Scan barcode
A review by coleperry
The Cleft by Doris Lessing
2.0
Cool novel, treatment of gender manages to be both novel and tired.
I loved the historiographical commentary from the Roman telling the story of studying an origin myth. The postmodern structuring of the novel was fun and thought-provoking. I was also really excited for the potential for disrupting traditional gender narratives, especially with the telling of a female origin myth. The treatment of gender and gender differences/relations, though, was disappointing on the whole. To reinvent the species' origins, but then reinscribe tired, contemporary gender stereotypes was pretty unimaginative. A woman walks into a man's dirty hut for the first time and invents a broom on the spot to clean up after him? Really?
Men are portrayed as naturally callous risk-takers who let children die and don't even see why this is a bad thing. Men lack compassion and women do all the care work. Women are cleanly and nags (even when the men begrudge them the point); men are messy but athletic adventurers. All the mischief young boys get into is described at length, but the story hardly ever mentions what girls do. This transposition of 21st century gender stereotypes and preoccupations onto both Roman and pre-historical understandings was very distracting. I won't even go into the pervasive heteronormativity.
There's a couple of women who flee the traditional women's home society (binary gender segregation was the status quo) to live with the men, but nary a man or boy who chooses to live with women. To me this reflects a current gender narrative wherein feminism/liberation/equality means that it's okay for some women to be more like men, if they so choose, but men receive social censure for any sort of effeminacy. In the story, there's not even precedent for men displaying the characteristics associated with women.
Many aspects of this novel would qualify as some definition of feminist, but I think it's pretty unfortunate that this books seems to naturalize gendered inequality (it's a human origin myth and yet, from the start, gender inequality coincides with biological difference!). It's great that women are shown resisting the domination of the men in the story and that they have strong leaders themselves (in fact they were doing great on their own!), but that's pretty weak feminism. With a story centering gender, but focusing on the pre-historical even pre-cultural, Lessing could have done a lot of interesting things with the idea of gender. Instead, the story takes the faux-radical approach of questioning ideas about the origins of the human species and even the gendered writing of history. Yet Lessing chooses to leave in place reactionary gender ideologies that prop up contemporary gendered inequality and oppression.
For all the postmodern writing techniques that Lessing is a master of, the novel fails to take into account postmodern and poststructuralist understandings of (and insights into) gender. So, despite how it posits women as the progenitors of the human race, I see this book as reinforcing the differentiation and thus the subordination of women. Men and women are inherently unequal; men have fun, women nag; blah blah. Seems like tired reasoning to me.
I loved the historiographical commentary from the Roman telling the story of studying an origin myth. The postmodern structuring of the novel was fun and thought-provoking. I was also really excited for the potential for disrupting traditional gender narratives, especially with the telling of a female origin myth. The treatment of gender and gender differences/relations, though, was disappointing on the whole. To reinvent the species' origins, but then reinscribe tired, contemporary gender stereotypes was pretty unimaginative. A woman walks into a man's dirty hut for the first time and invents a broom on the spot to clean up after him? Really?
Men are portrayed as naturally callous risk-takers who let children die and don't even see why this is a bad thing. Men lack compassion and women do all the care work. Women are cleanly and nags (even when the men begrudge them the point); men are messy but athletic adventurers. All the mischief young boys get into is described at length, but the story hardly ever mentions what girls do. This transposition of 21st century gender stereotypes and preoccupations onto both Roman and pre-historical understandings was very distracting. I won't even go into the pervasive heteronormativity.
There's a couple of women who flee the traditional women's home society (binary gender segregation was the status quo) to live with the men, but nary a man or boy who chooses to live with women. To me this reflects a current gender narrative wherein feminism/liberation/equality means that it's okay for some women to be more like men, if they so choose, but men receive social censure for any sort of effeminacy. In the story, there's not even precedent for men displaying the characteristics associated with women.
Many aspects of this novel would qualify as some definition of feminist, but I think it's pretty unfortunate that this books seems to naturalize gendered inequality (it's a human origin myth and yet, from the start, gender inequality coincides with biological difference!). It's great that women are shown resisting the domination of the men in the story and that they have strong leaders themselves (in fact they were doing great on their own!), but that's pretty weak feminism. With a story centering gender, but focusing on the pre-historical even pre-cultural, Lessing could have done a lot of interesting things with the idea of gender. Instead, the story takes the faux-radical approach of questioning ideas about the origins of the human species and even the gendered writing of history. Yet Lessing chooses to leave in place reactionary gender ideologies that prop up contemporary gendered inequality and oppression.
For all the postmodern writing techniques that Lessing is a master of, the novel fails to take into account postmodern and poststructuralist understandings of (and insights into) gender. So, despite how it posits women as the progenitors of the human race, I see this book as reinforcing the differentiation and thus the subordination of women. Men and women are inherently unequal; men have fun, women nag; blah blah. Seems like tired reasoning to me.