Prisons we choose to live inside : a study of Doris Lessing's The Sweetest dream, The fifth child and Ben in the world

Abstract

'I am a citizen of a free society, and that means I am an individual, making individual choices. My mind is my own, my opinions are chosen by me, I am free to do as I will.' On reading this phrase, I was taken back to secondary school, into a whitewashed classroom, probably on one of those hazy Friday afternoons, when the teacher stood hammering in the meaning of some term or other including that of democracy. Reading it like that, black on white, it did make me laugh to find almost exactly the same words which I grew up to effectively produce as being the right meaning of the word democracy. Little do people realise, as I myself never realised before, that such ideas turn out to be cliches inculcated in us since young, stupidly perpetuated by all of us who have it cemented in our minds that it is in us that the 'sovereign power' resides. Thus I wake up one morning to realise that as a result of this and many more assumptions, I am 'helpless against all kinds of pressures on [me] to conform in many kinds of ways'. This was the originating idea of my dissertation which then developed into a study of the individual in relation to the group. The focal themes are the prisons we choose to live inside and the possibilities which are open to the individual to achieve true freedom. Thus the dissertation is in actuality composed of two larger parts - The Imprisoned Individual and The Liberated Individual - the first of which is split into three other chapters.