Rereading Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence Series: A Proper Marriage

Doris Lessing is my favorite writer and I like to read her works on a regular basis. I decided to re-read the "Child of Violence" series. I began with the second volume of "correct marriage".

Many people know that these are the books of Martha Quest. In fact, this is what I usually say. But Martha and her generation are certainly violent children: Martha's father fought in World War I and her mother was a nurse who met him in the hospital; Martha and her companion He matured at the beginning of the Second World War. The first four novels were held in Africa and the last in London. Lessing who grew up in southern Rhodesia and moved to London.

Martha is a traitor. In the first novel "Martha Quest", she ran away from her parents farm and started living alone.

19 - year - old Martha married Doug Knowell impulsively, a cheerful man representing all the bourgeoisie she opposed, a man who likes to party. They go to the ball every evening with a sunset party. There are a lot of shots in the mirror: her friend Stella likes what she is looking at, but I do not like obesity Martha. Because they pursued their drunk friends during their honeymoon, she is the cross that does not know why she got married or not even in the evening of marriage. She was very angry with herself and went to a commune of her communist friends and asked her to dwell there. After she got home she decided that she did what he could do predictably after marriage: I tried to escape. She and her friend Stella (she does not like it) and Alice, the nurse talks about abortion. Martha thinks she will have an abortion. But when Martha learned that she was pregnant and likely to be pregnant when married, she suddenly entered baby costume creation mode like her friend Alice. It solved her life (she thinks). But in a short time

As Martha's father said, he believes that in this crazy world girls ruin her life, but that is not a problem.

On the other hand, the mother gave up the nursing profession and lived in a poor and miserable African farm.

Martha is thinking a lot about marriage. "Even if I inadvertently, the situation was not satisfactory."

There must be a pattern of words that wraps up feelings properly and safely - to isolate her emotions so that she can see them from the outside. Because she is a generation, they do not have anything in religion, but they formed themselves through literature.

This is a wonderful novel, much better than what I remember. Lessing wrote the fourth and fifth book "Inland and Four Cities" after her experimental novel "Golden Notebook". She has over 20 years of violent children's series, Martha Quest (1952), A suitable marriage (1954), A ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965) and The Four-Gated City (1969) writing.

Martha Quest is the first novel of a large series of violent children of 5 books and more than 2,100 pages of Doris Lessing. Because of the breadth of the series as a whole, the first book here is a general introduction, and reading is simply irritating as it is not a perfect story. We met a quest. An autobiographical protagonist leaves her childhood farm, moves to a busy town, goes to sleep to find work, goes to a party in the evening, goes out with a few different men, and is gathered by various friends It was. Together, it will become more acute. The social class around her married a somewhat strange man. All of these are very common writing, readers will not be able to find many interesting things here, and Quest is not particularly attractive personality. This is a disorder of the impressive novel arrangement.

Violent children are truly growth novels (as Doris Lessing last defined), its heroine Martha is always different from the typical focus of that type. There are always bigger problems related to racial discrimination, class conflict, and war. It is clear that Martha is representative of "personal conscience in relationship with the group" defined by Doris Lessing. (P.120) Individual's basic incompetence determined by personal and cultural history makes it difficult to achieve "freedom" which is difficult to achieve with the characteristics of "growth novel". In addition, since Doris Lessing is always trying to consider personal consciousness from social, political or psychological relationships with larger systems, the paintings of human efforts emerging from her novel are always individual It means weakness of an individual. . (Page 121)