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 exhusband 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 socialdemocratic 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 mustdress-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-goldennotebook/
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/goldennotebookmy60
daystruggle.html
For a review of The Golden Notebook:
http://www.critiquemagazine.com/article/goldennotebo
ok.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