Detailed Summary Of The Golden Notebook 1jh6b

The Golden Notebook Write a note on how Anna, Molly and Marion individually reflect various kinds of women’s 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 latter‟s ex-husband Richard‟s wife Marion; through the portrayal of their individual struggles against “sexual apartheid” the novel becomes “an anatomy of

woman‟s 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 Richard‟s 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 don‟t have much “historical precedents and present company” 1. and the other kind who is a victim of the bourgeois patriarchal husband‟s infidelity and repression. The novel explores Marion‟s realisation of her oppressive marriage with Richard and Anna‟s 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.” Marion‟s marriage to Richard in that sense had limited her individuality to the caretaker of his children who can‟t 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 Marion‟s situation, Anna and Molly‟s 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 woman‟s 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 Michael‟s 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 she‟s menstruating. While describing this domesticity, Anna writes in the Blue Notebook“It must be about six o‟ clock. My knees are tense…as the „housewife‟s disease‟ has taken hold of me…I must-dress-Janetget-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael‟s breakfastdon‟t-forget-I‟m-out-of-tea etc etc.” Anna‟s 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 Molly‟s idea of single parenthood is critiqued by their children. At one hand Anna‟s daughter, Janet expresses the wish to step out of her mother‟s image by going to boarding school like her other friends, wear “uniform” and have a „normal‟ life. On the other hand, Molly‟s 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 rightwinger 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 subject‟s 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 she‟s 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 Lessing‟s

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 woman‟s position in mid20th Century society and one woman‟s 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 book‟s 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 Anna‟s experiences in

Africa), red (describing Anna‟s 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 Anna‟s 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 book‟s fragmented nature keeps them at a distance and is too self-indulgent or navel-gazing. More than the words themselves, the book‟s structure is Lessing‟s 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 don‟t 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 don‟t 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 women‟s 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 Anna‟s 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 Anna‟s 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 Anna‟s 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 Anna‟s relationship with Mother Sugar. Did Anna‟s experience in psychoanalysis seem harmful or helpful to her development as a person, and how so? Was Mother Sugar a feminist? 10. One of Anna‟s 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 Anna‟s 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 women‟s 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