Disillusionment
More specifically, political disillusionment is a recurring theme in the stories of Lessing and, even more so, in her novels. It lingers and lurks in the background of stories in which it does not take front and center. The gap between political idealism and actual practice creates a psychic dislocation for many of Lessing’s characters that inexorably leads to disillusionment. The disillusion, ironically, often is the spark that leads to action. Even in a story as removed from the issues of politics as the strange and almost bizarre “To Room Nineteen” Lessing cannot stop from introducing this excavation of idealism. Here is subtly expressed in the issues related to age and gender under Marxism. That coloring of a recurring motif indicates that the disillusionment almost certainly has a very personal stimulus.
Real Life Lack of Resolution
Lessing’s stories are not the type that seek to bring everything to a tidy resolution that leaves that reader with certainty everything is going to work out for the best. To be sure, she is not a pessimistic writer, seeking to put characters through a pointless struggle destined to end in disappointment. Lessing consistently takes her readers through the struggle to reconcile those feelings of hopeless and disillusion with the human urgency to fix it and make it right. She guides them right up to the point at which something has been learned, hope has been renewed, illusions have been put away and things are moving in the right direction, but she stops at the point where real life mandates it: nobody knows how the future is going to turn out in real life. Why should they expect anything different in the mirror of real life called fiction?
Love is Not a Many Splendored Thing
Time and again in Lessing’s short stories, the best intentions of characters are hampered by what is typically an obstacle in most fiction, but an obstacle which is destined to be overcome: romance. Lessing may not be a pessimistic writer when it comes to possibilities, but she takes a hardline pragmatic view toward the chasm between the virtues people ascribe to love and the vices they work so hard to deny. Lessing paints a very complicated portrait of how love affects the intentions, desires and motivations of her characters. Generally speaking, what is termed love is really just self-interest and the demonstration of a weakness with a propensity to see what one wants to see in others. That propensity to deny truth is what gets her characters in trouble, not the fact that they happen be experiencing what most people charitably refer to as the “blindness” of caring for another person.
Anti-Imperialism
Considering the sheer volume of Lessing’s fiction that is set in Africa, the only question was whether Lessing would take the path of supporting imperialism or rebelling against it. Many writers in the same situation took the former so it is certainly not to be assumed that taking the latter was to be expected. The political disillusionment is, of course, one that seeps into and becomes an underlying structure of most of her stories set in “colonist” regions. Perhaps the most artful is one in which the opposition to imperialist ideology is the most subtle and understated. The title of “The Nuisance” refers to an inconvenient wife of a native who essentially dies because of her husband’s misapprehension of his white colonial boss’ advice on how to take care of the situation. The story is a stunning example of just how deeply Lessing despise imperialist conceptions precisely because it doesn’t really seem to be about that much at all.
