Suspect Doris would have had her on toast for breakfast
So, I recently read Lara Feigel's Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing (2018), which is pitched as 'An intense exploration of the life and works of Doris Lessing and how their themes are reflected in the writer's own life', and in fact is a lot more about Lara Feigel than it is about Doris Lessing and her works.
Sometimes that 'about a person's personal quest' can work: but it's a delicately balanced thing and easy to do wrong.
I got the feeling, which I have had before on occasion with people writing about their great literary heroines, that had they ever been in a room with the heroine in question she would have eaten them alive and then asked for something rather more sustaining in the way of nutrition...
It actually discusses a somewhat narrow tranche of Lessing's substantial oeuvre - mainly The Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence sequence, with a bit on The Summer Before the Dark and Love, Again. I suspect Feigel has not, in fact, read Lessing's science fiction (no, I would not consider it has the theme of androgyny - ahem, and for example, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five?) I can't recall much touching on her short stories. Nil on In Pursuit of the English.
I was irked in a somewhat Marxist way by the constant jetting off hither and thither and buying of seaside cottages, when thinking of the contrast with the period of Lessing's life that most preoccupied her when Lessing was poor, and the reason she got involved with Clancy Sigal was because she needed to take in a lodger - rather than being in a position to fly to LA to go and visit Sigal (even though he'd expressed a disinclination to talk to her about the project). A certain neglect of the material conditions of Lessing's life even while trying to make sense of her allegiance to communism.
Also annoyed by a very badly and superficially researched shallow account of historical understandings of the female orgasm, which even manages to stand Masters and Johnson on their heads (they were all about the clitoris, honestly!). But I am almost, almost, inured to lit scholars Doin It Rong when it comes to the history of sexuality.
I'm not against women (or anyone, really), writing confessional, self-exposing narratives - whether in fictional or non-fictional guise. What I am peeved by is being led to expect rather more about Lessing than I got - and I don't think that the invocation that Feigel makes of Chris Kraus's I Love Dick really works, because one does not, I depose, start reading that in order to find out about 'Dick' (whose identity would, I think, remain opaque had he not, I believe, outed himself as her, as it were, Mr WH?).
Perchance I was interrogating the text from the wrong perspective... This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2871534.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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