Victoria Rosner
Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1999), 59-89

This essay scrutinizes Doris Lessing’s reconstructions of home in her autobiographical writings through the lens of early twentieth-century pamphlet guides to Southern Rhodesian settler culture and architecture. The essay considers more specifically the ways the architecture of the mother-daughter relationship is constructed in the context of empire and motherhood is materially reproduced in relation to the family home. Inspired by the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, Lessing’s family set out to produce a colonialist homestead of their own. Lessing subsequently imagines her adolescent rebellion as an emigration, a journey out of the mother country to parts unknown. Moreover, while women generally have seemed extraneous to the process of colonialism, Lessing shows, on the contrary, the unexpected reciprocity of maternity and colonialism, a relationship most clearly played out in border skirmishes fought by mother and daughter across the house/bush boundary.