Trauma of War as a Paradigmatic Discourse in Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage

Doris Lessing’s novels reveal the way in which war affects humanity by capturing the traumatic state of the author herself and also of the characters in her works. As a result of the two world wars, in the twentieth century, trauma emerges as a paradigmatic discourse for defining its catastrophic, disastrous and injurious aftermaths. In the novels Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage, the author shows how the war is an extremely traumatic experience for those who are direct witness to its violence and how it wreaks havoc on the entire generation. In A Proper Marriage, there is no particular mention of any catastrophic effects of war. The novel vividly portrays the anxiety which people suffer before a war. The catastrophe of the World War-I aggravates the impact of the forth coming World War-II. Hasty marriages and pregnancies are manipulated as the ways to escape the trauma of the impending war. Such discourse of trauma of wars, with its vivid catastrophic and disastrous effects on the people, narrated in the Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage, forms the topics of investigation and discussion in the present paper. The paper also explores and discusses how scientific war accelerated the destruction of the youth without coming to their aid. Attempt has also been made to shed light upon various techniques of escapism used by the characters to survive in the chaotic world.