The Golden Notebook

Write a note on how Anna, Molly and Marion individually

reflect various kinds of womens struggles. What vision of
freedom for women does The Golden Notebook offer?
The novel The Golden Notebook has been written by
Zimbabwean-British writer and novelist Doris Lessing and was
published in 1962. It is about a British Communist, writer and free
woman namely Anna Wulf and is set in the time frame between
1920s and 1950s. The novel, in its multifaceted narratorial nuances
and depths, presents the familial, social and political aspects of a
single mother, Anna and brings into the light the fragmented
subjectivities of individuals with respect to Communism, Art and
Gender roles; one of these aspects focuses on the position of
women in England during the first half of twentieth century where
the patriarchal structures were being challenged and subverted by
women.
In The Golden Notebook, the three major women characters
are Anna, her friend Molly and the latters ex-husband Richards
wife Marion; through the portrayal of their individual struggles
against sexual apartheid the novel becomes an anatomy of
womans independence and the impediments to it.
1.
The two
friends Anna and Molly are single mothers, intelligent communists,
sexually liberated and economically independent but their
transgressive ways are critiqued by their own children, Janet and
Tommy. On the other hand, Marion is the typical Bourgeois wife
who is bound by the normative ethics of her class and gender and
is supposed to be a submissive wife and the nursemaid to
Richards children. From the onset of the novel with the first Free
Women section, the two archetypes of contemporary women in
Anna-Molly duo and Marion are foregrounded; the kind of women
who dont have much historical precedents and present
company
1.
and the other kind who is a victim of the bourgeois
patriarchal husbands infidelity and repression. The novel explores
Marions realisation of her oppressive marriage with Richard and
Annas breakdown in an attempt to unify her identity as a free
woman in pursuit of love.
The individual struggles of the women characters in the face
of conventional marriage as the normal in The Golden
Notebook presents the modern crisis in marriage, its evident failure
as a social institution, and the evident failure of men too as possible
mates.
2.
Richard failed to be loyal to Marion and continuously
cheated on her by falling in love with a type, something that fits his
box. Marions marriage to Richard in that sense had limited her
individuality to the caretaker of his children who cant step out of the
marriage for the sake of the children. She has to act within the
domestic realm of bourgeois ethics to repel criticism from her class,
as represented by her own mother and sisters. This drives her to
melancholic and malign alcoholism; a state from which she is in a
way redeemed by her relationship with her step-son Tommy. Even
though, Tommy is the authoritarian figure in the relationship and
Marion in a way parrots his politically liberal social-democratic
propaganda against the violence in Africa, she gets a chance to
subvert the domesticity she was earlier wrapped up in.
In contrast to Marions situation, Anna and Mollys lives of
independence and self-reliance without male assistance become a
voluntary action of rebellion against the societal norm. Both of them
are uprooted intellectuals who question the male sufficiency
2.
in
a womans life. However, they are confronted by the dual problems
of loss of individuality and motherhood in the process.
Anna is an emancipated woman who in her youth feared the
trappings of domesticity that came with marriage. By the time, she
becomes older and has already had a daughter from a failed
marriage with the man she loved, Michael, she begins to tussle
between the need to have love in her life from a real man and the
possible loss of self and a relinquishing of identity and will to a
usurping male.
1.
In her relationship with Michael there is a deep
impact upon her identity. Time and again, she is torn between a
mother who has to tend to her daughter Janet, a mistress who has
to return Michaels sexual advances, a wife who has to cook food
and clean the house and the working woman who has to work at
the party office even if shes menstruating. While describing this
domesticity, Anna writes in the Blue Notebook-
It must be about six o clock. My knees are tenseas the
housewifes disease has taken hold of meI must-dress-Janet-
get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michaels breakfast-
dont-forget-Im-out-of-tea etc etc.
Annas anxiety and vulnerability in this relationship is reflected
in her fictional foil, Ella- a character that she created in her
fragmented piece, Shadow of the Third in the Yellow Notebook.
Ella, like her creator, is a single mother who has been rejected and
cheated in love by her supposed real man Paul.
Anna and Mollys idea of single parenthood is critiqued by
their children. At one hand Annas daughter, Janet expresses the
wish to step out of her mothers image by going to boarding school
like her other friends, wear uniform and have a normal life. On
the other hand, Mollys son, Tommy ends up being a cynical Liberal
who wants to fight for the cause of suffering Africans before an
attempted suicide blinds him forever. His self becomes a
battleground of struggle between his divorced parents, the right-
winger Richard and the communist Molly.
As Tonya Krouse argues, the women in the novel are exposed
to two primary forms of freedom- freedom in the sense of a unified,
integrated subjects refusal to live according to the societal
conventions and freedom in the sense of cracking up that
accompanies the breakdown of social conventions and the
disintegration of individual subjectivities.
3.
While Anna and Molly
assert the former kind of freedom from the beginning of the novel,
Marion starts to assert her independence from the bourgeois norms
much later. But it is Anna who undergoes a breakdown of the self
because of the political, social and familial chaos shes surrounded
by. Her more than frequent assertions of her belief that everything
around her was cracking up undercuts the former definition of
freedom and opens up the realm of insanity and madness which
Doris Lessing claims to be the intended theme of the novel.
The Golden Notebook illustrates the struggles in the lives of
early twentieth century Western women- of women who demanded
their rights and asserted their individuality divorced from the
normative gender roles and of women who were unable to realise
the state of semi-slavery they were subjected to in the patriarchal
Western society.
********
Bibliography and References:
1. Sukenick, Lynn: Feeling and Reason in Doris Lessings
Fiction (1973)
2. Spilka, Mark: Lawrence and Lessing: The Battle of the
Sexes (1975)
3. Krouse, Tonya: Freedom as Effacement in The Golden
Notebook: Theorizing Pleasure, Subjectivity, and Authority. (2006)
http://survivingbaenglish.wordpress.com/the-golden-notebook/
4. Kaplan, Sydney Janet: The Limits of Consciousness in
the Novels of Doris Lessing (1973)

Teaching Guide to
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK by Doris Lessing
Themes: feminism, second-wave feminism, mental
breakdown, mothering, writing, psychoanalysis, communism,
female sexuality
Note to Teachers
The Golden Notebook is a novel about mental and literary
breakthrough and breakdown. Although many have hailed it as a
feminist classic, Lessing herself did not intend for it to be so. Rather
she wrote the novel during a period of time in which she was
interested in questions about writing and about mental functioning.
Certainly, however, the book addresses a womans position in mid-
20th Century society and one womans struggles with sex, politics,
motherhood, creativity, and success, and in this way it addresses
the feminist questions of the time.
What is most noticeable, and most commented upon, is the
books structure. The book contains a novel Free Women that is
divided into parts, and between the parts are four separate
notebooks kept by the main character, Anna, in Free Women.
The four notebooks are black (outlining Annas experiences in
Africa), red (describing Annas political experiences and especially
her disillusionment with Communism), yellow (a novel within a novel
in which Anna writes about a heroine named Ella), and blue (which
is Annas emotional and personal diary). In the end of the book, the
four notebooks are woven into one golden notebook in order to
represent integration and healing. The structure of the book itself
has been seen as both breakthrough and breakdown. On the one
hand, Lessing felt that the greatness of the structure had been
overlooked and her technique has been called brilliant. On the other
hand, readers often complain that the books fragmented nature
keeps them at a distance and is too self-indulgent or navel-gazing.
More than the words themselves, the books structure is
Lessings commentary about writing and mental process. The
fragmented, vertical splits that are the structure of the book are
meant to illustrate the self-division that we all live with while we
seemingly move forward in life; the notebooks represent crude,
failed attempts to organize and compartmentalize experience. At
the same time, the project of the golden notebook suggests that
integration is possible and the only real way forward. Similarly,
through Anna, Lessing examines writing through several horizontal
splits (ie, Anna who was successful but now blocked writes about
Ella who also struggles with writing, at the end of The Golden
Notebook Anna is given the first line for her next book which is
actually the first line of The Golden Notebook. These layers often
raise the question of whether anyone can write something
worthwhile anyhow and Lessing adds to this question by urging
students to not to write papers about her and her work but simply to
read what I have written and make up your own mind about what
you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience (p.
xxiii).
Discussion and Paper Topics
1. In Introduction (p. ix), in reference to working on
autobiographies and The Golden Notebook, Lessing writes: I have
to conclude that fiction is better at the truth than a factual record.
Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I dont begin
to understand. Is fiction better than fact in expressing the truth?
How does this question relate to the recent publishing scandals in
which well-known memoirs were found to be less fact and more
fiction? Should such works be seen as fact or fiction? Are they the
truth?
2. In Introduction (p. xxii), Lessing recounts that students
often write to her about her work, looking for information to include
in their papers about her or her books. She says she would like to
reply: Dear Student. You are mad. Why spend months or years
writing thousands of words about one book, or even one writer,
when there are hundreds of books waiting to be read. You dont see
that you are the victim of a pernicious system. Are you the victim of
the educational system? What is the best way to learn? Can you
think of classes or activities in which you felt that you did (or did not)
really learn something valuable?
3. The Golden Notebook has been hailed as one of the
founding novels of the womens movement. By titling the sub-novel
in The Golden Notebook, Free Women, Lessing seems to be
making claims about what freedom is or would be for women. In
Free Women, are Anna and Molly free? How so and how not?
What would the life of free men look like, and how and why would
their freedoms be different?
4. Anna maintains four notebooks (red, yellow, black, and
blue) that she then synthesizes in the golden notebook. One central
task in the development of the self or identity is the integration of
separate aspects of the self and/or moments in time. Discuss what
four notebooks you might keep about yourself and your life. Then
discuss how it would look for these notebooks to become
synthesized into one golden notebook of your own. Also address
whether at this point in your life this sort of integration would
promote healing or anxiety.
5. To Lessing, and to many readers, the most important and
revolutionary aspect of The Golden Notebook is its structure. How
did you experience the structure of The Golden Notebook? What
effect did the structure of the book have on you? What did the
structure communicate about individual development and mental
health?
6. In different ways, Molly, Anna, or Marion are portrayed as
bad mothers. What sort of mothers do you think they are? How do
they compare to the sort of mother you did or did not have? What is
your idea of a successful mother, and does this mother do what is
best for her children, herself, or both (if this is possible)? Would you
define a successful father in the same way?
7. How would you characterize Annas romantic and sexual
relationships with men? How do these relationships reflect upon
Anna or upon the men? What do you think will happen to Anna?
How are Annas relationships similar to or different from the
Hooking Up culture that characterizes college campuses in the
21st Century?
8. What is life like for Janet? What would it be like to have a
mother grappling with Annas questions? Is your mother a feminist?
Outline the history of motherhood in the United States and address
the following questions: What do we know about how expectations
for mothers have changed over the past 250 years? How does this
historical perspective influence your opinion about what exactly a
good mother is? What will the expectations of motherhood look like
in 50 years?
9. Summarize Annas relationship with Mother Sugar. Did
Annas experience in psychoanalysis seem harmful or helpful to her
development as a person, and how so? Was Mother Sugar a
feminist?
10. One of Annas central concerns was politics. Are politics
important to you? If so, how so? If not, why do you think women
today may be less concerned with politics than were Anna and
Molly?
11. Describe Annas relationship with Saul Green. Does this
relationship contribute to her breakdown or to her breakthrough, or
both? How so?
12. If people are indeed fragmented and compartmentalized,
then is a breakdown necessary for a breakthrough? How else might
a person integrate various aspects of their lives? Do the adults in
your life seem integrated or compartmentalized?
13. In the 1971 introduction, Lessing argues that no one
should read a book at the wrong time and that readers should put
down any book they find boring or skip over parts they do not like.
How do you feel about this advice? If you followed this advice,
would you have finished The Golden Notebook? What was your
experience of reading The Golden Notebook?
14. Do the struggles of Anna, Molly, and Marion seem relevant
today? What can women in the 21st Century learn from the three
women?
15. Did you find the final golden notebook to be satisfying?
Was Anna able to synthesize the parts of her life in a way that
seemed healthy? Was this a happy ending and, if not, what does
this say about womens place in society?

Online and Additional Resources
For a chapter by chapter summary of The Golden Notebook:
http://www.impatientreader.com/html/goldennotebookmy60daystrug
gle.html
For a review of The Golden Notebook:
http://www.critiquemagazine.com/article/goldennotebook.html
For information about Doris Lessing:
http://www.dorislessing.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing
Other Works by Doris Lessing
Alfred and Emily
Ben, In the World
The Cleft
A Four-Gated City
The Grandmothers
The Grass is Singing
Going Home
In the Pursuit of English
Landlocked
Love Again
Mara and Dann
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
A Ripple From the Storm
Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the
Snow Dog
The Sweetest Dream
Time Bites
Under My Skin
Walking in the Shade