AMBIVALENT MOTHERHOOD IN A PROPER MARRIAGE
AMBIVALENT MOTHERHOOD IN A PROPER MARRIAGE

Summary/Abstract: Doris Lessing’s life and work have always been marked by the tension between authorship and motherhood, a theme she confronted both personally and in her fiction. This paper presents Doris Lessing’s novel, A Proper Marriage which is the second one in her sequence entitled Children of Violence, having as main character, Martha Quest, who is Doris Lessing’s alter ego, the first three novels of the sequence being semi-autobiographical. This novel, as the title suggests represents a detailed analysis of marriage and motherhood which is not presented as an idealized fulfilment of womanhood but as a contradictory and ambivalent experience.

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