"The rule of silence"
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s "The Antheap" (1953)
https://literariness.org/2022/05/03/analysis-of-doris-lessings-the-antheap/
By Nasrullah Mambrol
May 3, 2022
= Originally published in Doris Lessing’s second collection of short fiction, Five (1953), “The Antheap” relates the growth from childhood to young adulthood of Tommy, the son of white settlers in southern Africa.
= As elsewhere in her short fiction (e.g., “The Old Chief Mshlanga”), Lessing uses a child’s viewpoint to explore the processes of both enculturation into racist ideology and resistance to such acculturation.
= The antheap of the title refers to the place where Tommy meets secretly with Dirk, the son of the white mine owner Mr. Macintosh and a black woman who lives in the African compound on the mine.
= That Dirk is Macintosh’s son is known by all on the mine but can be acknowledged by no one, as young Tommy discovers when he asks his mother why Dirk is a different color from the other African children:
= "Why do you ask?" said Mrs. Clarke, with anger.
Why, she was saying, do you infringe the rule of silence?
= The allegedly childless Mr. Macintosh takes an increasingly paternal interest in Tommy, paying for the education that will provide him with a promising future, but Tommy cannot forget that he is a changeling who has usurped the place of the real son, who is abandoned to a life of poverty and dangerous toil on the mine.
= An intense relationship develops between the boys, and Tommy becomes the means through which some of the father’s riches are channeled to their rightful recipient, passing on to Dirk the education that he is receiving in a city school.
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