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In “The Small Personal Voice” and “When in the Future They Look Back on Us,” essays separated by thirty years, I see evidence of the ongoing tension between Lessing’s allegiance to the individual identity so valued in nineteenth century fiction and humanism and her attraction to a positive group identity. I underscore positive because of Lessing’s well-earned wariness of group domination. In “Group Minds,” she shows that wariness when she describes the “free” individual in Western societies and goes on to note:
Lessing’s examination of the relationship between individual identity and group identity produces a productive tension that accounts for so much of interest in her work over many years.
Nowhere is that tension more obvious or more interesting than in the “space fiction” that David Waterman so ably explores. Waterman writes convincingly of Lessing’s desire “to cut through the performance, the received ideas, and the habits and customs of our daily lives.” Drawing on a wide range of sources, he provides an interdisciplinary reading of the “space fiction” and maps Lessing’s brave exploration of the hierarchical landscapes that so often imprison us. Waterman offers a timely reading of Lessing for contemporary readers living in the landscape of globalization. He raises important questions about the human cost of order and progress—of what we are “walling in and walling out.”
Professor Margaret Moan Rowe
Purdue University