Configuration of Alternative Spaces in Doris Lessing’s “The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange”

Abstract

Doris Lessing’s story “The De Wets Come to Kloof Grange” from her collection This Was the Old Chief’s Country recounts the story of white settlers, Major and Mrs Gale, whose routinized farm life in Rhodesia acquires a new dimension with the arrival of an Afrikaner couple, Mr and Mrs De Wet, to assist the Gales. Within the framework of recent theories of Thirdspace / Third Space by Edward Soja and Homi Bhabha, which are then related to Rosi Braidotti’s theory on nomadism, this study aims to show how hybridisation can only happen on the material level of space and how space, including the house, the garden and natural environment, can be configured and transformed from restrictive conceptualisation with boundaries to alternative ones where the female characters can escape to.