The Golden Notebook

1: Plot Summary: The Golden Notebook is a novel by the British Nobel Prize-winning Doris Lessing. Written in 1962, the novel gains considerable famous by the style of writing of Dories Lessing. The book is a story of Anna Wulf and it recounts the sexual and political experiences of the author. The structure of The Golden Notebook is a mixture of four notebooks namely: Red, Blue, Yellow, and Black with an interspersion of the episode of free woman and exploring the sentimental life of Anna and Molly, which they were separated from their husbands. In 1983, Lorna Sage explores the structure of The Golden Notebook in her book Dories Lessing Contemporary Writers. She states that:
The structure of The Golden Notebook the containing conventional novel free women, intercut with four notebooks that explore the underlying chaos of relations between sexual and political experience and creativityis elaborately and deliberately orchestrated. More so, in fact, than anything Lessing had done since her first novel.1

In 2006, Nicholas Ogan explores the structure of the Golden Notebook; in his critical paper, he argues that:
Lessing makes much of the structure of the novel. The red notebook for the political part of the novel, the yellow notebook for personal reminiscences, the blue one for a diary, the black one for her early experiences, and the golden one for some kind of supposed synthesis, all interspersed with the omnisciently narrated conventional novel, Free Women, all make for a cumbersome and somewhat pretentious format. Some will argue, unconvincingly, that the structure somehow mirrors the confusion of the narrators life, but the effect is to make the book something of a hodgepodge. The various heroines, whether named Ella or Anna, are so obviously the same person, that the changing point of view adds little to the book. 2

2: The Tone, Setting, and Characters of the Story:

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Sage, Lorna. Contemporary Writers. London: Methuen, 1983 Ogan, Nicholas. Critical Paper. 2006

A: The Tone: In exploring the tone of the novel, Lorna Sage in 1983 in her book Contemporary Writers about the tone of the novel states that: The tone is reluctantly ironic: Anna and her friend Molly are women escaped from marriage, bringing up children alone, but hardly free from men (their friendship consists partly of supporting each other in the face of repeated disappointment).(Lorna Sage) 3 B: Setting: In terms of the setting, it is hard to recognize one stable setting of the story because of the structure of the novel. That is t say that the novel contains four different books. Black one (of Anna's experiences in Central Africa, before and during WWII, which inspired her own bestselling novel). Red one (it tells her experiences as a member of the Communist Party). Yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna's own love affair). Blue (Anna's personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life)4 C: Characters: In term of the characters in the novel, The Golden Notebook explores on Anna and Molly sexual and political experiences with their ex-lovers and husbands. In addition, there is Tommy the son of Molly and Martha that she was a part of the communist party. The main character in the novel is Anna and talks about her past and nostalgia to her past. Anna has divided herself into numerous characters to tell us about her past. Lorna Sage in 1983, in her book Contemporary Writers Dories Lessing, she states that:
The new heroine, Anna Wulf, shares some of Marthas experience (she lived in Rhodesia during the war, and was apart of a communist
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Sage, Lorna. Contemporary Writers. London: Methuen, 1983 www.wikipedia.com

group), but she has no past to speak of. Instead she is caught in a hall of mirrors: . Anna has divided herself up this way, we are told, in order to register her chaos, and stave it off.5

3: Themes:

Sage, Lorna. Contemporary Writers. London: Methuen, 1983

In terms of themes, Doris Lessing deals with several themes in The Golden Notebook. The book explore mental and social breakdown of the author. The structure somehow mirrors the confusion of the narrators life, but the effect is to make the book something of a hodgepodge. Each notebook reveals or discusses many themes in sessions of free women. Those notebooks have a special colour for each namely: Red, Black, Yellow, and Blue

Breakdown: Lessing explores the mental and social breakdown in The Golden Notebook. In one hand, she was influenced by the communist party and in other hand; she was unable to go forward in her love affairs. Lorna states in 1983; in her book Contemporary Writers Dories Lessing that:
Breakdown become a positive value in her writing, an authentic response to what William tactfully calls a period of exceptional growththe period when, for her as for many who left the communist party, history was suddenly structureless.6

Free women: Lessing explores the notion of freedom (hardly free) in the

Golden Notebook. Lessing has divided the theme of free women into many sections. Sage in her book Contemporary Writers Dories Lessing states that:
In the second section of Free Women has Anna trying to talk sanity to Mollys sick and hysterical adolescent son Tommy, and failing. Hes eavesdropped on her notebook, and knows shes lying: If things are a chaos, then thats what they are (GN, p.28) This is the central event of Free Women, and, for its vividness, it is a measure of how far Annas wretchedness is displaced to make a public plot about the failure of idealism7

Black: Lessing in her book and namely in the Black notebook talks about her experience in Africa she writes Frontiers of War in the Black notebook. Sage in 1983 states that
In the Black notebook she convicts herself of having meretriciously written up about Africa in Frontiers of War it is not just that the novel a colour bar romance about a British airman and an African girl ,

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Sage, Lorna. Contemporary Writers. London: Methuen, 1983 Ibid

bred out of the war, and out of the impossibility of really imagining change in the colony.8

Yellow: Lessing talks about her private sexual life and especially her

painful love affairs. In the Yellow notebook, she explores her demoralized love affairs with several Men. Sage states in her book Contemporary Writers Dories Lessing in 1983 that The most damaging and demoralizing split is the sexual one, worked out by Anna in the fiction-within-a-fiction of Ella and Paul in the Yellow Notebook.(ibid) Blue: In the Blue notebook is where Anna records her memories, dreams, and emotional life considered as her personal journal. Sage states that
This project seeps, as it were, back into Annas life. In the Blue Notebook she remembers having said to Mrs Marks that instead of assimilating her experience to the communality of myth (another fake refuge) she should be on the lookout for anomalies.9

Red: In the Red notebook, Lessing discusses her integration in the communist party fantasies and her attraction toward Stalinism thought. Sage states
The Red Notebook shows the communist party in the same hard focus, buoyed up in its statutory Stalinism by self-censorship and jokes. And again shes brought back to the brink of meaninglessness10

The Golden Notebook as a Post-Modern novel:

Sage, Lorna. Contemporary Writers. London: Methuen, 1983 Ibid 10 Ibid

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In this section I would explore the characteristics of The Golden Notebook in relation to the Post-Modern thought, and how Doris Lessing manages to present the book as a Post-Modern novel. The Golden Notebook as a novel is characterised by many Post-Modernistic characteristics. Those characteristics are in terms of the structure, in terms of the style and in terms of the themes of the book.

The Subject use in Post-Modern Writing:

Postmodernism posits a centerless, dispersed subject who is literally a composite of various socially and culturally constructed roles or positionsnot perspectives that cannot be reconciled11 Lorna Sage in 1983 explores the characteristics of Golden Notebook; in her book Contemporary Writers, she stated that:
The Golden Notebook was a momentous book a book of its moment, opened to subcultural imperatives which the realist perspective had structured and suppressed. Because Lessing had found a form that so exactly focused he struggles with/against realism, it was a novel that persuaded its readers of the limitations of that shared language more painfully, and even perhaps more intimately, tan French new novels, or than antirealist writing from America.12

Lessing have tried to write a book in which she wants to break with the modern style. Her struggling against realism that is to say, realism is one of the fundamental perspective of the modern thought, makes the structure of the novel more or less real as the other novel. This Post-Modern style of writing makes the novel really a Post-Modern novel.

Women Identity in Literature and Society: Many writers who comment as a group or on female identity in
general assume women take up a dual position in the definitions given

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Georgescu, Anca. Self as narrative in Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook. Sage, Lorna. Contemporary Writers. London: Methuen, 1983

by dominant forces; id est they are both part of culture in general and part of women culture in particular. According to Gerda Lerner this accounts for an explanation for the fact that women can be both victims and upholders of the status quo. [W]omen writers as women negotiate with divided loyalties and doubled consciousnesses, both within and without a social and cultural agreement. This, in conjunction with the psychosexual oscillation, has implications for sentence and sequence- for language, ideology and narrative. This approach is not mutually exclusive with other definition, but it offers one way of seeing a group that is at least partially marginal or excluded from the dominant system of meaning and values. 13

In this quotation Van Butsel argues that women in the past were marginalised or excluded from the dominant system in society. Women try to have a status in the society by negotiate with divided loyalties and double consciousness with Men.

Women narrative in literature:

Eventually Marry Carmichael produces a womens sentence: this sentence gives access to the consciousness of a woman and it elicits a dissent opinion on that same consciousness, previously embedded in discourses of dominance .Womens mind and concerns have never been accurately portrayed in literature, and breaking the sentence is a way of radically changing language and tradition to allow a female point of view. A womens sentence is Woolfs definition of a writing unafraid of gender as an issue, undeferential to male judgment while not unaware of the complex relations between male and female. A womens sentence will thus be constructed in considered indifference to the fact that the writers vision is seen as peculiar, incompetent, marginal (Duplessis, 1985). Consequently Marry Carmichaels first lesson, as Woolf states, is that she writes as a woman, but as a woman who has forgotten she is a woman. This double emphasis is significant strategy, claiming freedom from the tyranny of sex14

She adds:
The feminist writers then were not important on an artistic level but rather in their insistence on self-development and defining the female identity; they represented a declaration of independence in the female
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Van Butsel, Sara. Womens Writing and Writing about Women: Analysis of The Golden Notebook by Dories Lessing. Ghent University, 2009 14 Van Butsel, Sara. Womens Writing and Writing about Women: Analysis of The Golden Notebook by Dories Lessing. Ghent University, 2009

tradition. They opened up new possibilities, such as the right to use sexual vocabulary as men do; they questioned the monopoly of male publishers and establishment and advocate to be freed of patriarchal commercialism15

According to Van Butsel women have break the sequence in literature. Lessing in her novel uses the pronoun I in her writing. In the past women writers were not so important on an artistic level they were marginalised and women do not have the right to speak about her emotional and sexual inner in literature. The novel is considered as the bible of women in which Lessing tries to break with the past and look for a new status for women.

15

Ibid