Feminist problematical issues in Doris Lessing's stories and the attempt to construct subjective individuality

This study aims to analyze the characters of Doris Lessing's short stories including Wine, He, The Other Woman, One Off the Short List, A Woman on a Roof, How I Finally Lost My Heart, A Man and Two Women, Between Men, The Witness, To Nineteen Room selected from To Nineteen Room story book in terms of characters' desire to reach the existential integrity in the context of problematic dimension that we can characterize as the attempt to construct the subjective individuality through feminism. Women who lived in the twentieth century had more freedom and opportunities than women in previous years. In spite of more freedom and opportunities, there is not much difference in the emotional world of women towards the problems that they encounter. Problems such as women's financial problems, family and social responsibilities, the difficulties that they encounter in professional life, love desires and marriage issues have prevented characters from realizing their own potential. The protagonists of analyzed stories have become the women who awaken, interrogate and discover themselves after a troubled process. The characters who refuse to obey the traditional roles, imposed and socially accepted rules constitute the complex and deep side of the stories with their struggles. Lessing responds delicately to the globally featured troubles, screams and breakdowns of characters who sometimes experience physical migration or mental migration with the aim of having freedom, individual identity and personalities. In general terms, the art of Lessing focuses on her efforts to have existential integrity through a feminist attitude. But her feminism goes beyond populist feminism. In other words, the author who has determined a peculiar feminist attitude prioritizes "women's rights advocacy" in a realistic manner. Therefore, despite all the persistence of feminists, she does not consider herself as a feminist author. The author's desire to reach subjective individualism and individual integrity focuses on an axis such as the construction of existential identity. In most of her stories, wee see that the individual but mostly the women take the model of self-struggle out of imposed model roles. This struggle could be summarized as constructing, reconstructing or protecting the existential integrity of the characters who somehow become aware of their subjective, individual and sexual identity. This attitude moves them out of the traditional norms on the one hand and on the other hand it reaches them to the universal. In this study, how the characters who are self-alienated, to experience meaning problems and struggle to have subjective and individual integrity recognize the existential difficulties and problems that they experience; what kind of solutions they are trying to present as a member of this class; what kind of consciousness-raising processes sexually discriminated women have undergone as a result of the problems that they encounter towards the family and the society are analyzed.