An innovative and experimental novel that broke new ground in terms of both form and content, The Golden Notebook was identified as a manifesto of feminism when it was published, but the author’s examination of the protagonist’s life has even further implications that condemn the imperialist traditions of European history and that illustrate the constraints placed on the possibilities of thought by language itself.
Lessing’s novel is one of the monumental literary achievements of the second half of the 20th century and a landmark document in the history of feminist thought.
Lessing divides the story into four books, each subdivided into five parts, with an extra part for the golden notebook in the fourth book. Each book contains an opening section entitled “Free Women,” followed by writings from the protagonist’s variously colored notebooks. The fourth book contains these sections plus the additional writing in the golden notebook, followed by one last installment of “Free Women” that stands on its own and that brings the novel back to the topic it began with, though handling it on a higher plane of understanding.
The novel’s protagonist is Anna Freeman Wulf, a novelist who has published a successful book called Frontiers of War. In the summer of 1957, she is a divorced mother attempting to live on her own, rear her daughter, and write a new book; the sections of Lessing’s novel entitled “Free Women” chronicle Anna’s life, her friends, and her work on her novel.
As Anna works, she sorts out her thoughts in four different-colored notebooks in which she explores ideas along four axes of inquiry. In the black notebook, she examines literature through her own novel about Black and white relations in Africa; in the red notebook, she examines politics, especially the opposition between communism and the capitalist Western world; in the yellow notebook, she develops ideas for fiction by examining women and men in sex and love; and in the blue notebook, Anna examines aspects of herself as a woman, mother, friend, writer, activist, lover—as a user of language and victim of its limits.
The blue notebook serves as her day-to-day journal of her life—the place where she turns a critical eye on the bits and pieces of her life and muses on the problem of using language to seek understanding. Finally, when Anna succeeds in moving beyond fragmentation, she begins to write exclusively in the golden notebook. She is no longer divided into fragments of a life. To achieve this unity, however, she must pass through a crisis of disintegration—a breakdown—and reassemble herself on the other side of it.
Doris Lessing constructs her story by creating a relatively straightforward and realistic novel in the “Free Women” sections about Anna, her friend Molly Jacobs, Molly’s son Tommy and her ex-husband Richard, and Anna’s lover Saul Green. In this novel, which serves as a kind of skeleton or point of departure for Anna’s experimental notebook portions, Anna and Molly are free because they are not bound by the legal and personal obligations of marriage. They are old friends, and they have long enjoyed getting together to talk over their lives and compare notes.
Although they are free women, they remain powerfully bound to men and to the topic of their interactions with men in their conversations. But Anna is growing tired of discussions that seem to be permanently tied to men. She is ready to move beyond the war between the sexes.
Molly’s life is complicated by motherhood and by her son Tommy’s difficulties as he matures, particularly when his attempted suicide leaves him blind—and leaves both Molly and Anna nagged by their sense of responsibility and the sting of failure. Molly; Tommy; Richard; his second wife, Marion; and various other characters are engaged in a kind of soap-opera existence in the search for love and personal satisfaction.
Anna’s life is both more simple and more complicated because she is reaching for difficult goals: transcendence of her limitations, liberation from her social, gender, and cultural conditioning, unity out of her fragmentation, and truth instead of piecemeal facts.
As Anna writes in the black notebook, she recreates scenes from her earlier life in Rhodesia but remains dissatisfied that they fall so far short of reality. As she writes in the yellow notebook, she begins a novel called The Shadow of the Third, narrated by Ella, an alter ego for Anna. Ella’s affair with a married man ends badly, and so she, too, begins writing, noting all the possible scenarios for how a relationship might go. Anna’s life then imitates Ella’s art as Saul and Anna play out the possibilities already summed up in the yellow notebook.
The blue notebook is Anna’s most personal and challenging work. In it she turns her critical eye on her own life as a woman and a writer. The limitations of thinking and writing become apparent as words begin to fail Anna, as recorded in the blue notebook. She enters psychological therapy in the effort to understand herself and her relationships better.
Ultimately, Anna has a breakdown, and the signifier of this breakdown is her loss of control over the words—and their links to meaning in the larger world—in the blue notebook. Anna must cross beyond assumptions and conditioning to achieve a unified identity as a complete and independent human being. She moves to the golden notebook of the title, where she can record her restorative dreams.
In this novel, Doris Lessing demonstrates her prescience in seeing the issues that absorb feminist theory and literary theory in general in the following two decades. The significance of the roles of gender assumptions and political ideology in shaping personal identity, and the power of language in conditioning the very thinking of those who use it, all are present and deeply probed in The Golden Notebook. Lessing not only breaks new ground for literary achievement by a woman writer, she breaks new ground by any standard of human identity.
Bibliography
Cederstrom, Lorelei. “The Principal Archetypal Elements of The Golden Notebook.” In Approaches to Teaching Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Edited by Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1989, 50–57.
Pickering, Jean. Understanding Doris Lessing. Understanding Contemporary British Literature Series. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.