A Granddaughter of Violence: Doris Lessing's Good Girl as Terrorist

British novelist Doris Lessing is probably best known to general readers for her five-novel series, beginning with Martha Quest and ending with The Four-Gated City, that is called collectively The Children of Violence, and for her widely acclaimed masterpiece, The Golden Notebook. Some, perhaps, will be familiar with her departure from realism—Briefing for a Descent into Hell, a journey into madness, or the science fiction novels of the Canopus set— and her return, seen most recently in The Good Terrorist and The Fifth Child. Moving from social realism to myth, from Communist to Sufi influences, her writing is full of unexpected turnings. Yet dip into Lessing anywhere and you find the same twofold question: How can an individual grow beyond destructive conflict within the context of a violent world, and how can a violent world be transformed, socially and politically, into a better sphere of existence?

To juxtapose Lessing, with her political orientation, and Karen Homey may at first seem incongruous. In an article praising Horney's early writing on female psychology, for instance, Dee Garrison (1981) deplores the lack of “mature political commitment” in her later work and quotes Paul Goodman's accusation that she taught “a psychology of nonrevolutionary social adjustment” (pp. 687-688). Garrison's argument deemphasizes, however, what Horney herself saw as the philosophical basis of all her work: her faith in the human capacity for change. All her studies of neurosis contain criticism, explicit or implied, of our modern competitive culture; and although, as a clinician, she kept her focus on the individual, she shared the belief Marion Vlastos ascribes to Lessing and R. D. Laing “in the connection between what human beings are in their innermost selves and how they behave collectively” (Vlastos, 1976/1986, p. 127).

If anything, novelist and psychologist may differ most in their mature visions of the possibilities for change. Whereas Horney's final book (1950) ends wit