• 영미문화
• /
• 제14권1호
• /
• pp.27-51
• /
• 2014

Doris Lessing describes a band of revolutionaries who become involved in terrorist activities far beyond their level of competence in The Good Terrorist. Alice Mellings who is from a middle-class family has organized a squat house in London and seems capable of controlling everyone around her and anything about the house. She is seemingly like a housekeeper or a breadwinner. She also likes to be on the battlefront, for instance, demonstrating, picketing and spray-painting slogans. Such is able to easily exploit the others and she increasingly becomes the leader in the house. Recently some critics have focused on the political and social roles of the protagonist who represents a voice of terrorists in the 1980s England. Based on this, The Good Terrorist is read with the concept of the subject of feminism that Gillian Rose adopts in order to show that this subject tries to avoid the exclusion of the master subject. This subject imagines spaces which are not structured through masculinist claims to exhaustiveness. Alice as the subject of feminism shows different roles; she extorts or steals money for the maintenance of the house from her affluent parents; she spends all her time cleaning, fixing, decorating the deserted house; and she looks after the official affairs related to the house with her skills and experiences. She is systematically in charge of the house and sits at the head of the table in the kitchen. But when their activities turn into disaster and their plans fail, Alice willingly decides to close down the house after ousting the members. Here in her extorted gaze it is revealed that she takes control over the working class members of the house who are unable to lead a revolution because of their own problems and thereby the working class are dominated by the middle class. That is, the place is paradoxically recreated based on class differences, which the revolutionaries try to break. By representing the deconstruction and recreation of the place through squat houses, Lessing reveals her implicit feminism in which a new place should be produced crossing the principle of the dichotomy of gender and class.