Book excerpt: Gustafson provides a comprehensive overview of Lessing's comments on the structure and purpose of the domestic tragedy within the context of his Laokoon essay, demonstrating that the fundamental psychic-deep structures informing his aesthetic and dramatic production are male narcissism and the abjection of the woman/the mother. As opposed to earlier studies of gender/generic questions in Lessing's dramas, this analysis explicates the theoretical basis for the rigid codification of gender which informs Lessing's fictional symbolic order.