The Summer before the Dark
Last Updated on Friday, 20 January 2012 02:03 Written by Barb Wednesday, 05 February 2020 20:55
I loved this novel. I liked living in someone else's head for a few days. And she's so good at it that it's as convincing as reading your own thoughts. It carries you along so effortlessly. So much so that it's slightly disturbing when you find you're following her thoughts so easily right up into the part where she (kind of) goes insane! (I'm not sure she was really insane. She had definitely wandered outside the bounds of polite society, but her perception of reality was dead on the whole time.)
She discovers the tremulousness of identity when she finds after being sick for a while that she's lost a lot of weight, her hair's dry and the color's gone out revealing her natural grey, her face is sunken and sallow, her clothes don't fit... in short, everything about her appearance that defined her as an upper-middle class woman dutifully fulfilling her role as wife and mother has gone. She walks the streets, sees a friend she's known for twenty years and not a hint of recognition. Men don't see her anymore. She was accustomed to being a pretty woman, one used to the attention of old men. All that's gone. She's completely invisible. She plays with that awhile then she finds new clothes that fit better, ties her grey hair back so it's not so wild anymore, sorta does herself up again and voila! it's all back. Her old self. She is visible again. She puts this mask on and off again, proving to herself how ethereal it is:
A famous African hunter describes how, when hunting, he kept the shape of the duiker or deer somewhere behind his eyes and this inner print fitted over the camoflauged beasts there were so hard to see among their patterns of light and shade: but in this way he did see them easily.
A woman walking in a sagging dress, with a heavy walk, and her hair -this above all- not conforming to the prints made by fashion, is not "set" to attract men's s-x. The same woman in a dress cut in this or that way, walking with her inner thermostat set just so- and click, she's fitting the pattern.
Men's attention is stimulated by signals no more complicated that what leads the gosling and for all her adult life, her s-xual life, ... she had been conforming, twitching like a puppet on those strings..." [p 186 Vintage ed.(US)]
What woman hasn't come to this realization and shuddered? You don't have to be approaching middle-age for that. This is classic second wave feminism. Along with scenes where she realizes how much humans apropriate things from other animals and how grotesque this is, it's dead-on accurate stuff, still true today but not earth-shaking (esp. for younger readers). It's old school. What sticks with us is the struggle that we all have to make over the same decision: do we stay in our own worlds where we've gained a certain amount of freedom or do we don those costumes and go back and play the role, only a little wiser now we know that it is a role? Is there a middle ground? How do we create space for that middle ground? That there is more of a middle ground now than there was for women then is thanks to those second wave feminists. Out of that middle ground, I think, grew third wave feminists. This review book looks like a good place to start for those who want to understand more about Doris Lessing as a second wave feminist novelist.
There was a part where she was remembering a scene with one of her children and one of them said something very insightful about either the helping professions or global inequities, I forget but which I thought I should mark at the time but didn't not having a pen or pencil nearby and now for the life of me I can't find it. Come to think of it, it was late when I remembered thinking I should mark it and now I'm wondering if I wasn't sleep-reading and imagined it.
At any rate, I thought this was a nice little summary of what Doris Lessing's work is like so I'll close with it.
Lessing's fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, Lessing has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality, the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novellas set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessing's courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa (from an online biography).
Photo credit: Chris Saunders