30 pages • 1 hour read
Doris LessingNo Witchcraft for Sale
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1956A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing was born to British parents in Iran in 1919. Her family moved to Southern Rhodesia in Africa—now Zimbabwe—in 1925 when she was six years old. At that time, Southern Rhodesia had only been a British colony for two years. She lived there until she moved to London in 1949. Her father bought 1,000 acres of land in Africa to farm, but it was never very successful, and her family did not have a lot of money. She was sent to a Catholic boarding school and left school at age 14 to begin working as a nursemaid for children in other homes.
Lessing spent 24 years in Africa during her childhood and early adulthood. Southern Rhodesia was adjacent to South Africa, and Lessing’s experiences as a white person during South African apartheid provided rich material for the many novels and short stories she would later publish. Lessing and her work are a product of English colonialism in Africa and part of the canon of colonial literature, although Lessing participated in anti-apartheid activism and was later banned from both Rhodesia and South Africa. “No Witchcraft for Sale” first appeared in the 1952 short story collection This Was the Old Chief’s Country and again in the 1964 collection African Stories. Based on details from her life, Lessing’s family may have had similar experiences as the Farquar family or might have known families who had similar relationships with their servants as the Farquars do with Gideon.
After leaving Southern Rhodesia in 1949, Lessing spent the rest of her life in London. During her long literary career, she published dozens of novels, short stories, poems, and even opera librettos. Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 for her skillful illustrations and critiques of apartheid-era life in South Africa.
Ideological Context: Lessing’s Political and Religious Beliefs
Lessing vehemently opposed apartheid, the system of segregation in South Africa that gave the white minority an elevated status and power over Black Africans. Her attitude toward the racial politics of the time is evident in her work. The title of her 1952 story collection, This Was the Old Chief’s Country, acknowledges that European colonists took the land from its rightful people. The underlying message in “No Witchcraft for Sale” comes down on the side of the native people: They hold a wisdom about the land that the white people will never have access to. In this way, they can maintain some form of power even in the face of imperialist violence.
Lessing’s work can be categorized into three eras of writing, each of which reflects and corresponds with a different political or spiritual interest in her life at the time. Lessing adopted communist viewpoints in the 1940s, and her writing during that time primarily focuses on social issues. She was banned from South Africa and Rhodesia for years due to her anti-apartheid activism, and after her death, it was revealed that she had been surveilled by British spies for 20 years because of her communist and anti-apartheid beliefs. Lessing distanced herself from the British Communist Party after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, and her work took on more psychological themes in the late 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, Lessing embraced mystical spirituality, particularly Sufism within the Islamic tradition, which is evident in her later works and particularly in her science fiction novels.
“No Witchcraft for Sale,” published in 1952, was written in her earliest phase of writing and incorporates Marxist philosophy. Though it is a very short story, it conveys Lessing’s distaste for social hierarchy through the relationship between Gideon and the Farquar family. It also critiques the capitalist greed demonstrated by the scientist who hopes to make money off of Gideon’s natural healing practices.
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