The Differences of Individualities

Like the city, in a great movement, the members of the Coldridge family must face the nature of their own individuality. Paul’s search for individuality triggers the growth of every individual. Paul keeps stealing things as a substitute for “stealing love,” and he looks for endless tolerance from his school so that he can feel that he is loved (FGC 338). The moral crisis that Paul brings to the family is similar to what Gilligan proposes in her ethics of care. Instead of the “justice” sought by the male psychoanalyst, Lawrence A. Blum explains that Gilligan’s idea of care is “founded in a sense of concrete connection and direct response between persons, a direct sense of connection which exists prior to moral beliefs about what is right or wrong or which principle to accept” (52). Paul’s attempt to steal things also reveals his need to receive care through the direct interaction between people instead of the abstract moral concern of the society.

Confronting the transformation of the children, Lynda also tries to adjust herself in her role as a mother. When she decides to overcome her dependence on the drugs given to her in the hospital, it happens to be the time of “Francis’s determination to reclaim his mother and his home” (FGC 348). Knapp suggests that the “the necessity of guarding the future by nurturing the younger generation” as a motif “remains unchanged in Lessing’s work” (97). Their effort develops a kind of interaction which recognises the need of each other. Francis’s attempt to communicate makes Lynda feel that she and her basement are no longer “forbidden territory, unclean, like lepers,’” so that Lynda could also “learn to be with him, not to feel ill, not to be upset” (FGC 347). Her battle is also with orthodox psychiatry which tries “to do away with the autonomy of the individual who was conceived of as an essentially passive entity conditioned, shaped and moulded by the environment” (Wilson, Only Halfway 115).

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Lynda faces an even more arduous battle since she also must confront Dorothy and Paul’s dependence on her and their anger towards her. Ironically, Dorothy and Paul are dependent on Lynda because their differences are not recognised by society. In The Shadow of the Other Subject: Intersubjectivity and

Gender in Psychoanalysis, Jessica Benjamin explains the concept of intersubjectivity

from the perspective of object relations and proposes that “difference, hate, failure of love can be surmounted not because the self is unified, but because it can tolerate being divided” (105). Through recognition that the “other” is outside oneself, one might therefore come to accept the difference of each other, “not to be felt as a coercive command to ‘become’ the other, and therefore not be defended against by assimilating it to self” (Benjamin 95). However, Benjamin explains further that this kind of “externality” allows a “representation of the other as simultaneously outside control and nonthreatening—a form of negation that social relations of dominance enforced by violence intrinsically prevent” (96). As a matronly friend of Lynda, Dorothy tries to prove herself recovered by being competent, so she needs to demonstrate “her stability by mothering Lynda, and dealing with everyday necessities” (Knapp 96). She criticises Lynda for being “nothing-but-a child” because Lynda easily gets along with Paul (FGC 388). Dorothy uses drugs to urge Lynda back to her company since she herself is too weak to fight the prejudices of society for their difference. The big machine of the medical system, the rise of Big Pharma, forces Lynda to be included in the social system and to be “drugged to the eyeballs” (FGC 354). While Martha goes to Dr. Lamb for her inner voices and visions, such as her premonition of Dorothy slashing her wrists (FGC 356), she is irritated that society confers on Dr. Lamb such great power that could deprive others’ freedom with “its inclusiveness, its arbitraries, its freedom to behave as it wished” (FGC 357).

Meanwhile, like Lynda, who could not detach herself from others’ expectations, Martha must struggle with her matron’s role in the house to conduct “a holding operation,” when ”there seems no centre in the house, nothing to hold it together” (FGC 391). Pickering mentions that Martha has become “the matron, the

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figure whom in the opening scene of Martha’s Quest she most hated and feared” (81). According to Klein’s idea, infants internalise what they perceive from the outer world.6 It seems that although Martha tries to escape from her mother’s influence, she is still playing the “old role” by creating a “forceful authoritarian” persona, like putting on a “new coat” (FGC 392). She needs to be watchful of everyone’s needs and moods and use any kind of “tactics” to run things, keep things going. Gilligan proposes that “[s]ensitivity to the needs of others and the assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to attend to voices other than their own and to include in their judgment other points of view” (16). Deluged with this need to take on the different trivia of everyone, she feels herself to be “a mass of fragments, or facets, or bits of mirror reflecting qualities embodied in other people” (FGC 391). In the matron role, she has to pick up these fragments and make them whole. However, Martha thus can break through her personal experience and from the perspective of impersonality, she is able to set her past free. “The rejuvenation a young girl gives her mother or an older woman is a setting free into impersonality, a setting free, also from her personal past” (FGC 429). While her day is “filled with a million details, fragments, reflected off the faceted mirror that was one’s personality,” she also seems to respond “all the time, every second, to these past selves” (FGC 395). Nevertheless, she must pay the price that her sense of selfhood is so stripped away that “of all the times in her life she had never been less Martha than now” and her “self had floated away and become part of that timeless and fluid creature” (FGC 428).