" The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, `The point is, that as far as I can see, everything is cracking up.’ – From The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing.
The novel deals with the dilemma of novelist Anna Wulf who being extremely self-analytical, critically explores her chaotic life through her four notebooks. Through four Notebooks Doris Lessing conveys the breaking up or fragmented female subjectivity in her novel The Golden Notebook with characteristic artistry. Each Notebook in the novel explores different aspects of Anna’s sensibilities. The `black book ‘explores her life as a writer in her early days in colonial Africa, the `red book’ explores her experience as a communist, the `yellow book ‘chronicles Anna’s experience in a fictional manner, the `blue book’ is a sort of diary. In the words of Doris Lessing, “There is a skeleton, or frame, called Free Women, which is a conventional short novel, about 60,000 words long, and which could stand by itself. But it is divided into five sections and separated by stages of the four Notebooks, Black, Red, Yellow and Blue. The Notebooks are kept by Anna Wulf, a central character of Free Women. She keeps four, and not one because, as she recognises, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of chaos, of formlessness – of breakdown. Pressures, inner and outer, end the Notebooks; a heavy black line is drawn across the page of one after another. But now that they are finished, from their fragments can come something new, The Golden Notebook.” The exerpts from these notebooks amalgamate with the fictional work Free Women, the central character being Anna Wulf. The various threads of of female subjectivity reflected in these notebooks lack coherence as the plot develops, meanwhile the protagonist integrates her experience, and through a single Golden Notebook converges the different threads of her writing into one. Immediately after its publication, Golden Notebook was accepted as an icon of the Second wave of
feminism and this great semi-autobiographical novel was considered as a celebration of feminism for the issues it raised ,which were so fundamental to Feminism, like Women at work, womens’ writing,
Politics, history, sexuality and gender etc.
She was honoured with Nobel prize for literature for 2007 for being "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny" According to Swedish Academy,” The Golden Notebook (1962) was Doris Lessing’s real breakthrough. The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th-century view of the male-female
relationship. It used a more complex narrative technique to reveal how political and emotion conflicts are intertwined. The style levels of differing documents and experiences mix: newspaper cuttings, news items, films, dreams and diaries. Anna Wulf, the main character, has five notebooks for her thoughts about Africa, politics and the communist party, her relationship to men and sex, Jungian analysis and dream interpretation. The disjointed form reflects that of the main character's mind. There is no single perspective from which to capture the entirety of her life experience.”
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