Doris Lessing: Surviving Utopia

This chapter considers Doris Lessing’s engagement with utopia, from the Children of Violence series which is set in 1950s–60s London to her near-future ecocatastrophic Mara and Dann novels (1999, 2005). The necessity of utopian hope in Lessing’s novels is set against a seeming disavowal of the possibility of positive systemic change. Utopian possibility in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series (1979–83), for instance, is driven by cosmic patterns rather than human action. Similarly, her excoriating descriptions of colonial and capitalist life in the Children of Violence series (1952–69) possess an energy that can be considered utopian. However, the apocalyptic strain in many of Lessing’s works renders this utopianism highly ambivalent. In their critique of societal progress or political change at scale, Lessing’s novels often sit at odds with the literary utopian tradition. In Lessing’s works, read alongside American contemporaries such as Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, the prefigurative mode is less concretely utopian. Enclaves of survivors persist, but the texts indicate that political struggle will return with each generation and the same problems recur across history. The chapter concludes that Lessing’s late ecocatastrophic fictions exhibit a stronger utopian impulse, which resonates with twenty-first-century discussions of the climate emergency in the United Kingdom.