ABSTRACT
The gradual internalization or psychologization of reality during the nineteenth century can be traced in practically all areas of thought. Depsychologicalization has the potential of freeing them from being engulfed in thinking about feeling and relying on exclusively external controls and certainties. In Doris Lessing’s and Carmen Martin Gaite’s most direct explorations of women’s potential for freedom, The Summer Before the Dark and Retahilas, it is clear that in addition to external and material restrictions, women can suffer a tenacious, at times self-sustained, psychal enslavement. In The Summer Before the Dark, Kate Brown accepts, also quite by accident, a job as translator which will take her to Istanbul and Spain while her husband is working in the United States. By the early 1970’s, the time of The Summer Before the Dark and Retahilas, the writers’ extra-literary comments express dissatisfaction—both personal and artistic—with the figure of the watcher. The chapter aims to distinguish between moral action and stage action.
