Language as a Gendered Property in Doris Lessing’s Feminist Utopia The Cleft

Under the debate of the role of language as a gendered property in the Utopian/Dystopian reading of The Cleft, language will be considered both, as the property of woman writers, here Lessing and as a gendered-ability of humans to communicate. In Lessing’s story the clefts serene utopian life is threatened by the sudden birth of the first male baby or Squirt. They are born to the clefts’ female-only community as we are born into language, we are born- more precisely- into patriarchal language (Bennett and Royle, 2004, p. 126) though Lessing, through her own version of history, has the chance to put this order in reverse, and deconstruct the notion that language is Man-made. The significance of language lies in the fact that, language-- besides featuring as an instrument enforcing a dystopian male order-- has also a liberating potential in the feminist dystopias (Cavalcanti, 2000, p. 152). Peter Fitting (1985) also believes that, one of the recurrent themes of recent feminist analysis is the recognition that the forms and practices of discourse, including language, are socially constructed and contribute to the maintenance of the status quo (p. 164). Nancy A. Walker (1990) also asserts that language as the ability to speak and to tell one's own story, is the focal point of the contemporary novels written by women (p. 38). She believes that women desire to make language their own property, in order to overcome their oppression by men, thus affirming that women's struggle over language is tightly linked to the goals of women's movement (p. 42). French and American feminism have different views about the relationship between woman and language, since the former sees woman denied a language to express her own experience, while the latter sees her capable of owning language as a dominant discourse for her own purposes. Whichever trend one takes, language does have a tremendous importance in feminism and consequently in feminist fiction. Walker (1990), regarding language as a significant issue in women's novels, has classified the approaches toward it into two categories: one group includes challenges to male dominated language, either by appropriating male discourse for women's purpose by altering or subverting it. The second group of approaches is composed of those that emphasize women's exclusion from language—their silence (p. 43). Words or more accurately language has the capacity to free a woman, to engage her in fantasy, and to help her to become empowered.