Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction By David Waterman

The ruling ideology is based on a foundation which depends on binary opposition to create and classify its subjects, and these categories are then accepted by the larger society as natural rather than cultural. According to Lessing, a society where groups of people form and then oppose one another is a society that is perpetually and hopelessly violent. The solution which she proposes is to (re)discover individual and collective androgyny, a development which requires that the system as it exists be overhauled; she begins by revealing the fictions which are the foundation of an ideology of opposition and exclusion, and finally, a foundation of violence.