The Cleft

The Cleft is a 2007 novel by Doris Lessing that portrays an all-female society of amphibian creatures, apparently human ancestors, who commit infanticide of their male offspring, until they discover that they can have sex with males who have been rescued from infanticide by an eagle and raised by a deer.

Lessing said of The Cleft

Lessing's next novel, "The Cleft" — its title a reference to female genitalia — is her latest report on the "attitudes" between the sexes.

"I saw a science magazine which said that the basic human type is female and that men came along afterward," she explains. "You have an original community of females, on a seashore, very conventional. Then, one gives birth to a baby boy and somehow the boy manages to grow up.

"So I've written a story based on this. I have it all told by a literary Roman senator — an aristocrat, very reactionary — discussing the very violent revolutionary, and evolutionary, changes.

"I noticed that my typist at the publishing house was shocked by some of the words I used. I can't wait to see what people make of it. Some people will hate every word of it; it's not politically correct."

Reviews

• Eve's Alexandria
• Geraldine Bedell in The Guardian (liked it)
• Ursula K. Le Guin in The Guardian (really didn't like it)
• The Australian, various commentators, 2007/1/2

Reviewed by Ursula K. Le Guin in the Guardian:

I call the tale a parable, but hesitantly, because I can't believe it says what I think it says. It appears to be as prescriptive as Desmond Morris and more essentialist than Freud himself. Anatomy is destiny. Gender is an absolute binary. Women are passive, incurious, timid and instinctively nurturant; without men, they scarcely rise above animal mindlessness. Men are intellectual, inventive, daring, rash, independent, and need women only to relieve libido and breed more men. Men achieve; women nag. Much of the presentation of this is familiar from the literature of misogyny. The "Old Shes" are described with utter loathing and disgust; the escapades of boys are made much of, while the doings of girl-children are ignored.

...

If we are offered the story as an origin myth of human sexuality and gender, I can't accept it. It is incomplete; it is deeply arbitrary; and I see in it little but a reworking of a tiresome science-fiction cliché - a hive of mindless females is awakened and elevated (to the low degree of which the female is capable) by the wondrous shock of masculinity.