Martha’s Unhomely Quest for the Homely
A Postcolonial Reading of the Protagonist Martha in Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest
Marthas o-hemlika sökande efter det hemlika
En postkolonial tolkning av huvudpersonen Martha i Doris Lessings Martha Quest
Annika Salisbury
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences English
15 Credits
Supervisor: Anna Linzie
Examiner: Maria Holmgren Troy Autumn Term 2018
The protagonist Martha in Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest is born to white British settler parents and grows up in a British colony in southern Africa in the 1930s. Although officially the coloniser rather than the colonised, Martha tries to reject this role mentally, verbally, and physically. This essay aims to show that a postcolonial reading of Martha in relation to the colonial context helps in understanding her double consciousness and, more specifically, her inability to find a real or lasting sense of home. Using Homi Bhabha’s concept of unhomeliness, the essay argues that Martha does not truly feel at home anywhere, because the “unhomely” always disturbs the
“homely.” Through close reading of the text, it shows how Martha tries to find a sense of home in four areas of her life: her physical home, nature, her body, and her mind.
This essay finds that despite Martha’s efforts in moving from her family home to rented accommodation, from the bush to the city, from girlhood to womanhood, and from her individual thoughts to the solidarity of others, she still does not feel at home anywhere.
Whenever she starts to feel comfortable in a place or situation, unhomely moments, such as reminders of her nationality, race, or class, always disturb the homely feelings of belonging. Ultimately, Martha cannot escape her unhomeliness.
Keywords: Doris Lessing, double consciousness, Homi Bhabha, Martha Quest, postcolonial theory, unhomeliness.
Huvudpersonen Martha i Doris Lessings Martha Quest är dotter till vita brittiska bosättare och växer upp i en brittisk koloni i södra Afrika på 1930-talet. Trots att hon formellt sett är kolonisatören snarare än den koloniserade, försöker Martha att avvisa denna roll mentalt, verbalt och fysiskt. Denna uppsats syftar till att visa att en postkolonial tolkning av Martha i förhållande till det koloniala sammanhanget bidrar till en förståelse av hennes dubbla medvetande och mer specifikt hennes oförmåga att hitta en verklig, eller bestående, känsla av hemma. Med hjälp av Homi Bhabhas koncept gällande o-hemlikhet argumenterar uppsatsen för att Martha inte känner sig riktigt hemma någonstans, eftersom det ”o-hemlika” alltid stör det ”hemlika.” Genom en noggrann läsning av texten visar den hur Martha försöker hitta känslan av ett hem inom fyra områden av sitt liv: sitt fysiska hem, naturen, sin kropp och sitt sinne. Denna uppsats konstaterar att trots Marthas ansträngningar att flytta från sitt familjehem till ett hyresrum, från land till stad, från ung flicka till kvinna och från sina individuella tankar till solidaritet med andra, känner hon sig fortfarande inte hemma någonstans.
När hon börjar känna sig bekväm på ett ställe eller i ett läge, stör o-hemlika ögonblick i form av påminnelser om hennes nationalitet, ras eller klass alltid hennes hemlika känslor av tillhörighet. I slutändan kan Martha inte undgå sin o-hemlikhet.
Nyckelord: Doris Lessing, dubbelt medvetande, Homi Bhabha, Martha Quest, postkolonial teori, o-hemlikhet.
Introduction 1
Physical Homes 3
The Family Home 3
Homes in the City 5
Nature 7
An Alternative Home 7
An Ideal Home? 9
Martha’s Body 11
A Girl’s Body? 11
A Woman’s Body 13
Martha’s Mind 15
A Contested Place 15
A Lonely Place 17
Conclusion 19
She was adolescent, and therefore bound to be unhappy; British, and therefore uneasy and defensive; in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, and therefore inescapably beset with problems of race and class;
female, and obliged to repudiate the shackled women of the past.
(Lessing 18)
Martha Quest, “shackled” by the issues of nationality, race, class, and gender mentioned above, is the female protagonist in Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest (1952).
The first of five novels in a series called Children of Violence, it follows Martha’s life from teenager to newly married woman, portraying her search for independence, identity, and home. Born to white British settler parents, she grows up in a British colony in southern Africa in the 1930s, modelled on the Rhodesia of Lessing’s own childhood. Although officially the coloniser rather than the colonised, she rejects this role mentally and verbally: “‘You make me sick,’ said Martha, reacting, or so she thought, to this racial prejudice” (Lessing 24). Martha “establishes herself as the other vis-à-vis her parents and the settler community” (Moan Rowe 21) and takes various steps to physically separate herself from her given role: leaving the farm for the city, choosing a job over marriage (initially), and flirting with communist ideas. In fact, Martha appears to have the “double consciousness” often ascribed to colonial subjects—“a consciousness or a way of perceiving the world that is divided between two agnostic cultures: that of the colonizer and that of the indigenous community”
(Tyson 421). On the one hand she admits that she “still shared her parents’
unconscious attitude” (Lessing 27), on the other hand she cannot bear their and the community’s “pettiness of vision and small understanding” (22), and the result is that she is “tormented with guilt and responsibility and self-consciousness” (18). Martha may live in colonial times, but it is as though she is already looking ahead to a postcolonial future.
This essay aims to show that a postcolonial reading of Martha in relation to the colonial context allows for a better understanding of her “curious mixture of feelings”
(Watkins 16). More specifically, it focuses on understanding how her experience of the colonial situation explains her inability to find a real or lasting sense of home. A close reading of the text shows that Martha longs for and tries to find a home in different areas of her life: as she moves from her family home to rented accommodation
(physical home), from the bush of her childhood to the city (nature), from girlhood to womanhood (body), and from individual knowledge to the solidarity of others (mind).
These four areas are key domains in the text.
In seeking to understand Martha’s quest for a home and how it is affected by her double consciousness, I turn to the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha and the concept of “unhomeliness.” Bhabha draws on Sigmund Freud’s concept of the “uncanny”
(unheimlich): “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar” (Freud 124); and its opposite, the “homely”
(heimlich): “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar” (Freud 126) and comfortable, but also sometimes hidden or secret. Developing these ideas within a postcolonial context, Bhabha argues:
To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow … The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. (The Location of Culture 9)
Lois Tyson summarises Bhabha’s ideas more simply when she states that “To be unhomed is to feel not at home even in your own home because you are not at home in yourself: your cultural identity crisis has made you a psychological refugee” (421). I believe that within her obvious identity crisis, Martha is suffering from unhomeliness:
she feels like a refugee, like she does not belong in her family, community, or country—
or even in herself.
Martha’s unhomeliness is one of the symptoms of her double consciousness, which means she can neither accept her coloniser status nor take on that of the colonised and her sympathies are torn between the two. Living in this state, Martha’s life is full of the domestic invasions and unhomely moments that Bhabha refers to above. If she starts to feel at home or comfortable anywhere, something familiar yet very unsettling (the unhomely) always disturbs her peace of mind, something linked to her nationality, race, or class, for example, and reminds her that she does not actually belong there. These reminders can be as minor as her mother rearranging her things in a rented city room (Lessing 124-125), to as major as experiencing the “painful
delirium” (73) of a spiritual illumination in the bush. Therefore, this essay argues that Martha does not truly feel at home anywhere—in her physical home, in nature, in her body, or in her mind—because the unhomely always disturbs the homely and she cannot escape her unhomeliness.
Physical Homes The Family Home
Martha’s family home, a house on the Quest farm, is the opening setting of the novel and a key place in terms of understanding her unhomeliness: it is not a true home to Martha because of its temporary, hybrid, and unwelcome matriarchal elements.
First, the family home feels distinctly temporary. On considering a ridgepole
“riddled with tiny holes” and the ramshackle nature of the building, Martha reflects that “The whole house was like this – precarious and shambling, but faithful, for it continued to remain upright against all probability” (Lessing 26). Martha appears to be at ease with nature forcing its way in and to find an appeal in the structure’s faithfulness to continue standing against the odds. It is her familiar childhood home and has remained as such over the years. However, this homely aspect is undermined by the unhomely notion that it should not be—was never meant to be—the family’s real home: “The house had been built as temporary, and was still temporary. Next year they would go back to England, or go into town” (27). Its presence is part of what Nicole Ward Jouve refers to as “The white settler’s point of view: the passing implantation of an English family in an African landscape” (99), because the Quest family is just biding its time and waiting to move on—not laying down proper roots.
Second, the house has a strange hybridity about it. “There were many different kinds of houses in the district, but the Quests’ was original because a plan which was really suitable for bricks and proper roofing had been carried out in grass and mud and stamped dung” (Lessing 25). Victoria Rosner argues that “the power to build had everything to do with the power to colonize” (64), so it appears the Quests neither succeeded in following the typical settler model of how to build what and when (Rosner details the instructions given to Lessing’s own parents prior to their move to colonial Rhodesia), nor did they accept going fully “native style” (Lessing 25), and the result is a compromise of culture and cost. Unfortunately, it does not appear to have been an easy compromise: “When Mrs Quest first arrived, she was laughed at, because of the
piano and the expensive rugs” (Lessing 25), because of her attempt to create and maintain “an enclave of the white English middle class—as far as she could keep it”
(Rosner 71). The sense of the familiar “Home” (Lessing 12)—referring to England—that they tried to bring with them and even build into their house was forced to fade over time. Martha also acknowledges, if not fully shares, the embarrassment surrounding the hybrid result: “She knew to Marnie, to others of their neighbours, this house seemed disgracefully shabby, even sordid; but why be ashamed of something that one has never, not for a moment, considered as home?” (Lessing 27). Bhabha argues that
“each ‘unhomely’ house marks a deeper historical displacement” (The Location of Culture 13) and Martha’s family home certainly reflects the displacement of its English inhabitants onto African soil: with the personal and political history of what brought them there, and the lack of options to move, improve, or return.
Third, there is an unwelcome matriarchy in the house. As already noted, Martha’s mother is a strong driving force in both the creation and maintenance of the house: “Mrs Quest had planned the front of the house to open over the veld ‘like the prow of a ship,’ as she herself gaily explained” (Lessing 25). It is very definitely her domain, and this is supported in Rosner’s belief that “If the male settler was defined in relation to his mastery of the land, the female settler was defined in relation to the house” (73). As such, the homely elements that Mrs Quest tries to include are naturally those of her own English upbringing and not in keeping with Martha’s. Furthermore, their relationship is clearly and deeply strained—Martha describes her as “loathsome, bargaining and calculating” (Lessing 15), among many other things, right at the start of the novel—so Mrs Quest’s influence over the house actually makes it seem unhomely to her daughter. Roberta Rubenstein suggests that “Mother is our first home, the original safe house … by which all later spaces of belonging are measured” (160) and, with that in mind, Martha was born with a poor measuring stick: the brief description of her birth calls it “the long night of terror” (Lessing 19). For adolescent Martha, home is far from a peaceful place—it is a “battlefield on which mother and daughter fight out their differences” (Rosner 77) and where Mrs Quest has always held the upper hand.
Thus, the odds are stacked against Martha in her search for a sense of homeliness in her own family home.
Homes in the City
And a door had closed, finally; and behind it was the farm, and the girl who had been created by it. It no longer concerned her. Finished. She could forget it.
She was a new person, and an extraordinary, magnificent, an altogether new life was beginning. (Lessing 110)
When Martha finally and optimistically leaves the family home and heads to the city, her subsequent homes prove far from really hers either: they are all owned or
“contaminated” (Lessing 127) by others.
Martha’s first home in the city is a rented room. Once teased by her friend Joss Cohen as “the rebel who never leaves home” (Lessing 91), Martha later accepts his help and moves to the city, “to the illusion of independence” (Moan Rowe 21). In fact, she does so in quite a hurry. In just one day, “She interviewed Mr Cohen, the uncle, got the job, and found herself a room by nightfall” (Lessing 110)—and did not return home.
Considering the ease of this, it can be assumed that her criteria for a new home are quite simple: away from the family home and her mother whom she had “out-grown”
(Lessing 82). However, after her first day at work, “When Martha arrived in the room she was prepared to call her home, her mother and father were there, and she was angry” (Lessing 123). Her new home is immediately invaded by her parents, and their familiar presence and influence are far from welcome. Martha hears her father discussing his favourite topic of the war during tea with her new landlady, Mrs Gunn, and it unsettles her: “That these words should be following her still made Martha feel not only resentful but afraid” (Lessing 124). Her father’s own unhomeliness is one of the many things Martha had hoped to “forget” (Lessing 110) in her move to the city, having been raised in the shadow of his wartime stories. As Bhabha notes, “In the stirring of the unhomely, another world becomes visible” (“The World and the Home” 141), and Mr Quest is certainly focused on another time and place—another world. In fact, he is often mentally absent from the present and his family, leading Martha to claim “He hasn’t seen us for years” (Lessing 31). Martha’s mother then scolds her for not joining them for tea and informs her that “I’ve unpacked your things and arranged them, I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, and I moved the bed”
(Lessing 124-125), striking with both her English social norms and her maternal control in one “grumbling note” (124). The result is that Martha “decided to leave this
room at once for another which would be free of her mother’s atmosphere and influence” (Lessing 125)—but ultimately does not. Whether due to lethargy or stubbornness, she remains in her unhomely new home for a while, where the character of Mrs Gunn also looms as an unwelcome matriarchal presence and even “the noise was difficult for a country person” (Lessing 123).
Martha’s second home in the city is arguably her friends’ flat. For a period of time, Martha befriends—or rather is befriended by—Stella and Andrew and finds herself almost living in the married couple’s flat. Interestingly, she claims to feel at home there at first: “In this country, or in England, or in any other country, one enters this flat, is at home at once, with a feeling of peace” (Lessing 218-219). Martha appears to be drawn to the nomadic quality of the flat, to its lack of claim on her, and to its lack of clear ownership by others: “Ah, the blessed anonymity of the modern flat, that home for nomads who, with no idea of where they are travelling, must travel light, ready for anything” (Lessing 219). Rosner argues that “space is always contested, defined by and through the struggles over its meaning” (83), and so Martha may feel comfortable because she senses no contest initially. Alternatively, as Ward Jouve proposes, “Martha is doomed to the nomad’s flat because she’s been born uprooted” (99). Either way—
interpreted more positively or more negatively—it is significant that Martha is attracted to the blandness of something with no history or personal stamp, where there seems to be minimal risk of “an unhomely stirring” (Bhabha, “The World and the Home” 147). However, this changes before long and by the time Stella has “expertly tightened the screw” (Lessing 260)—taken a kind of maternal control over Martha and helped end her relationship with her Jewish lover, Adolph—Martha has detached herself from yet another possible home. When Stella insists that she must still “look on their flat as a home,” Martha simply walks away, “with a stiff smile” (Lessing 263).
Martha’s third home in the city is her pre-marriage flat. Just before getting married, at the very end of the novel, Martha and her fiancé, Douglas, move into their own flat. Douglas “recklessly” buys “bales of stuff” for the place, and “there were curtains to hand and furniture to arrange, which Stella took it for granted was her prerogative” (Lessing 328). Even on first moving in, Martha and Douglas are not left alone but almost share the place with Stella and Andrew. In the days leading up to the wedding, they hide out there with them, “in a state of wild excitement, like a permanent picnic” (Lessing 328). Superficial excitement aside, however, Martha’s role in this new home actually seems to be one of “detached observer” (Lessing 18; Ward Jouve 113).
She appears to take no active part in the preparation of the flat or for the wedding (the two events being closely intertwined in the narrative) and, when feelings of unease hit her, “she comforted herself with the thought, Well, we’re leaving the town, anyway, we’re going to Europe” (Lessing 330). Thus, this final physical home in the novel seems to be one that Martha does not even attempt to settle into: she seeks no homeliness in it, as she is already set on leaving it.
Nature
An Alternative Home
As a child, Martha finds an alternative home to the family house in the bush around it and in nature as a whole, with which she has a deep and mystical connection. However, as she grows into adolescence and then adulthood, this connection is increasingly disrupted and distant.
The importance of nature in Martha’s search for identity and home is highlighted by many critics, including Ingrid Holmquist, who states that “Nature is another entity in Martha Quest which can be said to serve as a home for Martha as well as to have the function of creating ideals for her” (46). Although we know little of Martha’s early childhood, there are hints and references to nature serving as an alternative home for her during it. Nature is Martha’s first course of escape when she argues with her mother and her neighbour, Mrs Van Rensberg, in the novel’s opening scene: “she marched off down the garden, and ran into the bush” (Lessing 15). She is also described as dreaming under trees, sliding down grass, going hunting, and generally being at ease in the bush (Lessing 16, 21, 24, 87). Rosner argues that “Because settler culture keeps women in or around the house, Lessing experiences the bush as a space of freedom from gender constraints” (80), and this could help to explain Martha’s attraction to the bush as child. She can be completely herself there and does not have to “play the part ‘young girl’ against … familiar roles” (Lessing 10). In fact, she can do the very opposite and “behave like a clumsy schoolboy” (Lessing 24) in the “wild, patriarchal, African space of the bush” (Watkins 37)—transgressing both gender and cultural boundaries. Martha also seems to have a “mystical unity with nature”
(Holmquist 46), a connection that brings on feelings of “intense, joyful melancholy”
(Lessing 72) and provides powerful spiritual illuminations (Lessing 74-75).
However, adolescence proves to be a difficult time for Martha in regard to this
alternative home, making her feel uneasy and question her place both on the farm and in nature as a whole. She appears, in fact, to question the very existence of the farm:
“In the literature that was her tradition, the word farm evokes an image of something orderly, compact, cultivated … Martha looked over the mile or so of bush to a strip of pink ploughed land … the fields were a timid intrusion on a landscape hardly marked by man” (Lessing 10-11). What Martha sees does not fit the Western definition of a farm and, in one simple thought, she identifies both chaos and weakness in settler farming (Louw 31). Her thinking also supports the idea that “the land fails to provide the kind of mythical wholeness that the white settlers seek” (Watkins 18). Martha is torn by her double consciousness: she is disappointed by the land, yet she also loves it and her character is linked to the many detailed and expressive descriptions of it in the novel.
She then goes on to question herself: “So here was Martha, at sixteen, idle and bored
… But why was she condemning herself to live on this farm, which more than anything in the world she wanted to leave?” (Lessing 36-37). As well as boredom, Martha is suffering from “claustrophobia” and “resentment” (Lessing 11), all typical adolescent traits that contribute to her distancing herself from the farm, “which lay about her like a loved country that refused her citizenship” (37). As Martha transitions into womanhood, she seems to outgrow any childhood ease she once felt on the farm and it becomes an increasingly difficult and strange place.
Previously homely to her, Martha also starts to see the unhomely side of nature.
As Holmquist argues, “nature as well as the family contains norms. Both the family and nature make demands upon Martha, which are collective in that they do not recognize her experience of herself as an individual but emphasize her function as a social and natural or biological entity” (Holmquist 11). During one particular “moment”
(Lessing 74) in the bush, Martha has a spiritual illumination that is so intense and powerful that she finds it “painful” (73) to experience. In it, nature appears to overpower Martha, claim her, and teach her “quite finally her smallness, the unimportance of humanity” (Lessing 75). As a result, Martha no longer feels at home in the bush and she finds that “The vastness of the veld makes her feel like an exile”
(Watkins and Chambers 6). So she leaves, “consciously bidding farewell to her childhood” (Lessing 109) at all the places that have been important to her as a girl, like an anthill and a stream, and she continues her search for the homely in the city.
As an adult living in the city, Martha’s relationship with nature is limited and the reader gets just a few insights into it. One is a moment of apparent homesickness
that she chooses to call “a ‘touch’ of malaria” (Lessing 271), when she imagines how the farm would look at that time of year. Another is when she and Douglas drive out to the farm to meet Martha’s parents before their wedding:
this frank embrace between the lifting breast of the land and the deep blue warmth of the sky is what exiles from Africa dream of; it is what they sicken for, no matter how hard they try to shut their minds against the memory of it. And what if one sickens for it when one still lives in Africa, one chooses to live in town? Living in town, Martha had forgotten this infinite exchange of earth and sky. (Lessing 311)
The farm and surrounding bush are no longer a home to Martha, and she makes a nostalgic comparison of her life in the city to forced exile. Ward Jouve, instead, highlights the element of choice involved and argues that Martha “decided that she would not belong,” that it is “Martha’s refusal to relate to the Africa that is there … that makes her into a spiritual globe-trotter” (129). Regardless, Martha does attempt to reconnect with nature during her brief stay on the farm, but claims “It was shut off from her, she could feel nothing. There was a barrier, and that barrier (she felt) was Douglas” (Lessing 318). Adulthood and impending marriage seem to keep the door that Martha once closed even more firmly shut (Lessing 110).
An Ideal Home?
Nature is also the source of inspiration for Martha’s vision of an ideal home, a majestic four-gated city in the bush, but it is far from homely and its ideals are not as pure as they first seem.
There arose, glimmering whitely over the harsh scrub and the stunted trees, a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its falling flower- bordered terraces. There were splashing fountains, and the sound of flutes; and its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together; and these groups of elders paused, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of the children – the blue-eyed, fair-skinned children of the North playing hand in hand with the bronze-skinned, dark-eyed children of the South. (Lessing 21)
This vision is first shown in its purest form at the beginning of the novel: Martha is sat under a tree on the farm, feeling resentful of her mother and Mrs Van Rensberg, and
is struck by compassion on seeing a black child go past leading a herd of oxen. The combination of the bush and this sight seems to lead Martha into “her familiar daydream” (Lessing 21), which as Holmquist points out contains “an ideal of racial equality and of a harmonious relationship between the generations” and “the wish for a new home that is ideologically and emotionally satisfying” (45). Beyond the obvious ideological satisfaction, however, the emotional satisfaction that it gives is questionable. Martha rather surprisingly chooses an ideal home that is very grand and old-fashioned, rather than one that is cosy and familiar, in response to her “conflict- ridden family situation” (Holmquist 45). Nevertheless, it does at least feel familiar to her in the sense that she returns regularly to this dream, altering it in line with her own wishes as she grows up.
A year later, the vision is significantly presented in an updated form. Far less pure ideals have now crept in and the dream is both more realistic and more representative of Martha’s unhomeliness in her own family and society:
She could have drawn a plan of that city, from the central market place to the four gates. Outside one of the gates stood her parents, the Van Rensbergs, in fact most of the people of the district, forever excluded from the golden city because of their pettiness of vision and small understanding; they stood grieving, longing to enter, but barred by a stern and remorseless Martha – for unfortunately one gets nothing, not even a dream, without paying heavily for it, and in Martha’s version of the golden age there must always be at least one person standing at the gate to exclude the unworthy. (Lessing 22)
As Susan Watkins states, “The fact that the ‘race-free’ city is gated to exclude all those Martha dislikes is ruefully acknowledged by the narrator to be a problematic element in the fantasy” (143) and Martha does indeed pay heavily for this. In wanting to challenge “the petty lives around her” (Walder 106), her dream loses its pure and inclusive idealism and takes on elements of tension, power and, ultimately, exclusion.
It seems even an ideal home—a dream one guarded by gates—is unable to keep out “the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world” (Bhabha, “The World and the Home” 141).
Martha’s Body A Girl’s Body?
Housing both her mind and her soul, Martha’s body is naturally a version of home.
However, just as the other homes in her life, Martha’s bodily home struggles with its establishment: with growth, ownership, and its place in settler society.
At the beginning of the novel, on the family farm, 15-year-old Martha is seen struggling with her body’s growth from child to woman. Still behaving like and dressed as a young girl, her friend Marnie describes her as “sprawling and undignified … like an overgrown child of eleven” (Lessing 22). However, Martha is well aware that her body is no longer familiar to her and her clothes no longer fit as they should: “The dresses her mother made looked ugly, even obscene, for her breasts were well grown, and the yokes emphasized them, showing flattened bulges under the tight band of material; and the straight falling line of the skirt was spoiled by her full hips” (28). She feels as well as looks uncomfortable and seeing Marnie in her “fashionable dress” and
“silk-stockinged legs” (22) seems to trigger a reaction: “the battle of the clothes had begun” (32)—another battle fought primarily between mother and daughter.
The battle begins with Mrs Quest refusing to let Martha change her style of dress, arguing that “girls in England did not come out until at the earliest sixteen, but better still eighteen, and girls of a nice family wore dresses of this type until coming out”
(Lessing 28). Despite not living in England or belonging to a “nice” family, Martha is not allowed to feel at home in her womanly body and wear clothes that suit it, because
“outwardly the issue was social convention, and not Martha’s figure” (Lessing 28). As Watkins explains, “her body is a site of conflict and contestation. Martha’s mother’s concern with English middle-class values and their transcription on Martha’s body bears the weight of history” (35). Faced with the near impossible task of convincing her mother to change her deep-rooted values, Martha chooses instead to rebel: “after a long brooding underground rebellion” (Lessing 29), she simply cuts up and alters a dress on her own.
The dresses, however, are literally and figuratively only the surface issue: “On a deeper level the issue of the clothes is related to Martha’s sexuality which Mrs. Quest fears and Martha instinctively nurtures” (Holmquist 36). The dress-cutting scene contains numerous references to Martha’s body and points to the deeper issue of her sexuality. For example, Mrs Quest feels “alarm at the mature appearance of her
daughter’s breasts and hips” and when Mr Quest enters, “He stopped, with an embarrassed look at his daughter, who was naked save for a tiny pair of pink drawers;
but that embarrassment was having it both ways, for if Martha was still a child, then one could look at her naked” (Lessing 29). Ward Jouve argues that “the text is haunted by the presence of Martha’s body,” that it is an important “source of knowledge” (107), and Martha does indeed seem to be battling for more than what to put on it. She is battling for what her body shows, for the knowledge it brings to those willing to see it:
that she is moving from childhood to adulthood, her girl’s body is turning into a woman’s and is sexual, and she is now taking control over herself—or so she hopes.
The battle to decide over and feel at home in her body then continues in various ways: from Martha starving herself “into a fashionable thinness” (Lessing 51) and showing off her grown-up self to the Cohen brothers, to sewing an elegant and revealing evening gown that “startled” her parents and made her look “Too damned nice” (96). As Holmquist argues, “Martha’s sexuality is revealed as a central factor in the development of her identity. The scene in which she presents herself to her parents in her evening dress is given archetypal overtones. It is a symbolic presentation of the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood” (36). And wearing the evening gown to the Van Rensbergs’ party that evening does, indeed, turn into a kind of test run of her new adulthood: “away from everything known into unimaginable experience … she watched for the light of the Van Rensbergs’ house as of the beacons on a strange coast”
(Lessing 98).
Unfortunately, the party itself offers a taster of adulthood that is not altogether different from Martha’s childhood unhomeliness. Despite Marnie being as welcoming as possible, Martha sticks out due to her “too elaborate” (Lessing 99) dress and uneasy manners: “I told him [Billy] you didn’t mean it, you’re not stuck-up, you’re just shy”
(102). Despite Mrs Van Rensberg being “tolerant and generous” (103), “pleasant and maternal” (107), Mr Van Rensberg insists on singling out Martha to discuss politics (104). It seems she simply cannot escape her nationality and class: “The English are arrogant” (104). Furthermore, although Martha wants to be independent, she instantly allows herself to be claimed: “She was not herself, she was obedient to that force, which wore Billy’s form and features” (103). When Billy makes sexual advances, however, she abruptly stops him with an “indignant coldness” (106) reminiscent of her mother’s English puritanism—and, in doing so, both embarrasses him and annoys herself.
After the party, Martha finds it harder than ever to feel at home in herself and in
her present environment, so she finally takes the leap and “escapes to the city and the life of an independent, modern woman. The world lies before her or so she thinks”
(Moan Rowe 30). How different that life or world turns out to be, however, is questionable.
A Woman’s Body
Lessing often attempts to construct a home in the female body; she then self-consciously demonstrates the capacity for failure of such a project, given the body’s overdetermination by the structures and codes of history, race, gender, class and sexuality. (Watkins 35)
On moving to the city, Martha appears to embrace her womanly body and its newfound independence, but in reality her adult bodily home is still restrained by “history, race, gender, class and sexuality,” as Watkins notes above, leading to an unstable sense of freedom and homeliness.
Not long in the city, Martha is introduced to Donovan, the son of an acquaintance of Mrs Quest. She is instantly overtaken by her bodily instincts and the thought of what experiences her new independence can offer: “Martha wandered around her room in a state of breathless exhilaration, already picturing Donovan as a lover” (Lessing 133). She rejoices in “the delight of dressing for a man” (134) for the first time and awaits their date with fevered animation. But Martha is disappointed as Donovan proves far from interested in her sexually and behaves “in a way she had never imagined any man would behave,” unaffectedly moulding her body and clothes into his approved style like a mannequin: “It was like being possessed by another personality;
it was disturbing, and left her with a faint but pronounced distaste” (135). This marks the beginning of an uneasy friendship, driven by Donovan’s manipulation of Martha, in which he claims her as his partner and yet refuses to be her lover (173-175).
Nevertheless, submitting to Donovan does have its more positive side: it allows Martha to step supported into the city’s youthful social life, into “something very like one of her private dreams” (Lessing 141), where she “Found herself transported into delight” (143). With time, however, she starts to feel “a strong resisting dislike of his pressure on her” (Lessing 194) and it becomes an unhomely reminder of Mrs Quest’s controlling ways. Yet when Martha finally stops submitting to Donovan, her submission is just placed elsewhere—with Perry (or arguably Stella), then Adolph, and
finally Douglas—because that is how Martha has been raised and “Lessing … is too shrewd an observer of human beings and society to ignore the effects of nurture”
(Moan Rowe 30).
When Martha allows Adolph to become her first real lover, hoping to experience what she has previously just dreamt of, he also starts to control her and claims her from those who have done so before—Donovan, Stella, and company: “The act of love had claimed her from them, she now belonged to this man” (Lessing 249). Despite the uneasy feeling “that this man’s body was wrong for her, that she was having her first love affair with a man she was not at all in love with” (249), the physical act of making love seems to overpower Martha and she submits to Adolph in a “devoted, childlike way” (252) each time. In bed with him, she finds that “waves of emotion came over her which she longed might continue over those other uncomfortable times in between”
(253), but ultimately they do not: the homely moments cannot overcome the unhomely and “they were increasingly uncomfortable together” (252). Following in the footsteps of both Mrs Quest and Donovan, Adolph also tries to control what Martha wears and this continues her childhood struggle over clothes and sexuality—but with an odd twist.
He shows no concern for her morals or fashion, just what pleases him, and Martha finds herself responding with unexpected English prudery: “he said she should make it tighter, and showed her what he meant by lifting handfuls of material away from her hips. ‘You want me to look like a tart,’ she said indignantly, to which he replied by calling her a prude” (Lessing 251). In embracing sexual adulthood, therefore, Martha finds neither freedom nor comfort nor an escape from her past.
The affair with Adolph also sheds light on the double consciousness of Martha’s social circle. Despite the city’s youths trying to live a kind of “fairy story” (Lessing 189) without “snobs or restrictions” (182), Martha soon discovers that her sexual relationship with Adolph is not actually accepted, partly because it is extramarital, but primarily because he is a Polish Jew (244, 245, 259-260, 262). As Watkins suggests,
“the body (as the site of sexual dissidence) can be the source or ‘home’ for challenges to colonial values and ideologies” (41) and, without acknowledging their double standards, some of Martha’s peers seem critical of the challenge her choice of partner poses: “‘You’re a naughty girl,’ began Donovan. ‘You just have to be different, don’t you, Matty dear?’” (Lessing 245). Whether Martha’s choice is out of rebellion or not, in the end, the challenge is not tolerated—even in this “new country” (Lessing 182). Shortly before Stella confronts them and forces them to end their relationship, Adolph explains
the difference between himself and Jewish Stella—the inescapable one of nationality and class: “Yes, but she’s from an old English family, she’s not scum from Eastern Europe, like me” (Lessing 246).
Martha then ends her brief and questionable independence in the city by giving herself to, and even agreeing to marry, a man completely uncontroversial in terms of race, class, or religion—Douglas:
Seemingly free from familial constraints, Martha experiences the heady air of sexual liberation and political awakening, but I stress ‘seemingly’
because all roads ultimately lead back to the constraints represented by her parents’ marriage when Martha out of boredom and lack of anything better to do marries Douglas Knowell at the end of the novel.
(Moan Rowe 21-22)
But as the wedding looms close, her bodily home experiences far more unease than simple boredom: “Martha woke with the feeling of a prisoner before execution”
(Lessing 310). She knows from her parents that the homely state of marriage can come with distinctly unhomely elements, that she risks becoming “fat and earthy” like Mrs Van Rensberg or “bitter and nagging and dissatisfied like her mother” (Lessing 20).
Martha’s physical attempts to avoid her fate as a white colonial woman seem to have failed.
Martha’s Mind A Contested Place
The mind is a further domain in which Martha attempts to construct a sense of identity and home. It is a contested place, however, where she struggles against both the internal pressures within herself and the external pressures placed on her by others:
“Martha could feel the striving forces in her own substance: the effort of imagination needed to destroy the words black, white, nation, race, exhausted her, her head ached and her flesh was heavy on her bones” (Lessing 68).
Martha is quick to outwardly condemn others, such as her controversial neighbour Mr McFarline, for their “Damned hypocrisy … all this colour-bar nonsense”
(Lessing 77), but she struggles inwardly with her own double consciousness and is not immune to her colonial upbringing: “the fact was, she could not remember a time when she had not thought of people in terms of groups, nations, or colour of skin first, and
as people afterwards” (67). In fact, the reader gets regular insights into the concerted effort that Martha needs to make in order to keep her thoughts in line with her beliefs.
For example, when cross with a Greek shop owner in the town near her parents’ farm, she finds herself thinking “Damned little dago; and checked herself, with guilt, for
‘dago’ was a word she had outlawed” (91); and later, in the city, on discovering the unusually high wages of a black worker in her office, she finds herself contemplating that “if she supported the complete equality of all races, then she must applaud this small advance towards it. On the other hand, because of her upbringing, she was shocked” (121).
Martha also struggles with her mother’s mixed messages. Mrs Quest, near the beginning of the novel, proudly announces to Mrs Van Rensberg that “Martha was clever and would have a career” (Lessing 12), but far from encouraging her reading and studies, she appears to thrive on keeping Martha at home. When Martha suffers from pink-eye, her mother does her best to get her a sick note from the doctor in order for Martha to avoid a major exam (Lessing 36). As Holmquist explains, “With regard to Martha’s roles as a woman, Mrs. Quest seems somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand she wants Martha to have a traditional married life, on the other, she expects her to become a professional woman” (32). Thus, Martha is raised with a confused sense of purpose and role—not knowing whether she is expected to follow the traditional colonial woman’s role or allowed to break out into something new. Mrs Quest is also ambivalent about Martha’s prolific reading: some of it is “respectable” (Lessing 109) and necessary in order to be clever, but she is also suspicious of it. When Martha does finally leave for the city and a career, “Mrs Quest went into her bedroom, and looked helplessly for some kind of clue to her daughter’s state of mind … she looked at the books on the table by the bed, with a feeling that they must be responsible”
(Lessing 109). The boasted career path is suddenly seen as something very suspect.
Martha even struggles with the views of the Cohen brothers. As her friends, she seeks their support in the growth and development of her mind, but they also lay claims on her as a result. Joss and Solly help fuel Martha’s reading, but they mainly lend her books on topics of particular interest to themselves—economics and psychology (Lessing 18). As a result, Martha is pushed out of her safe zone of familiar, self-chosen literature and she “learns to be … critical of the nostalgic literary tradition that has instructed her thus” (Watkins 36). However, she cannot relate to or deal with everything that she learns, due to her limited experience and state of unhomeliness:
“There were, at this very moment, half a dozen books lying neglected in her bedroom, for she knew quite well that if she read them she would only be in possession of yet more information about herself, and with even less idea of how to use it” (Lessing 19).
Martha longs to find worldly understanding and belonging through Joss and Solly’s books, but instead reading them makes her feel even more like an exile:
When Joss, for instance, or Mr Van Rensberg, posed their catechism, and received answers qualifying her for their respective brotherhoods, surely at that moment some door should have opened, so that she might walk in, a welcome daughter into that realm of generous and freely exchanged emotion for which she had been born … for what she believed had been built for her by the books she read, and those books had been written by citizens of that other country; for how can one feel exiled from something that does not exist? (Lessing 108)
Unfortunately, Martha’s understanding is too superficial and just vocalising the
“answers” she reads is not enough—it does not open any doors to a welcoming brotherhood or to a real understanding of herself and the world.
A Lonely Place
To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalencies and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity: ‘I am looking for the join … I want to join … I want to join.’
(Bhabha, The Location of Culture 18)
On moving to the city, Martha continues her search for understanding, belonging, and brotherhood—for what Bhabha refers to above as “social solidarity.” She is overwhelmed by social activities, partners and acquaintances, but finds little in the way of real peace or companionship for her mind.
In describing the sports club that she first joins, Martha romantically refers to
“a magic circle, and inside it nothing could happen, nothing threatened, for some tacit law made it impossible to discuss politics here” (Lessing 190). Yet this unreal, static world does not satisfy her mind, even though she has herself dreamed of living in an idealistic, peaceful community. The club is like a home-away-from-home for its members, but in the homely there is also something distinctly unhomely, something
that controls people, smothers their individuality, and moulds them into a group: “it was all so public, anything was permissible, the romances, the flirtations, the quarrels, provided they were shared” (188). And, over time, Martha finds the goings on increasingly disturbing: “everything disgusted her” (196). On dancing with Perry at the club one evening, Martha finally “rebelled, and talked in her normal voice … she was resentful because he would not accept her as herself – whatever that might mean”
(212). But she cannot manage to break the magic circle.
Before Joss Cohen leaves for South Africa, he visits Martha in the city and encourages her to contact a “Left Book Club” (Lessing 154). He hopes, based on
“number of assumptions” (155) about Martha’s beliefs, that she will find like-minded people there. Martha, however, does not fit the book club members’ expectations—
being too “conscious of her appearance” (157) and reading the wrong newspaper (160), among other things—and they fall far short of hers. She finds the men “false and cynical and disparaging” and the women “fussy and aggressive” (162-163). In fact, the women are a particular disappointment and not a role model that she is prepared to accept, let alone become herself: “And Martha heard that fierce and passionate voice repeating more and more loudly inside her, I will not be like that” (159). The women “were not at all unashamedly housewifely … nor were they fashionable” (158), but Martha finds them both overly maternal and resentful (159). As such, they are an unhomely reminder of her childhood, of her own mother and Mrs Van Rensberg—or possibly a combination of both. On reflection, Martha even decides that she prefers “the undemanding women of the district” where she grew up, which is harsh criticism indeed: “comparing them, there could be no doubt which were the more likeable” (159).
The book club may not provide social solidarity for Martha, but it does at least open a new world of literature to her, one which she can turn to when “The titles of her books seemed faded” and “what the print said had nothing to do with her life”
(Lessing 163). On reading the New Statesman, Martha finds a different form of solidarity:
As she turned the pages and the lines of print came gently up through her eyes to her brain, without assault, what she gained was a feeling of warmth, of security; for here were ideas she had been defending guiltily for years, used as the merest commonplaces. She was at home, she was one of a brotherhood. (162)
She finally finds the brotherhood that she has so longed for, the one that fits her own
instinctive beliefs. However, she has no one to share it with now that Joss has gone abroad, “the only person she had ever known who knew exactly how she felt” (153)—
until Douglas comes along.
Although a regular at the sports club, Douglas surprises Martha by reading the same journal as her and seeming to share her views. She quizzes him widely on topical issues and is hugely relieved when he answers satisfactorily: “she gave a large, grateful sigh, and relapsed into the silence of one who has at last come home” (Lessing 295).
Finding that Douglas is “as dissatisfied as herself with the present,” they are able to share their hopes and dreams, and “she felt as if she had known him forever; the world was suddenly beautiful, and the future full of promise” (Lessing 295). However, Douglas is clearly struggling with his own double consciousness: with his promising place in colonial society versus his dream to rebel and move abroad. Unfortunately for Martha, once they are engaged to be married, he appears to retract into the role of a
“conventional” (Lessing 326) white colonial male: “He was transformed. Martha felt a disgust” (305). Therefore, she finds herself going full circle from being disgusted at her mother’s talk of marriage at the beginning of the novel, to being disgusted as “marriage makes its claim” (Moan Rowe 30) on her at the end. Sadly, after all of Martha’s searching, she “has little or nothing to show as the fruit of her labour” (Moan Rowe 35), and her sense of unhomeliness is as strong as ever—if not stronger.
Conclusion
This essay shows how Martha, in her colonial situation, struggles with her double consciousness and its resulting unhomeliness, and how these follow her through her life. It shows how she tries and fails to fully reject her role as a white British colonial woman, unable to escape her upbringing and the various pressures placed on her. More specifically, my postcolonial reading of Martha shows how she seeks to find a sense of home in different domains—in her physical home, in nature, in her body, and in her mind—but is repeatedly left feeling lost and unhomed. Whether in her family home or far from it, in the bush or in the city, as a child or as a woman, in her individual thoughts or in solidarity with others, however hard Martha tries, she cannot find a true sense of home. Whenever she starts to feel at home in a place or situation, unhomely stirrings remind her that she does not belong there, she is not yet free from the cultural restraints that shackle her. To conclude, Martha cannot truly feel at home anywhere,
because the unhomely always disturbs the homely and, ultimately, she cannot escape her unhomeliness.
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