A LAND FREE OF “THE OTHER”: READING UTOPIA IN DYSTOPIAN TIME IN DORIS LESSING’S THE CLEFT

Reading Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, one is faced a story of a woman-only community which is claimed to be human being's Original History. In The Cleft, Lessing presented a pre-gender world, in which its only-Cleft inhabitants reproduced asexually and lived calmly until the birth of the first male baby called, a Monster, or a Squirt. Through her creating an alternative in which woman is the first sex, she displayed the fact that one’s idea of “the Other” is affected by the gender-assumptions, as well as the other socio-cultural conventions. Considering The Cleft in the contexts of Cultural studies and Women’s studies, the present study presented utopian reading in dystopian time, remarked by the sudden birth of males, and sexual differences. The study tends to answer three questions under the light of Simone de Beauvoir, Fredric Jameson, and Peter Fitting. The study demands to answer whether The Cleft can be viewed as a Utopia and the Dystopia; through what concepts or strategies Lessing achieves her intention; and also to discover the benefits such a utopian/dystopian outlook adds to the understanding of the novel. The study finally concluded that, Lessing's The Cleft, provided its readers with the opportunity to live and experience a Utopian and genderless status through the complete elimination of patriarchy, male values, and sexual differences. In so doing, she both critiqued the gender discriminations of our modern, contemporary society; and presented a blueprint for a better future. Lessing in The Cleft, tried also to re- conceptualize the man/woman dichotomy; and to bring the possibility of a society in which male and female would live as complementary halves, which together equal humanity