Volume five in the Children of Violence series, this novel follows Landlocked (1965) and concludes the adventures of Martha Quest in an apocalyptic vision of a future in which human beings overcome the limitations of communication and mutual understanding through telepathy. This feature has led to the book being included in surveys of science fiction, although it is primarily constructed in the manner of realist fiction.
The title refers to a vision that Martha had as an adolescent of a city populated by citizens who have moved beyond the narrow confines of prejudice. Although the earlier novels in the series had been set in an Africa under the newly liberated influence of postcolonialism, in The Four-Gated City, Martha travels to London in the years immediately following World War II, returning to her family’s historical and cultural roots.
With two failed marriages behind her, and disillusioned by some of her experiences as a Communist political activist, she is still seeking independence in a world that defines woman’s estate as a dependent condition. In England, she begins to discover her freedom. She has brought with her the manuscript of her late lover, Thomas Stern, a Polish Jew and an idealist with whom Martha had made a complete emotional, physical, and spiritual union. She consults the manuscript periodically, finding it filled with wisdom.
Martha becomes the secretary of the writer Mark Coldridge, who becomes a replacement for Thomas in her life. She shares material from her past, including her visions, and from Thomas’s manuscript as well, and these details then become part of Mark’s writing, entwined in his thought. His dreams of a utopian world eventually will carry his cause back to Africa in the attempt to found an ideal city.
Mark’s wife, Lynda, has suffered institutionalization for years for treatment of her mental illness, and Martha gradually becomes her familiar after Lynda is moved out of hospital care and into the Coldridges’ basement. Martha even experiences a kind of madness herself, carrying her inner exploration to the limits of human consciousness and beyond. Ultimately, this “quest” leads her to the goal of self-unity that she had been seeking, throughout her life, in the world around her rather than in the world within her. By sharing Lynda’s experience of madness and Mark’s vision of the possibilities for a better world, Martha completes her quest and finds personal wholeness and satisfaction.
The epilogue to the novel relates, fragmentarily, the apocalyptic destruction of Great Britain and Martha’s escape to an island where the successors to the human race develop and move beyond the violence that engenders them. Connected psychically, these new people are not burdened by the biases inherent in the traditional five senses, tied as they are to race, gender, nationality, or other contingent aspects of identity.
Doris Lessing seems to suggest how monumental the challenge of overcoming racism and sexism is: human beings may have to evolve beyond their current status in order to eradicate injustice and maximize the potential every person has locked inside.
Bibliography
Karl, Frederick R. “The Four-Gaited Beast of the Apocalypse: Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City (1969).” In Old Lines, New Forces: Essays on the Contemporary British Novel, 1960–1970. Edited by Robert K. Morris. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1976, 181–199.
Sprague, Claire. “Without Contraries Is No Progression: Lessing’s The Four-Gated City,” Modern Fiction Studies 26 (1980): 99–116.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis
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