The Veld
The veld is an expanse of land in the Africa in which Lessing sets many of her stories that is mostly grassland broken up by the occasional shrub or tree. Its significance as symbol is clear from its recurrence as a kind of character. Scholars of Lessing’s work have attribute the specific symbolism to this purity of nature as the place where it achieves total completeness independent of the existence of man. But man must, of course intrude into the perfection of the veld, so the argument goes, this arrival of man into a situation of perfect unity is the force which creates human consciousness. Others take a less philosophical approach and split from this heady symbolism at the point of agreement on the veld representing the idea of perfection. From this perfection has arrived the confluence of ideological differences, imperialism and racism; the veld under this interpretation thus could be said to be symbolic of what mankind might have been.
The Heart
In her story “How I Finally Lost My Heart” Lessing creates a symbol that can be applied to pretty much everything she has ever written. Lessing’s views on romantic love are significantly less conventional than usual. In fact, she sees romantic love as perhaps the single greatest obstacle stopping individuals from achieving their goals. The heart is, of course, the iconic symbol of romantic love, but in Lessing’s story, not surprisingly, it is hardly the symbol one expects or has grown used to. Lessing holds a philosophical—perhaps even ideological—view that love is always under all circumstances a profoundly selfish and self-deluding experience. In order to reconcile this subversion of convention, one must literally lose their romantic symbol of the heart when falling in love if they are to have any shot at it not becoming the biggest speed bump on their road to success. Love means not expecting to receive someone else’s heart when you lose yours.
Animals
Animals play important symbolic roles in many stories by Lessing. The title characters in “Sparrows” are just going about their business of eating scraps throw to them by some diners when their natural behavior sparks a series of reactions that result in humans taking a closer look at their own motivations. The title character in “Our Friend Judith” by contrast makes an enormous life decision primarily the basis of mother cat’s perfectly natural if understandably upsetting decision to not just ignore a new litter of kittens, but actually kill one of them. One of her most anthologized stories, “Flight” features a homing pigeon as a central character. And then, of course, there are those pesky stars of "A Mild Attack of Locusts." What binds all of the many animals populating these stories is one simple thread: the animals behave as nature either intends or mandates. There is no consciousness there; they are part of the symbolic perfection of the veld.
The Nuisance
One of Lessing’s most subtly powerful stories features a native African wife who is killed by her husband essentially on the basis of a misapprehension of what his white colonial boss said about the matter. The white man is the boss in more ways than one; his word gets the wife of the other man murdered and his indifference to this result allows another human being to come to be seen everyone involved as merely nuisance. Lessing is famously anti-imperialism in her fiction and “The Nuisance” situates the dead black woman as a symbol for everything that has ever been important to the powerless which gets buried and forgotten simply because they don’t have to be important to the powerful.
The Tunnel
"Through the Tunnel” was published in 1955 by which time Lessing had already published two collections of short stories. “Through the Tunnel” is also a notable outlier for the author narratively since it features a very rare occurrence of a young boy as Lessing’s protagonist. Nevertheless, the title channel has come to take on a deeply symbolic resonance for this writer of so many stories about people trying to make it one point in time and place to another while facing odds stacked well against them. Lessing is far more noteworthy for her stories of young and older women making a trek through a symbolic tunnel to realize a coming of age, but ironically it is her idiosyncratic story about a young boy’s coming of age passage through an actual dangerous passageway that has so strongly shaped and defined the thematic foundation of her much of her entire canon.
