You, Me, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark: Week One
(pages 3-78)
Welcome to the first of four discussions about The Summer Before the Dark! Doris Lessing is one of my favorite authors, and I’m so looking forward to reading and thinking about this novel with you. It was published in 1973, when Lessing was fifty-four years old and already very well established in her career. (Martha Quest, the first book in her Children of Violence series, came out in 1952, and The Golden Notebook—one of my favorite books of all time, and the way many readers first meet Lessing—was published in 1962.) We can’t call The Summer Before the Dark a later work, as she kept writing and publishing until just a few years before her death in 2013, but it’s fair to say that it is the work of a very experienced, accomplished novelist. We see here a central theme that she explored in depth in many of her novels both before and after this one: a woman wrestling with an identity that no longer fits her.
I’ve read this book only once before, several years ago, and my memory of it is favorable but hazy, so it’s going to be a rediscovery of sorts for me. As I said in the previous post, I don’t intend to offer any kind of lecture or scholarly analysis in these posts. I just want to share my thoughts and experience of this book as a reader, and hear yours in the comments.
The first line is striking: “A woman stood on her back step, arms folded, waiting.” We aren’t dropped into the specificity of a named character. It’s a woman, she could be any woman. Could be any one of us. At first, I assume that we’re seeing her through the remove of an omniscient narrator. Here is a narrator, showing us a woman on her back step, rather than experiencing the act of standing on the back step from within the woman’s consciousness. Here is a woman, offered up to us to consider, rather than inviting us into her consciousness. We get access to the thoughts that she’s sorting through, but they are presented as cliched thoughts, generic thoughts, thoughts we’ve all had, things we’ve all said, without much introspection. But reading further, I realize that we’re in a close-third person perspective, and that it’s the woman, Kate Brown, viewing herself from a distance. It feels that we’re at a remove in the narration because she is at a psychological remove from herself. She’s depressed, feeling disconnected from herself and her own feelings. She sees herself from a distance, understands herself as a nameless woman standing on her back step, waiting. Her challenge is laid out right in the very beginning on page 3: “She was trying to catch hold of something, or to lay it bare so that she could look and define...”
We’re in her perspective, but her children are named before she is. We don’t get her name until page 8. What is the purpose of withholding it until then? What effect does that have?
At the beginning of the novel, her identity (outward, at least) is defined by marriage and motherhood. She mutes herself, tamps herself down, for the comfort of her children. She arranges her life to be convenient for her family. Though taking on the translating job at the conference frees her from having to be available for everyone at the house, it’s also a decision that’s basically imposed on her. Her husband and his friend assume that because there is a need and she is capable of filling it, she will. And she does. And then with the youngest child choosing to travel for the summer, her husband decides the house will be rented out, and it’s assumed she’ll find somewhere else to stay. Decisions are made for her, or without regard to her. It’s understood that she will simply fit in wherever she’s needed, whatever is convenient to the others.
As I read, I wondered if this is all a little too heavy-handed. Or does it just seem that way to me reading now, fifty years after the novel was first published? But then I reminded myself, who loves Doris Lessing and has read many of her novels: subtlety is not Lessing’s thing. She creates characters to very deliberately explore her chosen themes. They’re there in service to it. Which is not to say that they aren’t engaging, complex characters. They are. But they exist for a larger thematic purpose. Is it all a bit heavy-handed? Yes. Is that intentional? Also, yes.
Kate slips right into the rhythm of her role as simultaneous translator, and finds that her family is able to pick up the slack without her. She gets home too late to make dinner, but her daughter has already done it. They don’t need her like they used to. In fact, they haven’t for some time, but she was slow to recognize it.
One thing that strikes me in this chapter is Kate’s ease at translating, which I know (from other novels, ha! Novels by Javier Marías in particular, but also Intimacies by Katie Kitamura) is not simply a matter of being fluent in both languages. There is the skill of hearing what is said and retaining it and repeating it in the other language nearly at the same time. No trouble at all with that for Kate. This is not a major sticking point, of course, but I noticed it and wished that there was attention paid to how difficult a task Kate has actually taken on, given that she has no formal training in it. I want this both for Kate’s sake, and for realism. It’s such a specific job Lessing is giving her here!
“Mrs. Michael Brown could not have been called ill-dressed; but it was not Mrs. Michael Brown who was being employed by Global Food.” Her identity had been defined by her role as wife and mother. Working apart from the family and the world of the home, she has a new identity entirely. It’s as simple as buying new dresses, getting a sleek haircut, holding her body differently. She is malleable, changeable. I get the sense, as a reader, that the changes will continue, that she will shift throughout the novel until she reaches either a final form or a further evolution. (Is there such a thing as final form, though? Aren’t we always changing?)
On page 32, long after we first met Kate, she is again “a woman.” And again on page 39. It’s a recurring thing. What effect does this have? What could Lessing mean by it? I don’t recall from my previous reading if that psychological remove continues through the book or resolves at some point, so I’m paying close attention to those points when Kate slips back into namelessness. Her identity is stripped away in those moments. Is that it?
Even apart from her family, in her new job, she’s still filling the same role. “She had been set like a machine by twenty-odd years of being a wife and a mother.” And yet, she thinks that the warmth and charm she exudes “had nothing to do with her, nothing with what she really was.” The identity she has, the role she fills, the personality she’s developed in doing so, is not—she believes—her real self. Who is the “real” Kate and why is she not her real self with her children? Does it go back to what was said in the beginning, that one must dim oneself for the children? Here I remind myself that this is all filtered through Kate’s perception, Kate’s understanding of the world and of her children.
And then there is the “carefully tended image of the marriage” rather than the marriage itself carefully tended. She considers an affair with Jeffrey, and then recalls affairs that her husband had. So we understand that she is free to act, should she choose to. But then we learn that though she has accepted her husband’s affairs, she has also lost respect for him as a result, “as if he had a weakness for eating sweets and would not restrain it.” So what would an affair with Jeffrey do to her understanding of herself? Her respect for herself?
Finally...those episodic seal dreams! What do you think about those seal dreams? What do they seem to be promising?
Let’s discuss in the comments. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
As a reminder, here is our reading and discussion schedule:
6/6: pp3-78* (At Home to The Holiday)
6/13: pp78-149 (The Holiday to The Hotel)
6/20: pp149-206 (The Hotel through “twitching like a puppet to those strings...”
6/27: pp206-273 (“Next day Maureen...” to end)
*Page numbers correspond to the Vintage International edition from 2009. Refer to titles instead if you’re reading a different edition.