Alienation' in selected works by doris lessing

Abstract EN

This paper displays the effect of seclusion and alienation that the British writer Doris Lessing has experienced in her early youth in an isolated farm in South Rhodesia, after the family moved from Persia.

Lessing African experience as an alien to both black and white societies supplied her with a prospective comprehension of the white, middle-class and “consequently members of a ruling political establishment (who) have often found themselves alienated from their own privileged society and drawn to what is different in the native African culture, realizing that they can never be of it” 1 She lived her early age suffering from the impact of life in exile, life on the African veld that conquers its white colonialist invaders by its only parable alienation and thus her suffering from internal as well as external alienation is reflected in her novels.

This paper tries to probe the falsities of the colonial myth of white superiority, the affliction, loss of identity and the necessity of blacks and whites remaining separate.