A review by purplcrosswords
The Cleft by Doris Lessing

4.0

Now! What is it about all these terrible ratings? Accusations of sexism? Of the text lacking quality/being boring? I can identify so little with previous reviews of this work that I made it a point to write a review for this one.

I had never read Lessing before and when I read the synopsis for this one I knew that it was just meant to be. It is definitely not what I had expected – I had hoped it would be a cleverer version of Herland, maybe. It does share certain similarities with Gilman’s separatist female utopia, such as the usage of type characters instead of actual people, which further identifies both works as fables of humanity. However, The Cleft is very little like Herland as in it does not focus on the ‘before men’ but instead on the ‘after’; and there is close to none utopic elements in this scenario.

The premise is simple: women came first. Then one day, a boy was born. They think the child’s defective, but then ‘monsters’ keep being born, until the baby boys start being rescued by eagles and form a community of their own on the other side of the mountain. The most interesting moment in the text is precisely the beginning, gruesome and intriguing, indicating both genders as criminals against one another. From there, the story assumes the shape of a quasi-parody of traits generally attributed to males and females. Meanwhile, to further complicate matters, the narrative is put together by a Roman senator-wannabe who remarks on the earlier civilization and compares it to his own.

This book is clearly not preaching anything about human evolution; instead, its objective is to give us food for thought in what concerns the often troublesome relations between genders. Read it if you do not want to take for granted the patterns of those relations. ‘Cleft’ or ‘squirt’: the only thing clear is that there can’t be one without the other.