Configuration of alternative spaces through performative and nomadic acts in Doris Lessing's short fiction

Doris Lessing is a protean author of the twentieth century due to her experimental writing style and a diversity of issues, ranging from race and ethnicity to class and gender. The richness in the material and form of her writing can also be traced in how she values spaces in her fiction set in Africa and England: wild nature, cultivated settler lands and homesteads in the African continent as well as a variety of closed, open and transitory spaces in the city, gain importance with respect to human intervention. Her two collections of African stories – This Was the Old Chief's Country and The Sun Between Their Feet; two collections of stories set in Europe and England – To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories and The Temptation of Jack Orkney: Collected Stories; and finally, one collection of stories and sketches London Observed lend themselves to an analysis based on the relationship between space and gender. Within the framework of recent theories of space by Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja, which are related to Judith Butler's and Rosi Braidotti's theories on performativity and nomadism, this dissertation discusses to what extent both genders, particularly women, help to constitute an alternative mode of thinking about private/closed, public/open and transitory spaces, and transform them into lived/social ones based on experience, appropriation and movement. For this purpose, in each chapter the stories in each collection are classified in terms of space and one narrative from that collection is analysed in detail. The variety of spaces in the stories – from the smallest unit to the largest scale – chosen for textual analyses mark at not only the physical parameters of space where everyday activities take place as well as the thoughts regarding social codes and norms that shape human behaviours and social relations, but also the possibilities of configuring these spaces in new ways through the characters' performative and nomadic acts. In addition, this dissertation also discusses the gradual change in the concept of home from one story to another. "The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange" depicts the appropriation of the private house of a family as a home-country-like space and its transformation into a social space for all inhabitants such as the children, the adolescents and the adults in "Getting off the Altitude". The stories set in England demonstrate how the meaning of home changes from a semi-open space in "A Woman on a Roof" to temporary spaces in "An Old Woman and Her Cat". Finally, transitory spaces like a taxi and a city are discussed in "Storms" from London Observed. Through these discussions space is revealed to be a fluid entity changing with social intervention. Keywords: Doris Lessing, Thirdspace, Social Space, Nomad, Gender Performativity