Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1965. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1972. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 263-265).

From Introduction: This thesis then is a detailed study of Lessing's novels in an attempt to show her development as a writer. Her short stories are handled briefly in connection with her novels. For, although the short stories are among her finest work, focus on the novels is sufficient to show her growth as a writer. Hers is the small individual struggle to overcome the limitations of both her content and her form. To overcome the limitations of her content means expanding her own consciousness and re-forming life itself. Only when she is free and the world is free can she overcome the limitations of her content. Then, of course, she need no longer and can no longer write. The task seems as impossible as that of the dung beetles, but she nevertheless continues. Like the sacred beetles with "the sun between their feet" she carries on rolling the muck of the world into symbols of the truth.

This study of six novels by three post-World War II British novelists deals with the philosophical and pragmatic aspects of intimate relationship. Raymond Williams, in The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, establishes that novelists were among the first to recognise the destruction of the old community by industrialism. Without an alternate conception of community, industrial capitalism imposes itself directly upon the individual, and thus sets harsh limits upon the relationships he or she can create. One result is the alienation that Karl Marx described as inherent in the marketplaceosociety underpinning Victorian culture; or, in another idiom, the possessive individualism perceived by C.B. MacPherson. The increasing commercialism of society—the propensity, as Adam Smith phrased it, to truck and barter—has encouraged possessiveness, and has debased and alienated the most intimate aspects of human existence, especially sex and love. Sex is a central expression of the essence of life, and hence sexual relationships are adversely affected when they are alienated from love and community. As in the commercial transaction, intimacy in these six novels is vulnerable to the manipulation and the exploitation of one person by another, because there is no willingness to become involved in a reciprocal relationship. This commentary on the novels of John Fowles, Doris Lessing, and David Storey suggests some tentative conclusions about intimacy in the latter part of the 20th century. The working class novels generally emphasise traditional relationships; and tell us that individuals who try to discard them (as with Clegg in The Collector, and Machin in This Sporting Life), will lose £or never win) those whom they love. The emphasis upon money alienates them from their basic community, and destroys their integrity. There is no intimacy divorced from the primary social relationship. Middle class protagonists move away from community as they become dominant in a marketplace society. Their success transforms- them into alienated and possessive individualists; and their belated attempt to restore a sense of intimacy is an effort—perhaps tragic—to become whole in a fragmented world. But the relationships occur in a vacuum. Either they fail, as in The Golden Notebook, or the individuals reject intimacy, and flee forward from community into a super-individualism as with Martha Quest in The Four-Gated City. These novels tell us nothing of a social movement that will give the individual a sense of purpose or meaning: hence the individuals remain isolated, and seem to lose substance. When Leonard Radcliffe, for example (Radcliffe), murders his community out of his need for an absolute, he precipitates his own death. Again, Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant1s Woman lose their vitality and sexual commitment because Sarah is more concerned to preserve her individuality. These examples serve to show that temporary and partial relationships are lethal to the spirit. The loss of intimacy is the result, in the end, of the loss of the moral sense. The displacement of the religious impulse to wholeness (the "disappearance of God") leaves one with the hollow victories of possessive individualism in a fragmented society. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Note:

This thesis introduces a skeletal representation of the "kind" of individual Doris Lessing promotes in her work. Organized around five semantic qualifiers, this analysis explores a number of Lessing's works belonging to several literary categories for evidence of the appearance of the daring, self-aware, public, engaged, and vocal individual. It argues that Lessing, as a humanist, is committed to individual personal actualization but that this is tempered with her personnally held views about what is valuable and enriching human experience. It concludes that as author of fictional tales, autobiographical texts as well as political essays, she designs the path of self-development she considers worthy of mention.

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Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1989. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [244]-254).