Who owns the past? Gendered history and narrative authority in Doris Lessing's The Cleft

The Cleft is framed as a reconstructed prehistoric chronicle narrated by a Roman senator who claims control over fragmentary and speculative recordsof human origins. Positioning himself as a rational arbiter of the past, he reshapes a female centred society into an ordered and legible history for a Roman audience. This study examines how narrative authority is produced through the senator’s situated voice and his overtly androcentric handling of evidence. The analysis approaches the narrative through historiographical and narratological perspectives, treating the senator’s account as a rhetorical construction organised through selection, ordering, and emplotment. When read alongside Lessing’s sustained interest in female subjectivity, the senator’s discourse stands in tension with the novel’s critical force. The text thus exposes historical narration as a gendered practice in which authority is not neutral but manufactured through rhetorical control, interpretive dominance, and repeated appeals to evidentiary certainty.