Education and female agency in the garden: ”: Doris lessing’s “flavours of exile

Abstract

espanolLa reciente celebracion del centenario de Doris Lessing ha supuesto la oportunidad de dedicar nuevas miradas a su obra. Esto es asi con respecto a las aportaciones criticas existentes sobre el interes de Lessing por la educacion (Cairnie 2008; Sperlinger 2017), sobre todo en ninos y ninas en procesos de transicion hacia la adolescencia. Este articulo muestra que, para Lessing, dicho interes es constante y se observa a lo largo de su obra, tanto de ficcion como de no ficcion. Tomando el corpus de los relatos africanos como marco principal de referencia, este articulo estudia “Flavours of Exile” (1957), un relato donde el huerto familiar se transforma en espacio informal de experimentacion, y es para Lessing un vehiculo para dar paso a sus preocupaciones por la educacion del sujeto femenino en un contexto historico de descolonizacion. EnglishDoris Lessing’s recent centenary brought opportunities to look at her works with fresh eyes. This is also the case with Lessing’s interest in education (Cairnie 2008; Sperlinger 2017), especially that of children in their transition to youth. This paper argues that this was an interest with which Lessing consistently concerned herself in both her fiction and non-fiction writings. Using the corpus of her African short stories as a primary reference framework, this paper studies “Flavours of Exile” (1957), a short story in which a family’s vegetable garden becomes a learning space for informal experimentation. The story is used by Lessing as a platform to raise her concerns about the education of the female subject in the historical context of decolonisation