Children of Violence by Doris Lessing

First published:Martha Quest, 1952; A Proper Marriage, 1954; A Ripple from the Storm, 1958; Landlocked, 1965; and The Four-Gated City, 1969

Type of work: Social chronicle

Time of work: The late 1930’s to 1968, with an appendix dated as late as 1997

Locale: An African farm; Zambesia, an African city; and Bloomsbury, England

Principal Characters:

• Martha Quest, the protagonist, who grows from a rebellious and self-absorbed adolescent to an intelligent, intuitive woman
• Mrs. Quest, Martha’s mother, a hypocritical, selfish woman
• Mr. Quest, Martha’s father, a sickly, dominated man
• Joss Cohen, Martha’s Socialist friend
• Solly Cohen, Joss’s Zionist brother and Martha’s friend
• Douglas Knowell, Martha’s first husband
• Jasmine Cohen, a politically active friend of Martha
• Mr. Maynard, the magistrate of Zambesia
• Anton Hesse, a Communist Party member and Martha’s second husband
• Thomas Stern, a Polish Jew who becomes Martha’s lover
• Mark Coldridge, for whom Martha works as a secretary and who eventually becomes her lover
• Lynda Coldridge, his insane wife
• Jack, another of Martha’s lovers
• Phoebe Coldridge, a political organizer and Martha’s friend
• Jimmy Woods, a technologist and science-fiction writer
• Francis Coldridge, Mark’s son
• Paul Coldridge, Mark’s nephew

The Novels

Over seventeen years, from 1952 to 1969, Doris Lessing wrote a series of five novels under the title “Children of Violence.” In them, she chronicles the life of Martha Quest: an adolescent who scorns her parents’ Victorian principles, through a young woman’s two failed marriages and a flirtation with Communism, to an independent woman who tries to live actively rather than passively. Lessing, in her essay “A Small Personal Voice,” states that the overriding question addressed in each of the five novels is: “What is due to the collective and what to the individual conscience.” Thus, the novels them selves, as well as Martha, move constantly between these two poles.

In the first volume, Martha Quest, Lessing introduces her fifteen-year-old protagonist, Martha Quest, a child of the veld who is already starting to rebel against her narrow-minded and dominating mother and her sickly father, who lives under the emotional shadow of World War I. Though her childhood has been spent on a farm, Martha is widely read and eagerly, yet naively, absorbs any and all ideas that might put her at odds with her parents’ generation and their views on the “native problem” and sex. Her two means of escape, besides her books, are to wander over the veld and dream of what might be, and to visit the Cohen boys (Joss and Solly) in town.

Martha’s escape into dreams and visions helps lead her into each new phase of her life throughout all five novels, and one of the most important visions occurs early in Martha Quest. Sitting under her favorite tree hoping to escape Mrs. Quest’s nagging, Martha stares across the veld and “sees” a “noble city” with “splashing fountains, and the sound of flutes.” She notices “many-fathered children” of all colors moving through the splendor of the “foursquared and colonnaded” ancient city of the future. This is Martha’s vision of a world of unity and peace for which she longs. Her second means of escape is the Cohen brothers, Joss, a Socialist, and Solly, a Zionist, with whom she exchanges books and ideas regarding political, racial, and psychological ideas. Until she leaves the farm, however, she is unable to put these ideas to the test.

When she moves to Zambesia, Martha is immediately pulled in three directions—social, political, and sexual—yet she attempts to form a “collective” unity by partaking of all three. She finds herself transformed into “Matty,” a desirable female of the reigning white social set, and she drinks, dances, and flirts to excess. At the same time, Joss introduces her to Jasmine Cohen, his cousin, and her group of liberal-leftist intellectuals and politicals, from whom she hears talk of breaking down racial barriers and hints of a growing Communist Party in Africa. Hoping to bridge the gap between her opposing social and political groups, Martha has her first sexual encounter with Adolph King, a Jew, which raises criticism from both groups.

Moving between these three worlds, Martha manages to remain basically uncommitted, until one day, when her political conscience is jogged to life. She witnesses a line of barefoot and shabby African natives led handcuffed together to the magistrate’s office on some flimsy charge. She watches the natives’ bound hands, “the working hands, clasped together,” and emotionally takes up their cause. Her reading becomes more and more political, and she starts attending more meetings. Yet her attention is diverted by Douglas Knowell, who subscribes in theory only to politically radical ideas. Unaware of his shallowness, she has an affair with him and marries him. Presiding over her wedding is Mr. Maynard, Zambesia’s white magistrate, who has followed (and will continue to follow) Martha’s political awareness with some concern. He watches as she leaves for her honeymoon, and he predicts the upcoming war, racial unrest, and Martha’s divorce. On this pessimistic note, the novel ends.

A Proper Marriage, the second novel, concerns itself with Martha’s growing realization of a woman’s role as well as the dissolution of her marriage, all against the backdrop of World War II. She now finds herself, somewhat unwillingly, linked to a new group made up of pregnant wives whose husbands are soldiers. While waiting to deliver her baby, Martha examines the biological and emotional bonds of womanhood. In keeping with the title Children of Violence (for Martha, herself, was born during World War I), Caroline, her daughter, is born on the eve of World War II. Thus, the second generation has arrived. With Douglas off to war, Martha plays her role as mother but keeps up with the political movements by way of meetings and books. Her idealistic notions of fulfillment through motherhood and marriage contrast sharply with her idealistic notions of independence through political activism. As she tries to work out a compromise, Douglas, unfit for active duty because of ulcers, returns and thrusts Martha into the role of a young suburban housewife. With servants, tea parties, and sundowners at the local club, Martha slips passively into a life of complacency for several years.

When boredom finally sets in, Martha begins reading again, and she sees the same problems still surfacing: racial unrest, the growing Communist movement, and conflicting news about the war. She renews her political connections against Douglas’ wishes and attends political meetings while resuming a friendship with Jasmine, who knows who is who among the political groups. Thus, Martha is once again pulled in different directions. Before marriage and motherhood, and a social-political consciousness. She chooses the latter. Martha tells Douglas of her decision to leave him, claiming her right to do as she please. He immediately turns into a wronged and self-righteous husband, who receives sympathy from all, while Martha is seen as negligent and self-serving. They enact in the last few weeks of their marriage, a melodramatic series of hysterical outbursts. Once again, Mr. Maynard watches Martha drive away, but this time she leaves behind her husband and child. He quietly calls her a “deserter” yet just as quietly wishes her luck. Thus her not-so-proper marriage ends, along with the second novel.

At the opening of A Ripple from the Storm, Mrs. Quest has ceremoniously disowned Martha in a registered letter but cannot resist visiting her with news of Caroline and criticism of Martha’s newly acquired group of friends, the “local Reds.” Since she left Douglas, Martha has been busy learning the local political ropes from Jasmine, while having a brief affair with William, one of the local military men involved in left-wing politics. Despite the affair, however, her energies are largely devoted to political activism. She plunges into political busywork, typing speeches and articles, delivering pamphlets to the “coloured quarters,” reading Socialist and Communist manifestos, and attending meetings. She neglects her personal life, and her affair with William ends.

As in Martha Quest, in which she drinks and dances too much and eats and sleeps too little, here she does things to excess, literally working herself into a fever. During this illness, Martha has another vision. She dreams of “that country,” a land “pale, misted, flat; gulls cried like children around violet coloured shores.” She recognizes England in her dream but not before she has another vision, this time of Africa. In it, she sees an abandoned ancient country, and in a pit in the earth, “an immense lizard, an extinct saurian that had been imprisoned a thousand ages ago in the rock.” Coming out of her fever, Martha finds Anton Hesse nursing her. He is a Communist refugee from Adolf Hitler’s Germany and an active party member who seems to have ice behind his blue eyes and scorn for the political amateurs with whom he finds himself. Yet during her fever, Anton offers her a rare glimpse of his inner humanity, and Martha feels herself drawn to him. She believes that he is “logically right,” but somehow “inhuman and wrong.” Thus, as their relationship grows, so does their group.

New members start to join, such as Andrew McGrew, who struggles with Anton’s pure party rhetoric; Jimmie Jones, a “working class boy,” whose humanistic ideals conflict with Anton’s; and Athen, a Greek refugee, who refuses to lose sight of the needs of the individual. Thus, as the group, and Martha, search for a “collective” unity, they are also dissolving into factions. Petty arguments and jealousies break out and loyalties are questioned; still the group perseveres and is even drawn into a larger circle of political dissidents composed of some of the older and more powerful citizens of Zambesia. The racial and political issues are soon joined by women’s rights issues, and even while Martha is drawn further into political activities she manages to remain detached.

Her one commitment is to Anton, whom she decides to marry so that he will not be deported. Mr. Maynard again presides over the ceremony, which is wedged in between political meetings; directly following the wedding, Martha realizes that she has again married in haste and for the wrong reasons. It is a marriage of political convenience, one ruled by reason rather than passion. As their political group begins to dissolve, so does Martha’s marriage. Martha’s faith in political change and unity, too, begins to fail. Instead of action, all she has seen from Anton is talk. In the closing dialogue, Anton insists that the group must continue to try, but Martha, knowing the futility of their task, turns her back and falls asleep.

After two failed marriages, Martha is again alone. She finds secretarial work and tries to redirect her personal and political life. In Landlocked, Martha has two visions which parallel her physical and emotional states. In the first, she sees herself in a large house with “half a dozen different rooms.” She moves guardedly from one to another, making sure that they remain apart. If she fails in this task, the house will “crumble.” In the second vision, she sees herself isolated on a “high dry place” from which she watches people sailing away. She tries to reach them but cannot cross the distance that separates them. Thus, she remains “landlocked.” The solution to the problem posed by these visions will be England and Mark Coldridge’s house. Before this can happen, however, Martha meets Thomas Stern, a Polish Jew, with whom she experiences her first truly emotional, physical, and psychic relationship. When her affair with him is interrupted, she is left standing on the edge of a new awareness, yet she is unable to understand how to proceed. All she can do is wait for Thomas’ return, because somehow he has the answer for her.

Yet when he does return from fighting for Israel, he has undergone such a great change that there is a barrier between him and Martha. He leaves again to work in some outlying African villages, and while working, he contracts “blackwater” fever and dies. Martha inherits a manuscript he has kept, and once she starts to read it she realizes that Thomas had become two people. The notes are a blend of native legends, traditions, recipes, and jokes, with his own references to Poland and Israel mixed in with Eastern philosophical outpourings. To Martha’s credit, she makes some sense out of Thomas’ ramblings, and this helps to prepare her for her own psychological split, which she will voluntarily undergo once in England. It is her first clue to the merging of the individual with the collective.

By now, Martha realizes that Zambesia is not ready for the type of revolution she has envisioned, so she plans to leave for England. She is twenty-nine when she attends one last political meeting in Africa, and she finds herself out of place among the younger people, who are making their own political ripples: Sympathy with Russia is out; sympathy for China is in. The war is over, and a new order is beginning. As Martha packs her bags, the last thing she throws in is Thomas’ manuscript, and the last person to whom she speaks is Jasmine, who will remain behind hoping for a new brand of Communism from China which will restore “calm, sense, humanity.” She then leaves Martha standing alone on a dark street.

In the fifth and final novel, The Four-Gated City, Martha arrives in post-World War II London and for the first time feels a sense of independence. She takes a job as secretary for Mark Coldridge, a writer, and during the next twenty years she evolves into his colleague, friend, and housekeeper, and lover. Yet during this period, too, she becomes sexually involved with a man named Jack, and politically involved with Mark’s cousin Phoebe Coldridge. While she gives herself over to both men physically she remains on the outside emotionally. She senses that there is something incomplete about her development and turns again to Thomas’ manuscript, for it hints of a need to become connected to people not merely sexually or politically but psychically as well.

For this last stage in her development, Martha turns to Mark and his “mad” wife, Lynda Coldridge. Mark replaces the place Thomas had in her emotional and sexual growth, and in some strange way, Mark’s own writings have the same “feel” as Thomas’ manuscript. In fact, he not only continues where Thomas left off but also he incorporates Martha’s own vision of a “foursquared” city into his utopian dreams. As for Lynda, after years spent in mental hospitals, she takes up residence in the basement of the Coldridge house, moving in and out of spells of insanity. Martha ventures down into the basement more and more often, until she spends an entire month with Lynda during which Martha herself moves in and out of her own brand of voluntary insanity. It is during this inner search that Martha’s visions begin to take hold. The dream house of Landlocked, with all of its separate rooms, becomes both the Coldridge house with all of its people that Martha watches over, and the rooms of her own mind and spirit which she explores more and more frequently. As for the “foursquared” city, it becomes a pastoral island peopled by a telepathic group of survivors who help to repopulate the earth with a new kind of person.

What makes Martha’s “foursquared” vision possible? In her own search for unity and peace, the Cold War is escalating, “Communism” is becoming a dangerous word, violence is on the rise, racism has failed to disappear, and society, on the whole, seems to be heading toward a cataclysm of some unidentified nature. Echoing these calamities, the Coldridge household dissolves, but only physically. Psychically, the members of the household have connected with one another and have produced, in their own fashion, the possibility of a new world. Mark leaves for Africa to establish a utopian desert city, and Martha remains in England, walking in the dark along the water’s edge. She knows at last that the unity she searched for all of her life has been within her own mind. She simply could not see it.

In the appendix, there are fragmented accounts of a pilot who, suffering from nerve-gas exposure, crashed his atomic-armed aircraft into England’s shores. Great Britain is destroyed, its population all but annihilated. There are also accounts of Mark’s attempts to help with the “Rescue” by offering his desert city as a place of refuge and healing for the victims. Finally, there is a letter from Martha, telling of her escape to an island, where she witnessed the evolution of a new type of child of violence, one who could “see” and “hear” telephatically, and one not bound by skin color or gender. Martha’s vision of unity and peace has finally arrived, twenty years after the cataclysm and sixty years after her life on the African farm. It is 1997, and Martha is one of seven people left on the island, but, she writes, “more are being born now in hidden places,” and some day “all the human race” will be like the “many-fathered children” born of violence.

The Characters

Martha Quest, as her name suggests, is a character in search of something, from the time she is fifteen, at the opening of Martha Quest, to the last pages of The Four-Gated City. What that something is remains just outside her reach, no matter which direction she takes: sexual, political, racial, intellectual, communal, individual, internal, or external. She tries each direction, some more than once, and in some way each is a dead end. She is trying to make sense out of a world gone mad with violence and tyranny. She is also a person trying to see how the individual fits into the “collective” side of humanity. Her first attempts to fit in are largely external and come in the shape of groups and causes. Yet she eventually sees something in the fabric of each group she joins that does not hold together. It is not until she comes to terms with herself, in the most basic and psychological way (she literally and voluntarily enters her own madness) that she realizes that her search inward gives her the link she needs to join humanity. In the political groups, no matter how actively involved she seems, Martha remains passive, pulled one way and then another, and resisting only when futility takes hold of her. Conversely, her journey inward, into her own psyche, becomes her most active moment, in which she controls her own destiny by choosing to return from madness and live.

Yet the groups are important to Martha’s growth, her search, and with each group come characters who help to influence her or show her a direction. In her mother, Martha sees everything she does not want to become: puritanical, hypocritical, selfish, and domineering. Martha comes to terms with many people in her life, but never with her mother. At best, she comes to accept her mother’s ways, but she cannot understand them. As for her father, the chance for a connection with him is interrupted by his continuing illnesses and his willingness to live through past war experiences. Thus, her mother and father come to represent the “family tyranny” she tries desperately to escape.

One of the few contacts she has outside her family in her teenage years is with Joss and Solly Cohen, two Jewish intellectual brothers. They teach and challenge Martha by giving her books and discussing political and racial matters with her, becoming her introduction into the world of intellectual activism. Through them, she is able to question much of what she has learned from her parents. Like most of the characters in the first four volumes, they help to further Martha’s development and progression from one group to the next.

Douglas Knowell offers her an identity that is both social and sexual, but he turns out to be almost as narrow-minded and conscious of status as her mother. His conventional civil service job and suburban mentality are closer to Mrs. Quest’s dream of a fulfilling life than to Martha’s. Thus, she seeks refuge in a political group with the help of Jasmine Cohen, a woman completely immersed in political activity. When Martha first meets her, she is efficient, controlled, and active: everything Martha believes she lacks in herself. Yet Jasmine is also a solitary human being, committed to causes yet, strangely, untouched by them. Causes seem to be Jasmine’s reason for living, and if one cause fails, she moves easily to the next.

Somewhere between the conventional world of Douglas and the political world of Jasmine stands Mr. Maynard. Martha comes to know him in many forms. He represents the old order of Zambesia, both socially and politically. Yet he is also on the fringes of change. Ultimately, however, he is merely an observer of change rather than a participant. At times, he is critical of Martha; at times he is supportive. In the end, like Martha’s mother, he, too, clings to the old ways.

The next two people in Martha’s life represent two different poles of her own personality: reason and emotion. In Anton Hesse, she finds a man fanatically driven by both the ideology and the bureaucracy of the Communist Party. Although he is the leader of Martha’s political group, he is more concerned with following Party rules than with the possibility of actually bringing about change. He is rational to the point of seeming ’’inhuman.’’ In direct contrast is Thomas Stern, an emotionally active man who, more than anyone else in the series, influences Martha. He lives emotionally and psychically on the edge, pulling Martha with him. She, however, is not yet ready, and so he pulls away from her and slips into madness. Like Martha, he is searching for the answers to fundamental questions. In his struggle between sanity and insanity, he produces the manuscript in which Martha finds the seed of an answer.

In England, Martha meets a string of people who either parallel the people she left behind or become extremes or extensions of those people. Jack opens up new and erotic worlds for her; Phoebe Coldridge is a politically committed woman much like Jasmine; Jimmy Wood is an emotionless man concerned only with the technological manipulation of man’s brain; and Paul and Francis Coldridge correspond to Martha’s own view of herself as a child divided by what is socially acceptable and socially unorthodox. The two most important people in Martha’s adulthood are Mark Coldridge, a writer, and Lynda, his insane wife.

These two people carry on, in spirit, what Thomas Stern began: a search for inner unity and its relation to external reality. Mark, like an earlier Martha, looks for answers in books and in external projects which take him into areas of history, politics, psychology, technology, and utopianism. Lynda, on the other hand, is directly responsible for Martha’s true inner journey, for Lynda is “mad.” From her, Martha learns to develop telepathic and psychic sensibilities and a desire to descend into herself. Lynda’s problem, however, is that while she has periods of lucidity, like Thomas Stern, she never fully recovers from or learns how to control her inner journeys. Thus, Mark remains Martha’s rational and outer self, while Lynda represents Martha’s irrational and inner self. By the end of The Four-Gated City, Martha moves between both worlds, the inner and outer.

Critical Context

Because it took Lessing nearly two decades to complete the five novels, critics have not had an easy time with Children of Violence. Was it a Bildungsroman, a roman fleuve, a political manifesto, social criticism, a feminist tract? As it turns out, it is something of each. From the start, Lessing had the direction and theme of the novels clearly in mind, and she herself calls it a “hybrid.” The novels are intensely personal, bordering on the autobiographical, and contain many of Lessing’s political views and psychological leanings. Because her commitment to them and the ideas contained within them are so strong, critics, according to Lessing, have failed either to see them or to take them seriously.

Although early reviewers and critics had trouble with Lessing’s Children of Violence, it has gained prominence as one of her most significant and successful works, second only to The Golden Notebook (1962) in its depiction of the modern experience.

Bibliography

Brewster, Dorothy. Doris Lessing, 1965.

Draine, Betsy. Substance Under Pressure: Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 1983.

Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Offers feminist criticism of Lessing, among other writers. Although Greene focuses mostly on The Golden Notebook, the essays offer insight into Lessing’s other works.

Kaplan, Carey, and Ellen Cronan Rose, eds. Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook.” New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1989. An excellent close look at The Golden Notebook, with helpful applications of contemporary feminist theory.

Pickering, Jean. Understanding Doris Lessing. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Contains good summaries of the novels, with insightful commentary.

Pratt, Annis, and L. S. Dembo, eds. Doris Lessing: Critical Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974. A collection of essays on Lessing’s work, containing an excellent interview with Lessing conducted by Florence Howe and some early feminist criticism.

Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. An excellent examination of the Children of Violence series as it pertains to the social construction of gender and identity.

Rose, Ellen Cronan. The Tree Outside the Window: Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence, 1976.

Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. This book gives special attention to Lessing’s focus on human consciousness—what the theme means in her work and how she challenges the limits of consciousness in her prose.

Schlueter, Paul. The Novels of Doris Lessing, 1973.

Sprague, Claire, and Virginia Tiger, eds. Critical Essays on Doris Lessing. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. A collection of insightful essays on Lessing’s work.