CARE TO SURVIVE! CARE ETHICS IN DORIS LESSING’S THE MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR

SEDA ARIKAN

ABSTRACT

Nobel Prize-winner English writer Doris Lessing’s dystopian novel The Memoirs of a
Survivor was published in 1974, a period in which both new concerns and new ideas were
bushing out. The catastrophic setting of the novel which depicts the breakdown of modern
society going parallel to food and water shortage, lack of electricity, perishing of natural
and social order, and appearing an anarchy prescribe the probable disaster the world
may attain in the future. Contrary to this circumstance of a possible atrocity in which
people just struggle to survive, Doris Lessing proposes an alternative way of living and an
ethical stance that is related to “care ethics”, a moral theory appeared in the mid-1980s.
Care ethics basically deals with the relationships in human life to develop “caring” both
in social relations and the relation of humanity to non-human world. Contrasted with
deontological and utilitarian ethics, it criticizes moral approaches based on the rights of
male, liberal, and human beings. That’s why, care ethics that asserts the significance of
emotion, intuition, body and caring motivation for all beings is related to some ethical
fields such as feminist ethics, environmental ethics, animal ethics, and bioethics all of
which appear as moral and political theories based on caring for “the other”. In this
study, The Memoirs of a Survivor will be analyzed in terms of care ethics that Lessing
proposes, in the background of the novel, as an alternative to andro-anthropocentric
view that could result in a catastrophe for the whole world. In this respect, “caring” for
others in the microcosm of the family and macrocosm of the universe will be depicted as
an ethical and political action that is practiced by Lessing’s two mystic protagonists, the
unnamed narrator and the teenage girl Emily.