Novel: The Cleft

Premise

Doris Lessing reimagines the origin of humanity as an allegorical fable that centers women as the first social architects. The novel posits a proto-human community of women who reproduce, govern, and sustain life by their own means until a disruptive emergence of male beings reshapes the social order. The narrative treats myth, anthropology, and feminist critique as intertwined modes for exploring how gender, power and story-making create cultures.

Plot overview

The narrative unfolds as a compressed mythic history rather than a conventional linear plot. It begins with an enclosed, cooperative female society whose stability is upended when a new, chimeric presence appears, male creatures who are physically different, impulsive and driven by unfamiliar desires. Their arrival provokes fear, fascination and conflict. Over generations the interaction between sexes generates rituals, legends and institutions as each side attempts to explain and control the other. What starts as a fragile coexistence hardens into patterns of domination: myths are invented, authority is consolidated, and the original female autonomy is eroded by social structures that justify male supremacy.

Characters and voice

Characters are archetypal and often unnamed, functioning more as social types than psychological portraits. A central figure, often framed as a "first mother" or elder, represents continuity and the women's knowledge of nurture and social cohesion. Male figures appear as impulsive, inventive and aggressive, their emergence catalyzing change rather than providing a detailed personal history. The voice of the book alternates between a quasi-anthropological narrator and a reflective storyteller, producing a tone that can be clinical, mythic, ironic and mournful in quick succession.

Themes

The Cleft examines how myths and institutions get constructed to naturalize power dynamics, particularly gender hierarchies. Lessing probes the origins of patriarchy as a cultural invention that rewrites biology, creating explanations and rituals that legitimize male rule. The novel also contemplates creation and creativity: who gets to name the world, shape its myths and claim authorship of meaning. Themes of violence, sexual politics and the mutability of social order recur, as does a meditation on storytelling itself, how fables, authoritative histories and sacred texts consolidate authority and erase alternative memories.

Style and tone

The prose is spare, elliptical and often aphoristic, blending mythic simplicity with analytical detachment. Lessing manipulates genre expectations, fusing speculative fiction, anthropological report and parable. The result is both lucid and elusive: scenes are distilled into emblematic moments that invite interpretation rather than offering tidy answers. Humor and bleakness sit side by side, and the narrator's occasional ironic distance sharpens the book's critique without collapsing into polemic.

Critical reception and significance

Seen as part of Lessing's late-career engagement with philosophical and speculative concerns, the novel provoked debate for its stark allegory and provocative assertions about gender and power. Some readers praised its bold reworking of origin myths and its uncompromising feminist inquiry, while others found its archetypal treatment of men and women reductive. Regardless of reaction, the book functions as a concentrated meditation on how societies invent stories to justify inequalities and how those stories, once told, become instruments of control.