, published in 1988, is a masterpiece that returns to the realist style after she wrote a series of space novels. It tells a “horror” story of a middle-class family disintegrated by the birth of the fifth child. At the end of the 1960s, in an unconstrained atmosphere in Britain, young middle-class couples David and Harriet had four children in a row and lived happily, but the birth of the fifth child Ben spoiled the family’s original happiness.

Ben was extremely uneasy in his mother’s womb. He punched and kicked her and made his mother suffer a lot. After birth, he looked like a huge, monster-like deformity. Harriet and David were shocked and afraid of their newborn. Ben’s appearance is almost creepy. He was always hungry, extremely strong, demanding and violent. There was no baby like him who was not innocent and pure at all. By social standards, all this was abnormal. His rough and uncontrollable disposition disturbed the family, and no one dared to approach him except Harriet. When the family decided to send Ben to the private institution, Harriet compromised. But she was still worried about Ben and take him home despite the opposition of her family. She took care of her wild child and tried to teach him something similar to normal behavior, which exhausted all her time and energy, made her ignore her four lovely older children and her husband.

However, the whole family collapsed because of Ben gradually. Only Harriet stayed with him and struggled with the role of mother. At the end of the story, Ben met a group of wicked friends and eventually became a juvenile delinquent.