1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTERS

TITLE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ABBREVIATIONS ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION THE LITERARY CRAFTSMANSHIP

PAGE NO.

CHAPTER I CHAPTER II

1 17 79

CHAPTER III

IN THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK CONCLUSION WORKS CITED

ABBREVIATION

GN: THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

LITERARY CRAFTSMANSHIP OF DORIS LESSINGS THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

INTRODUCTION The art of novel has received the devoted attention of some of the supreme craftsman of modern literature. It has displaced all other literary forms in popularity and has replaced narratives almost entirely in the second half of the nineteenth century. To depict the different conflicts, physical and ethical, internal and external the authors have introduced different kinds of the literary devices to resolve the conflicts. The writers techniques play a strong role in developing a theme as the actions of the characters do. Techniques have been the mode of expression for the different kinds of themes. There has been constant experimentation with new fictional techniques and procedures such as the control of the point of view so as to minimize the apparent role of the author- narrator, the use of symbolist and expressionist techniques. Experimentation of devices adopted from the art of the cinema, the dislocation of time sequence the adaptation of forms and motifs from myths and dreams, and the exploitation of the stream of consciousness method in a way that comments the narrative of outer and events into a dream of the life of the mind. A novelists style is the approach the writer takes in putting together word, phrases, sentences and paragraphs, style can determine the pace at which the story is told and how directly the author relates the

4 story to the reader. The style and techniques adopted by the authors deepen the meaning and understanding of the themes of the novel. Dream is a special technique used by the novelists to reinforce the theme but also to unify the seemingly disordered events. By using these techniques the novelists fulfill their artistic ambition in literary creation. Novelists use many other devices, including imagery and irony. By using such devices, writers avoid the need to state every place of information they wish to convey. Techniques prove to be a medium of discovery of the themes, psyche of the characters, the point of view of the authors and their perspective of life and society. Doris Lessing was born in Persia on October 22, 1919 to captain Alfred Taylor and Emily Maude Taylor, who were both English and British nationality. Her father who had been cripple in world war I, was a clerk in the imperial bank of Persia; her mother had been a nurse. In 1925 lured by the promise of getting rich through maize farming. The family moved to the British colony in southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Doriss mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce, a civilized edwardian life among savages; but her father did not and the thousand odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth. Lessing has described her childhood as an uneven mix of some pleasure and much pain. The natural world, which she explored with her brother, Harry, was one retreat from another wise miserable experience. Her mother enforced a rigid system of rules and hygiene at home. She installed Doris in a convent school, where nuns terrified their charges with stories of hell and damnation. Later sent to an all girls high school

5 in the capital of Salisbury, from which she soon dropped out. Her formal education came to an end at the age of thirteen. Unlike the other African writers, Lessings became a self- educated intellectual. She recently commented that unhappy childhoods seem to produce fiction writers.To quote, Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasnt apparent to me then. Of course I wasnt thinking in terms of being a writer then I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time(http://www.dorislessing). Bed time stories also nutured her youth. Doriss early years were also spent absorbing her fathers bitter memories of World War I, taking them in as a kind of poison. Lessings life has been a challenge to her belief that people cannot resist the currents of their time, as she fought against the biological and cultural imperatives that fated her to sink without murmur into marriage and motherhood. There is a whole generation of women, she has said, speaking of her mothers era, and it was if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them. She believes that she was freer than most people because she became a writer. According to her, writing is a process of Setting at a distance, taking the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general. In 1937, Lessing moved to Salisbury to work as a telephone operator, and she soon married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had two children, before the marriage ended in 1943. Following her divorce, Lessing was drawn to the left book club, a communist book club and it was here that she met her second husband, Gottfried Lessing. They were married shortly after she joined the group

6 and had a child together, before the marriage also ended in divorce, in 1949. Gottfried Lessing later became the East German Ambassador to Uganda and was murdered in the 1979 rebellion against Idi Am In Dada. By 1949, Lessing had moved to London with her young son. That year she published her first novel The Grass Is Singing and began her career as a professional writer. Lessings fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her experiences in Africa. Drawing upon her childhood memories and her serious engagement with politics and social concerns, she has written about the clash of cultures, the gross injustices of racial inequality the struggle among opposing elements within an individuals own personality, and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. Her stories and novels set in Africa, published during the fifties and early sixties, decry the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials, and expose the sterility of the white culture in southern Africa. In 1956, in response to Lessings courageous outspokenness, she was declared a prohibited alien in both southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Over the years, she has attempted to accommodate what she admires in the novels of the nineteenth century their climate of ethical judgement, to the demands of twentiethcentury ideas about consciousness and time. After writing The Children Of Violence series (1951-1959), a formally conventional novel of education about the growth in consciousness of her heroine, Martha Quest, she broke new ground with The Golden Note Book (1962), a daring narrative experiment in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in depth and detail.

7 Lessings fiction is commonly divided into three distinct phases, the communist theme (1956-1969). (When she was writing radically on social issues and returned to in The Good Terrorist (1985)), the psychological theme(1956-1969), and after that the sufi theme, which was explored in a science fiction setting in the canopus series. Because of her campaigning against nuclear arms and South African apartheid, she was banned from that country and from Rhodesia for many years, she moved to London with her son in 1949 and it was this time her first novel, The Grass Is Singing was published. The Golden Notebook is considered as one of the major works of twentieth-century literature and was first published in 1962. In the 1970s and 1980s. She began to explore more fully the quasi-mystical insight Anna Wulf, seems to reach by the end of The Golden Notebook. Her inner space fiction deals with cosmic fantasies (briefing for a descent into hell, 1971) dreamscapes and other dimensions(memoirs of a survivor,1947) and science fiction probings of higher planes of existence (Canopus in Argos : Archives, 1979-1983).Lessings other novels include The Good Terrorist (1985) and The Fifth Child (1988); she also published two novels under the pseudonym Jane Somers (the diary of a good neighbours, 1983 and if the old could..., 1984) in addition, she has written several notification works, including books about cats, a love since childhood. In the novel series Canopus in Argos: Archieve,(vol.1-5, 1979 1983). Lessings expanded the science fiction genre the series studies the postatomic war development of the human species. She varies thoughts about colonialism, nuclear war and ecological disaster with observations on the opposition between female and male principles .Among inspirations for the work was the Idries shahs school in 1960s of Sufism

8 she revisited her interest in Sufism in the Time Bites (2004) collection of essays. Lessing returned to realistic narrative in The Good Terrorist (1985), providing satirical picture of the need of the contemporary left for total control and the female protagonists misdirected martyrdom and subjugation. In this book she examined with irony a militant left-wing life style and the short distance between idealism and terrorism. The vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life has had special appeal for Doris Lessing. It reappears in some of her books of recent years: the fantasy novel Mara Dann (1990) and its sequel The Story of General Dann and Maras Daughter Griot and the Snow Dog (2005). She retains hope in humanity with the emergence of collapse and chaos, the two elementary qualities. Lessing also did some nonfiction works. In pursuit of the English (1961)about her youth in London, Prisons We Choose To Live Inside (1987), a collection of lectures and The Wind Blows Away Our Words (1987),which described in detail the sufferings of Afghan refugees from the Soviet invasion of their country. Another example was African Laughter Four Visits To Zimbabwe where she deplored the destruction of wild-life and the environment in that country, and criticized the narrow mindedness of many of the minority white community there. The autobiographical Under My Skin (1994) and Walking In The Shade (1997) represented a new peak in her writing. She recalls not only her own life but the entire epoch: England in the last days of the empire. Her novel the Sweetest Dream (2001) in a stand-alone sequel in fictive form. Perhaps her unsparing view of the political antics of friends and lovers necessitated such discretion. Her other important novels are The

9 Summer Before The Dark (1973) and The Fifth Child (1988). In the former, the reader at first infers a liberation motif: a women finally about to fulfill her gift and sexual desires After a first reading the contours of the real novel take shape : a ruthless study of the collapse of values in middle age. The Fifth Child a mixture of genre from mythology to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein is a masterfully realized psychological thriller, where a womans repressed or denied aggression against family life is incarnated in a monstrous boy child. Lessings personal agonies and traumas are reflected in the works of her writings, and the dissolution of marriage becomes one of the major themes in their works. Writing is a passion for her and she writes with a vision of future. She has closely seen the time of the Second World War. Hence, the outcome of the brutal war, the violence and destruction, the decline of the civilization, the fragmentation of society are some of the recurrent themes in her novels. She examines the apartheid and the slow awakening among the back natives in the African colonies from the grassroots level. Her hatred of the white supremacy is well brought out in her works. Lessings fiction is remarkable for its encyclopedia range and complexity. She has equally well handled complex subjects like the writers block and in her recent novels she deals with inner space. She never forgets Rhodesia and its landscapes where she spent her childhood and from where she came out finally to settle down in London. The country where she spent the earlier part of her life finds a significant place in her novels. Her evocation of the atmosphere and landscapes in Africa, the vegetation, animal life, forests with all the smells and hues, is brilliant and vivid. They have a symbolic significance in her works.

10

In her Preface to The Golden Notebook, she puts her case more formally, Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas cant be yours alone. The way to deal with the problem of subjectivity, that shocking business of being preoccupied with the tiny individual who is at the same time caught up in such an explosion of terrible and marvelous possibilities, is to see him as a microcosm and in this way to break through the personnel, the subjective, making the personal general, as indeed life always does, with transforming a private experience-or so you think of it when still a child,I am feeling this or that emotion, or thinking that or the other thought- into something much larger: growing up is after all only the understanding that ones unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.(GN 13) Lessing excels in delineating political psychological and personal terminals and studies them with keen perception and deep sight. Above all, it is their concern about the gender oppression and thus subtle exposure of the marginalized and represses position of women in a male dominated society, which brings them closer to each other. Lessings protagonists mainly spring from the white privileged class, and are thus free from racial discrimination or oppression. As such she also does not focus much on economic and political freedom for women but rather takes them for granted. Her struggle is for abolishing

11 gender discrimination and seeking reciprocity, mutuality and harmony in life. She envisions an organized whole world blending female virtues, morality and values with male culture so as to save it from catastrophe and doom. Politics, madness and the roles of women all these are by now familiar Lessing themes. She deals with racial discrimination, political commitment psychological maladjustment and alienation, combining them with the themes of feminism, break down and madness, the search for the roots of being, apocalypse and utopia which figure in different ways in her later works of fiction. The thematic range of the novel is so complex that at one level it constitutes a history of the political and cultural life of the England of the fifties, which at another level it is an archetypal journey of the self for wholeness and illumination. Structural complexity is even greater. Lessing herself has laid emphasis on the novels structure. I got angry with review of the Golden Network. They thought it was personal it was in parts. But it was a very highly structured book, carefully planned (http//www.dorislessing.com).The Golden Notebook was looked upon as a portent of a new era of feminist consciousness. But Lessing did not mean the novel to be exclusively about sexual politics. It is also a perceptive portrait of Lessings milieu a society on the brink of feminism and a powerful and revealing account of a women searching for her own personal and political identity. This dissertation is entitled Literary Craftsmanship of Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook which focuses on the many different literary devices that she has used in the novel.

12 Chapter I is the introduction which highlights the techniques used in the novel. It further focuses on life and works of Doris Lessing.It also gives the scope of the thesis. Chapter II is entitled The Literary Craftsmanship in The Golden Notebook deals with the structure of the novel which is quite innovative. Lessing presents experience in its fullness, examining and re-examining it from different points of view in an attempt to give unity to the fragmentariness of modern life. A copy of the table of contents will highlight Preface Free Women 1 The Black Notebook The Red Notebook The Yellow Notebook The Blue Notebook Free Women 2 The Black Notebook The Red Notebook The Yellow Notebook The Blue Notebook Free Women 3 The Black Notebook The Red Notebook The Yellow Notebook The Blue Notebook Free Women 4 The Black

13 The Red Notebook The Yellow Notebook The Blue Notebook The Golden Notebook Free Women 5 The structure of the novel is very complicated and it consists of a short realistic novel called Free women divided into five parts. Interspersed between the sections of this novel are four extracts from four different coloured notebooks, kept by Anna, the heroine of free women: a black notebook, deals with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, she writes stories out of her experience; and a blue notebook which is her personal diary. The division in Annas personality is emphasized in her four notebooks. It is like four different people adopting a persona to suit each one. There is also a golden colour notebook, in which Anna gives her lover sentences to begin a new novel. Annas is the first sentence of free women thus linking the end of the notebooks to the beginning of the novel The Golden Notebook. The fragmentary structure of the novel is thereby unified and turned into a coherent whole. After the last of these four repetition of the pattern comes the section called golden notebook and then a final free women section ending the novel. From this brief outline the intricacy of Lessings design reveals itself, her structural plan depends on the free women sections and the notebooks (Carey 438). The Golden Notebook contains a short realistic novel called free women. It focuses on the life of two women friends living in London in

14 the 1950s.Anna is divorced and has a small daughter, Janet. Anna is also been rejected by her lover Michael after a five year relationship. Her friend, Molly is divorced and has a son of twenty years called Tommy. They have been members of the communist party, the emotional turmoil in their personal life proves traumatic and hence they take treatment from an analyst. Mrs Marks. Anna keeps four notebooks of different colours to record different aspects of her experience. One day, Tommy reads these notebooks and tries to commit suicide and instead he succeeds blinding himself. Anna the protagonist quarrels with a homosexual couple living in part of her flat and finally asks them to leave. Her daughter, Janet, at her own request, goes to a girls boarding school. Left alone, she has an affair with the American, Saul Green, recovers, and begins to teach the delinquent kids and does matrimonial welfare work(GN 576). Molly remarries. It is only at the end of The Golden Notebook that we learn that Anna has written Free women out of the raw material of her life, collected in her dairy. The black notebook deals with the material Anna used to write her best-selling novel, entitledFrontiers Of War ,which is a story within a story. The story within the story has another angle of exposition. It shows the political scenario of the communist world. The black notebook is divided into two parts, source and money. The notebook focuses on the world of agents, television adaptations and film rights. It also includes parodies. As Anna loses her ability to write, the notebook becomes a cuttings-file for news items about violence in Africa party.

15 The red notebook is concerned with Annas experience in the British Communist Party.Inspite of knowing the inner circle of politics she joins the party. She writes very little in it and whatever she writes is highly critical of the party. In the first two sections, she bemoans the partys decision to view its intellectual as enemies and to execute them. The third and the fourth sections of the red notebook again deal with the communist activity, the notebook projects the idealized picture of Stalin as the man who works when the whole world is resting, and as a man who thinks for the betterment of the men of the world. The progress of the party after Stalins death is expressed in detail. A striking similarity between the black notebook and red notebook is that both the books become a cutting file for news items about violence in Africa. Every one of these news items referred to violence, death, rioting and hatred in some parts of Africa.(GN 461). The yellow notebook begins with a novel Anna is writing entitled The Shadow Of The Third. It also turns out to be a fictionalized version of her life. Annas psychic conflicts and her tormenting experiences during her love affair with Michael are fictionalized here. She creates her alter-ego in Ella, the heroine of the novel, and also creates Ellas lover, Paul from her impressions of Michael. The juxtaposition of The Shadow Of The Third with Free Women enables the reader to see how Anna selects and shapes and reconstructs her material for the purpose of fiction. To add to the reflexive ness of The Golden Notebook, Ella, heroine of Annas novel, is herself writing a novel about suicide. The last section of the yellow notebook contains eighteen short stories about women who long for the right man. But each attempt Anna

16 makes fails miserably, leaving her desperate and emotionally barren. It also includes parodies and pastiche the latter is a symptom of Annas writers block. The blue notebook is an account of her personal diary.Lessing makes use of the epistolary technique in which the narrative is conveyed entirely by exchange of letters. The diary is connected with her life. It focuses on her record of her meeting with Mrs Mark, who helps her in analyzing the writers block. A detailed study of the entries of the blue notebook reveals the source of the novel. Anna writes about Ella in The Shadow Of The Third. Annas long affairs with Michael and the way he abandons her, affects her, so much that for nearly eighteen months she does not include any entries in the blue notebook. Her sense of fear of exposing herself through the blue notebook creates a kind of confusion which is highlighted in recurring dreams. Her psycho analyst Mrs.Mark suggests her to name the dream which she regards as a possible way to come out of it. Finally in the last section of the blue notebook she meets an American writer Saul Green with whom she has a relationship that is meaningful and that settles the problem in Annas life. The special feature highlighted in the blue notebook is the presence of heavy black lines after every section. The reason that the protagonist Anna gives for is that I drew that line because I didnt want to write it. As if writing about it sucks me even further into danger (GN 421). Another striking feature in this section is the occurrence of dreams to explore the protagonist Annas inner life therefore dreams in the novel serve as an epiphany helping Anna to see through herself and her dilemma. They are used only to make things unbelievable. Annas dreams enter into the realms of the grotesque and uncanny.

17 CHAPTER II The Golden Notebook is an international acclaimed novel and is regarded as Lessings master piece because of its rich contents and complicated form.Lessing explores a multi-layered, multi-voiced novel in which the lament for a threatened future weaves its way through character, plot, dialogue and narrative structure. Dreams is one of the technique used by Lessing to explore the protagonist, Annas inner life and they serve as an epiphany helping her to see through herself and her dilemmas. Neena Arora regards that in free women Lessing has contracted a conventional realist text and the rest of the novel is intended to show that the realist text does not convey reality; that traditional realism infact falsifies reality. Patrica Waugh comments on this narrative and aesthetic strategy. The frame [free women] presents a wholly dissatisfying version of Annas experience. It is clearly a deliberate aesthetic strategy on Doris Lessings part of lay bare the conventions of realism as entirely inadequate vehicle for the expression of any contemporary experience and in particular, the experience of women. In the preface within The Golden Notebook Lessing explains the function of Free women. To put the short novel Free women as a summary and condensation of all that mass of material, was to say

18 something about the conventional novel, another way of describing the dissatisfaction of a writer when something is finished: How little I have managed to say of the truth, how little I have caught of all that complexity; how can this small neat thing be true when what I experienced was so rough and apparently formless and unshaped?(GN 13) Free women is an account of Anna who is a free woman in the sense that she is not dependent on a family, is financially independent and is free from the traditional patriarchal assumptions about the subordinate role of women in society. She is an intellectual, apolitical activist and a literary artist. within The Golden Notebook is an account of two women friends living in London in the 1950s .Anna and Molly are able to live free of men and marriage are engaged in a whats- wrong- with- men sessions (GN 62). The discussions of Anna and Molly vividly reveal the precariousness of their freedom and both freely acknowledge and reveal an entirely different philosophy. She enjoys fantasies of saying to Molly, Weve had the wrong attitude to the whole thing, and its Mother Sugars fault what is this security and balance thats supposed to be so good? Whats wrong with living emotionally from hand to mouth in a world thats changing as fast as it is? (GN 31) Janet is the small daughter of Anna, who is divorced and rejected by her lover after a five year relationship. Annas friend, Molly is also divorced and has a son of twenty, Tommy, with an introspective temperament. A number of affairs seem to develop between Anna and

19 Molly, in search of companionship and happiness in life but are constantly disappointed and deserted by men who come to them for their sexual gratification. Molly becomes serious but impatient, Now we free women know that the moment the wives of our men friends go into the nursing home, dear Tom, Dick and Harry come straight over, they always want to sleep with one of their wives friends, God knows why, a fascinating psychological fact among so many, but its a fact. (GN 45) Neena Arora feels that Lessings Anna and Molly are quite resilient and have the capability to create order and to create a new way of looking at life (GN 76) but even they feel broken forlorn forsaken, insecure and uprooted (GN 30) Anna enjoys a certain amount of physical and financial freedom however she too has been: Afflicted with an awful feeling of disgust, of futility and insecurity (GN 55). When the two women went out together, Anna deliberately effaced herself and played to the dramatic Molly. When they were alone, she tended to take the lead. But this had by no means been true at the beginning of their friendship. Molly abrupt, straight forward tactless, had frankly domineered Anna. Slowly, and the office of Mother Sugar had had a good deal to do with it, Anna learned to stand up for herself. Even now there were moments when she should challenge Molly when she did not. She admitted to herself she was a coward; she would always give in rather than have fights or scenes. A quarrel would lay Anna low for days, whereas Molly thrived on them. She would burst into exuberant tears, say unforgivable things, and have forgotten all about it half a

20 day later. Meanwhile Anna would be limply recovering in her flat.(GN 30) Anna again feels panic, when a sickly ugly man follows her off the underground, grinning triumphantly at her retreat from his lewd urges, she buys fruits at a stand, smells the tact clean smell, touches the smooth or faintly hairy skin in order to regain a balance and to calm herself. In spite of writing fiction and does party work as a dedicated communist, she has an emotional vacuum in her life. She is still dependent on men for having sex, for being serviced,for being satisfied(GN 401) but she is at last free enough to have a number of short affairs. At the back of my mind I always thought, well, I'll get married, so it doesnt matter my wasting all the talents I was born with. Until recently I was even dreaming about having more children yes I know it's idiotic but its true. And now I'm forty and Tommy's grown up. But the point is ,if you're not writing simply because you're thinking about getting married. But we both want to get married,' said Anna, making it humorous;(GN 27) In the view of Sushila Singh, indeed, what the book is suggesting is that if any man does not ache for a woman then there is something rotten and diseased about him. And even when her lover true to be rotten she does not want to dump them, she would rather prefer that they get healthy. This is feminism at its most sane (54). Their free existence is no promise of constant happiness . When Michael leaves Anna after four years of togetherness there is a disintegration of her being. She feels as if everything is divided off and split up (GN 247). When Michael informs her that he will not come and rings Anna for the last time she feels as if,

21

An awful black whirling Chaos is just inside me, waiting to move into me. I must go to sleep quickly, before I become that Chaos, I am trembling with misery and with tiredness....Tomorrow, I think tomorrow Ill be responsible, face my future, and refuse to be miserable. Then I sleep, but before I am even asleep I can hear myself crying, the sleep crying this time all pain, no enjoyment in it all. (GN 326) Lessings free women, Anna and Molly build a balanced and nobler world and they regard themselves as boulder pushers and are far from content and happy. They choose an independent way of life because it is less miserable than that of conventional married women. They get happiness and independence through freedom given to them to be ones original self as. Marion, the wife of Richard, highlights the character of Anna, who is free to live as she likes and thus comments, you- are so lucky to live, to live as you like. Such a pretty room. And you-you-you are free. Do as you like (GN 250) Marion, who is drunk is jealous of Annas way of enjoying life, Marion winked, horribly; and said with drunken roguishness : Oh but I think Ive come because Im envious. You are what I want to be youre free, and you have lovers and you do as you like. Im not free, said Anna; heard the dryness in her tone and understood she must banish it. She said: Marion, Id like to be married. I dont like living like this.(GN 251)

22 Molly decides to remarry, after remaining a free woman for long. Thus insecurity and loneliness are the two rewards of freedom. The theme of freedom and loneliness of free women is explored by Lessings in her Golden notebook. The dependence of free women on men makes Anna cry, There was perfect understanding there; and the two women, both women both of them bringing up children without men, exchanged a grimacing envious smile. 'The point is, said Anna, neither of us was prepared to get married simply to give our children father. So now we must take the consequences. If there are any. Why should there be? Its very well for you said Molly sour; 'you never worry about anything, you just let things slide.' Anna braced herself - almost did not reply, and then with an effort said: 'I don't agree, we try to have things both ways. Weve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule? (GN 32) Separation after an intimate relationship with their husbands for many years become very painful for women. When Annas alter ego,Ella is deserted by her lover Paul she feels cracked up, as if in pieces(GN 283). In fact her whole life was shaped around a man, who would not return to her (GN 276) She was so conditioned by Pauls presence and his demanding and possessive nature. Ella feels that even after Paul had left her.... everything she did, said or felt, still referred to him(GN 276).When Paul plays a fraud, she is utterly miserable, she loses her will to enjoy the happiness with Paul the things, places, the emotions were

23 more important to her than anything and she is frightened to be alone. There is a total disintegration of her personality and the emotional vacuum in fact deepens. Problems still exist in their new found freedom and disappointments in getting love continue. What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows: in this case, that women's emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly ... I am always coming to the conclusion that my real emotions are foolish, I am always having, as it were, to cancel myself out. I ought to be like a man, caring more for my work than for people; I ought to put my work first, and take men as they come, or find an ordinary comfortable man for bread and butter reasons -but I won't do it, I can't be like that. (GN 283) Anna depends on her lover Michael for emotional and physical fulfillment, and for a sense of shared life. He dislikes the critical and thinking Anna (GN 297) but likes her feminine quality. She is happy after an intimate relationship and he breaks with her saying cruelly, Well Anna and so our great love affair is coming to an end (G.N 296). The fragmentation is seen in Annas personalities when Michael abandons her,

24 But at least it has been a great love affair?' He, then: 'Ah, Anna, you make up stories about life and tell them to yourself, and you don't know what is true and what isn't.' 'And so we haven't had a great love affair?' This was breathless and pleading; though I had not meant it. I felt a terrible dismay and coldness at his words, as if he were denying my existence. He said, whimsically: 'If you say we have, then we have. And if you say not, then not.' 'So what you feel doesn't count?' 'Me? But Anna, why should I count?' (This was bitter, mocking, but affectionate.) Afterwards I fought with a feeling that always takes hold of me after one of these exchanges: unreality, as if the substance of my self were thinning and dissolving .(GN 296) Anna and her best friend Molly, are members of the communist party. Used to giving lectures on art she takes part in the discussions of a sub group of the party. She resigns from the party, feeling that the British communist party has lost touch with reality, and the resignation occurs on the same day when Michael rejects her. She begins to crack up. She feels frozen and frigid and consults a psychotherapist, Mrs. Marks like her friend Molly. Molly an ex-communist and a divorce she has a twenty- year old son, Tommy with a strange and unpredictable temperament. He accuses his mother and feels terribly agitated by the irrationality and disorderliness of life and is drawn towards his father and his step- mother, Marion He broods to Anna and Molly: Id rather be a failure like you, than succeed and all that sort of thing. But Im not saying Im choosing failure does one? I know what I dont want, but not what I do want (GN

25 53). Richard blames Molly for Tommys loneliness and behaviour and hints about her free life, He now said, resentful: 'I've seen a good deal of Tommy during the last year, when you left him alone. She interrupted with: 'I keep explaining, or trying to- I thought it all out and decided it would be good for him to be left. Why do you always talk as if he were a child? He was over nineteen, and I left him in a comfortable house, with money, and everything organized. Why don't you admit you had a whale of a good time junketing all over Europe, without Tommy to tie you?' 'Of course I had a good time, why shouldn't I?' Richard laughed, loudly and unpleasantly, and Molly said, Impatient, 'Oh for God's sake of course I was glad to be free for the first time since I had a baby. (GN 36, 37) Anna takes an interest in him which is protective and patronizing. She allows him to read her four note books and each book of hers has recorded her experiences. Tommy accuses her of being false, having read them to her own experiences of trying to impose a pattern where there is no pattern. Tommy happens to read these books, accuses Anna of dishonesty, of pretending that things are not chaotic, when in reality they are, I dont think there is a pattern anywhere. You are just making patterns out of cowardice (G.N 247). During the course of Free women, Tommy, unable to cope with life, faces the terror and he fails to bear it, and tries to

26 commit suicide and succeeds in blinding himself instead ,this confirms Annas fear and we find her saying to Molly, What are those diaries then? They arent dairies Whatever they are Chaos, That is the point [G.N 56]. The last section of free women, Anna who is frustrated and depressed decides her remedy. To quote, Molly was also alone in an empty house, having lost her son to her ex-husband's second wife. She invited Richard's sons to stay with her. Richard was delighted, although he still blamed Motives, life for his son's blindness. Molly entertained the boys while Richard went to Canada with his secretary to arrange the financing of three new steel mills. This trip was something like a honeymoon, since Marion had now agreed to a divorce. Anna discovered she was spending most of her time doing nothing at all; and decided the remedy for her condition was a man. She prescribed this for herself like a medicine. Fragmentation in Anna s personality is seen once again when her daughter Janet goes to a conventional boarding school on her own accord, Anna left all alone experiences the breakdown and the cracking up(G.N564). Saul Green an American writer comes to live in her flat she falls in love with him, discusses with him left wing politics, her writers block

27 and her break down .She begins to look at her life again under his influence not through a fragmented consciousness, but with a new illumination seeing fusion, likeness and wholeness where none existed before. Anna has now recovered from her breakdown when Saul leaves her but she feels psychically integrated, To Quote, After spending their time working will a socialist group and advocating the cause of African independence for sometime, Tommy and Marion return to a more accepted way of life. His fathers business was taken over by Tommy and Marion starts a dress shop., The free women, Molly, gets married. Anna joins the labour party, takes night classes for delinquent holds and engages in marriage welfare work. Towards the very end of the novel Molly tells Anna in an ironic tone: So were both going to be integrated with British life at its roots. (G.N 576) In the notebooks by using the device Lessing is able to convey the variety of moods, memories, thoughts, conscious and unconscious motives and habits that brings to light an individual, Anna Wulf. In the black notebook Anna makes a record of her life as a writer, of her past experiences in South Africa, of the success of her first novel Frontiers of War and the attitude of the commercial art-.world towards it The black notebook is divided into two columns Source and money. Under the heading source she describes her African experiences out of which Frontiers Of War is written. The material under the head money is a record of transaction related to Frontiers of War, business interviews, renumeration from transactions etc. The book deals

28 with a story about the racial situation in central Africa during World War II. The story gets developed through the four sections of the black notebook. The story evolves out of her political involvement especially the politics of communism in the southern Rhodesian camp. Exposition of rivalry, jealousy and unfaithfulness, mixed with the colour question and the white superiority, takes the reader to the Lessings climate of emotional intensity. Frontiers of war is a story within a story. This reveals us the political scenario of the communist world. The petty jealousies of the, officials, the exploitation of the radicalism of the young and inexperienced party members by the party leaders gets expressed here as in many of Lessings novels. Annas involvement with communism does not enable her to give unity and wholeness to her fragmented consciousness. Her disappointment and frustration with communisms and the emotional turmoil in her personal life prove traumatic for Anna. It leaves her emotionally, crippled to such an extent that she cant function as a normal human being. Anna seeks the help of a Jungian psycho-. analyst but she is disappointed here also. Mrs Mark advices her to merge herself with the collective, archetypal self, in order to root out her fear of cracking up. Anna cannot accept this because it insists that she must merge herself with the collective self, thereby dissolving her sense of being the center of awareness. Lessing includes some parodies also in this section As she loses her ability to write and thus uses bricollage technique. By using this technique a transformation in the tone is affected.

29 The black notebook contains the real story of Annas experience in Rhodesia during the II world war, which she exploits for her novel. Anna, ends up in Rhodesia just before the war as the wife of a tobacco farmer, Steven, whom she met and married in England. She leaves him and gets a job as a secretary in the city and becomes a communist, because the left people were the only people in the town with moral energy. And yet there were always two personalities in me, the communist' and Anna, and Anna judged the communist all the time. And vice-versa .Some kind of lethargy 1 suppose. I knew the war was coming and it would be hard to get a passage home, yet I stayed. Yet I did not enjoy the life, I don't enjoy pleasure, but I went to sundowner parties and dances and I played tennis and enjoyed the sun. It seems such a long time ago that I can't feel myself doing any of these things. (GN 82) The Frontiers of war is about a dashing R.A.F Pilot, Peter Carey, stationed in Rhodesia, during the II world war, is disgusted by the leftists week-end orgies, secretly makes contact with the local African agitators, whose leader is the cook at the hotel. He falls in love with the cooks young wife. They spend their nights together in each others arms in the brothel by the sullied waters of the towns river, a place where white and black meet. Lessing comments on the life led by the people in Africa who enjoy sex just to hide their humiliation. To Quote, Their innocent and pure love, broken by the harsh inhuman laws of this country and by the jealousies of the corrupt, will know no future. They talk pathetically of meeting in England

30 when the war is over, but both know this to be a brave lie. In the morning Peter says good-bye to the group of local 'progressives', his contempt for them clear in his grave young eyes. Meanwhile his dark young love is lurking at the other end of the platform in a group of her own people. As the train steams out, she waves; he does not see her; his eyes already reflect thought of the death that awaits him - Ace Pilot that he is! - and she returns to the.. (GN 73)

Anna falls in with a group of twenty year olds, Paul an Englishman, Jimmy, an alcoholic gay, Ted, a compassionate socialist, Maryrose, a beautiful girl born in the colony and George, a forty year old who is an interesting character, who drives a truck for living. She hooks up with the groups leader Will i, a German who fled to Rhodesia. She lives with him for three years but neither likes nor understand each other but seldom have sex. The highlighting feature in this section is the way the free woman enjoy sex just for physical pleasure and not for emotional satisfaction. I did not like Willi. He did not like me. Yet we began to like together, or as much as is possible in a small town where everyone knows what you do (GN 82). Paul, Jimmy and Ted fly bombers for the Royal Air Force. Though they were friends for many years they did acknowledge that the end of the war would be the end of their intimacy (GN 86). At Oxford these three had been homosexuals. The most interesting of the three was Paul, whom Anna uses in The Frontiers of war as a gallant young pilot (GN 87) and a person truly without nerves (GN 89) and who dies before he leaves the colony.

31 George and his wife struggle to support themselves, three children, and two sets of aged parents; they all live together with no privacy. George, is caring and deeply responsible but his enormous sex drive leads him to deal with stresses in his life by having affairs with the black African wife of a cook named Jackson who works at the Mashopi hotel where the comrades like to relax. The woman has borne Georges son whom Jackson accepts into the family. None related the boy with George, and he would lose his job and condemn his family to financial ruin if he acknowledges his son. He is tormented by his inability to save both his son and his family, And now I propose to behave just like every other stinking white sot who sleeps with a black woman and adds another half-caste to the Colony's quota.' 'She hasn't asked you to do anything about it,' said Willi. 'But that isn't the point.' George sank his face on his flat palms, and I saw the wetness creep between his fingers It's eating me up,' he said. 'I've known about it this last year and it's driving me crazy. (GN 129) The comrades liked to stay at the Mashopi, a hotel in the country side run by a conservative British couple, the Boothbys. Mrs. Boothby gets a crush on Paul. Paul deliberately hurts her by preferring the company of her black cook Jackson whom he pretends to educate about communism. Mrs. Boothby finds herself jealous of her cook. One weakened when the Mashopi host a big dance, Jimmy, passes out drunk in the kitchen. Mrs. Boothby loses her temper and ends up firing Jackson on the spot even though he has been a perfect employee for the past fifteen years.

32 Mrs Boothby said: 'Jackson, you leave tomorrow. Jacbson said: 'Missus, what have I don?' MrsBoothby said: 'Get out. Go away. Take your dirty family and yourself away from here. Tomorrow, or I'll get the police to you.' Jackson looked at us, his eyebrows knotting and unknotting, puckers of uncomprehending pain tightening the skin of his face and releasing it, so that his face seemed to clench and unclench. Of course, he had no idea at all why Mrs Boothby was so upset. He said slowly: 'Missus, I've worked for you fifteen years. ( GN 145) Lessing focuses the character of the free woman ,Anna who is so overcome by emotion that she runs off with Paul into the countryside and has sex with him. They return and Willi is furious with Anna because he and Anna are supposed to be a couple. He wants to have sex with her at that point, and she goes along with it. The group breaks up right after that; they never return to the Mashopi hotel. A few days later, Paul gets killed in a drunken accident. The second section of the black notebook, opens, when Anna receives letters from different persons which becomes the most striking feature in The Golden Notebook .She receives a letter from Mr. Reginald, who is looking out for suitable themes for television plays, with a real creative talent(GN 257). When Reginald questions about the central theme of her lovely book, she says it is about the color bar. His views on reading: Oh, I do so agree, a terrible thing, Of course Ive never experienced it myself, but when I read your book terrifying (GN 259).

33 Reginald says that he could not agree with the color bar and utters the whole thing is beastly and her story is a simple moving love story and he acknowledges that it would make a lovely film Anna is totally dissatisfied, But if I know it, why bother? Just to prove it? My selfdisgust begins to turn into another emotion I recognize quite well - a sort of minor hysteria. I know quite well that in a moment I'm going to say something wrong, rude, accusing, or self-accusatory. There is a moment when I know I can either stop myself, or it not, I'll be propelled into speech which I can't stop. We are on the pavement, and he wants to get rid of me. (GN 260) Anna receives a letter for the second time from Mrs. Edwina Wright, representative for the Blue bird series of Television, one hour plays, USA. Edwina is looking forward with eager anticipation to read Annas screenplay. She regards that her Frontiers of war touches on race or extra marital sex, both of which is not liked by Edwina : Anna, I liked your book so much. Im glad Thank you. Back home theres a real interest in Africa, in African problems (GN 264). Anna talks about race and Edwina views the novel as, Well in your wonderful novel, you have the young flier and the Negro girl sleeping together. Well, now would you say it was important? Would you say their having sex together was vital to the story? (GN 264). She is totally dissatisfied and depressed with the views from Reginald and Edwina and comes to a conclusion, Perhaps it would be a good idea to

34 check before you invite writers in this country to dinner, because quite a number might cause you embarrassment.(GN 267) The third section of the black notebook includes entries and reviews which highlights the special technique used by Lessings. It begins with the entry 11th November 1955. Its a London scene involving cruelty to a pigeon that Anna advised to skip over. This event in Annas life reminds her of an episode in her earlier life back with the comrades in Rhodesia, Last night I dreamed of the pigeon. It reminded me of something, I didnt know what. In my dream I was fighting to remember. Yet when I woke up I knew what it was - an incident from the Mashopi hotel week-ends} I haven't thought of it for years, yet now it is clear and detailed./Tarn again exasperated because my brain contains so much that is locked up and unreachable, unless, by a stroke of luck, there is an incident like yesterday. (GN 367) Mrs. Boothby, the proprietor with her husband of the Mashopi hotel, still has a crush on Paul. She gives him a rifle and asks him and the comrades to go out in the country side and shoot pigeons for a pigeon-pie, which they do without stamping insects. Paul shoots several pigeons, and makes a big point of sending Jimmy who adores him to fetch the bird carcasses as if hes a dog. This scene fills the left side of the black notebook where Anna puts her source material, Nevertheless, like your butterflies, they are doomed.' And Paul his rifle and shot. A bird fell off a branch, this time like a stone. The other bird, startled, looked around, its sharp

35 head turning this way and that, an eye cocked up skywards for a possible hawk that had swooped and taken off its comrade, then cocked earthwards where it apparently failed to identify the bloody object lying in the grass. For after a moment of intense waiting silence, during which the bolt of the rifle snapped, it began again to coo. And immediately Paul raised his it mid shot and it, too, fell straight to the ground. And now none of looked at Jimmy, who had not glanced up from his observation of insect. There was already a shallow, beautifully regular pit in the sand, at the bottom of which the invisible insect worked in tiny heaves. Apparently Jimmy had not noticed the shooting of the two pigeon. (GN 375) On the right side of the black notebook, where Anna keeps stuff related to the commercial aspects of Frontiers of war, she puts a letter from a New Zealand publication asking her for portions of her journal to publish. Anna writes back with a refusal, and then amuses herself by jotting down several pseudo journal entries from the view point of an American boy traveling through Europe, pretending to be a writer, Some months ago I got a letter from the Pomegranate Review, New Zealand, asking for a story. Wrote back, saying I did not write stories. They replied asking for 'portions of your journals, if you keep them'. Replied saying I did not believe in publishing journals written for oneself. Amused myself composing imaginary journal, of the right tone for a literary review in a colony or the Dominions: circles isolated from the centers of culture will tolerate a far

36 more solemn tone than the editors and their customers in let's say London or Paris. (Though sometimes I wonder). This journal is kept by a young American living on an allowance from his father who works in insurance. He has had three short stories published and has completed a third of a novel. He drinks rather too much, but not as much as he likes people to think; takes marihuana, but only when friends from the States visit him. He is full of contempt for that crude phenomenon, the United States of America. (GN 384) Being a committed writer Lessing resorts subverting the normal discourse based on ideology through parody .When Anna is approached to adapt her 'Frontiers of war' into film she objects because of the cross commercialism and sentimentality of the mass media. Anna starts writing parodies of film synopses. But then her agents are ready to take them. She then starts writing imaginary journals but they too are accepted by the media fraternity. Anna's friend James Schaffer produces a short story 'Blood on the Banana Leaves' (GN 389) a first rate parody. But the whole 'parodic' discourse take on an ironic twist as the readers /viewers subvert the 'parody'and see it as a familiar discourse thus calling into question the very nature of discourse (ideology) and thus parodying the whole affair. Thus on one level, the Golden Note Book is a case where the text is in dialogue with other texts, in act of absorption, parody and criticism, rather than as autonomous artefact. Anna ends this part of the black notebook with three critical reviews of her Frontiers Of War novel that showed up in various soviet publication and the last section of the black note book the bricollage technique is used to depict the violence in Africa. Then she records a

37 dream in which a film crew shoots her novel Frontiers of war. It looks very accurate at first and then Anna realizes that its completely untrue to her vision. Anna reveals to the director ,Why did you change my story? I saw he did not understand what I meant. I had imagined he had done it on purpose, had decided my story was no good. He looked rather hurt, certainly surprised (GN 462). The director tells her not to worry about the version they film, so long as they film something. Anna realizes that her dream is about total sterility. At the end of the fourth section of the black notebook she takes off this division and decides to write on both sides, which indicates that Anna has come out of her self-division. Another striking feature towards the end of the each notebook is she draws a double line across the page, making the end of the black notebook (GN 462). The Red notebook is mainly concern with Annas experience with the British communist party from 1950-57. It contains descriptions of party meetings, discussions hints on the strength and weakness of the party, portraits of party members and their personal relationships. Anna writes very little in this notebook and whatever she writes is highly critical of the party. It depends her growing unless with the party and her final extraction from it. Anna becomes the partys decision to view its intellectual as enemies and to execute them. The whole tone of the section is reflective in the communist circle in the late fifties when thousands of party members were dissatisfied and were disillusioned by the activities or leave the party became they didnt want to say good bye to our ideals for a better world.

38 Anna describes getting interviewed for permission to join by Comrade Bill, who treats her with unconscious contempt as if doubting her commitment to the party. She writers about Michael, Czech Man, with whom she is involved and his guilt and fear over the fact that he is a member of the British Communist party and meanwhile three of his friends have been hanged by the communists In Prague, Michael spends the evening talking to Anna. It is impossible that these men could be traitors to communism. Then he explains, with much political subtlety, that the party should frame and hang innocent people; and that these three had perhaps got themselves, without meaning to, into objectively, antirevolutionary positions .Anna anguishes over the execution of the Rosen bergs in the United States for states for treason. Both Anna and Molly are disgusted and Molly beings to cry, She was sitting on by bed ,chatting about her day, then she began, graying. In a still, helpless way. It remained me of something , could not think of what, but of course it was May rose, suddenly letting the tears slide down her face sitting in the big room at Mashpee, saying we beloved everything was going to be beautiful and now we know it wont .(GN155) Later on, Anna notes the death of Stalin and she and Molly try to convince themselves that the great man (GN158) must not have known about the genocide committed under his regime. Her last entries in this section describe her experiences during election time in Britain, going door-to- door and trying to recruit voters to the British communist party.

39 She meets several lonely, unfulfilled housewives who plan to vote Labors because their husbands insist on it. To quote, This countrys full of women going mad all by themselves. A pause, then she added, with a slight aggressiveness, the other side of the women Id talked to; I used to be the same until I joined the party and got myself a purpose in life. Ive been thinking about this the truth is, these women interest me much more the election campaign.(GN161) The official part of the Meeting comes to an end and Anna offers to make tea. While preparing tea, she remembers a story sent to her by a Comrade in Leeds. Initially, she had thought that the story was a parody, but then realized it was dead serious. Then she realized that it could be read as a parody, or as a serious study, and this further brought home to her the fragmentation and division of language and ones experience Anna reads the story to the meeting. It concerns Comrade Ted from Leeds, England who is thrilled beyond words to get invited to the Soviet Union. He goes and stays in a marvelous hotel and sits at the table, writing up his notes for the day, for he was determined to keep a record of every precious moment (GN274). Then some younger comrades knock the door and enter with open, simple faces, wearing workers boots. They humbly ask Comrade Ted to accompany them to Kremlin, and then to an unpretentious room, where Comrade Stalin is working with shirtsleeves rolled up far into the night as everyone knows that he does Comrade, you must forgive me for disturbing you so late at night Oh I interrupted eagerly, But the whole world knows you are a late worker (GN274).

40 Comrade Ted is so anxious and things get ever better because Comrade Stalin humbly asks his opinion about the Soviet Unions foreign policy towards Britain, I know my eyes were full- I shall be proud of these tears till I die! As I left Stalin was refilling his pipe, his eyes already on a great pile of papers that awaited his perusal. I went out of the door, after the greatest moment of my life. (GN275) Anna finishes reading this story to the writers group, and the others just look at her. Then the lunch harshly and bare their Leeth at each other in open hostility . The meeting ends on this uncomfortable note. As we separated, the room was full of hastily; we were disliking each other, and know it (GN276). The third section of the red note book opens with three entries from 1955 to 1956 exploring the mood of the British communist party after Stalins death in 1953. Though Anna has left the party, they are trying to woo her back. The twentieth congress of the Russian communist party has filled the British idealists with hope, and they want to clear out the dead wood and naively expect the oldsters to resign for the good of the party Anna is filled with renewed hope and then disillusionment, My dear comrades I have been listening to you, amazed at the wells of faith in human beings! what you are saying amounts to this that you know the leadership of the British cp consists of men and women totally corrupted by years of work in the Stalinist atmosphere, you know they will do any thing to maintain their position.(GN394)

41 The fourth section of the red notebook is more of news clippings related to violence in Africa. Anna underlines the word freedom wherever she sees it : a total of 679 times (GN 462). She includes an extended story told to her by one of the comrades Jimmy about a mutual friend comrade Harry. Harry fought in the Spanish civil war on the side of the communists, gets disillusioned with Stalin, because a Trotskyist, and then became disillusioned with Trotsky. Back in Britain during the Second World War, he gets turned down for military service because of damage to his leg sustained in the Spanish conflict. He devotes himself to teaching disadvantaged children. He is renting a room from an air force widow who is actually in love with him. He is preparing himself for the inevitable day when the Soviet Union will recognize his greatness and invite him over to help them return to the ideological purity of Lenins values. They adored him of course for his high seriousness, but more than once they enquired why Harry wore such bizarre clothes, and even, as I recall, if he had a secret sorrow. (GN464) Jimmy invites Harry to join him for a delegation of British teachers bound for the Soviet Union. Harry labors under the misconception that he is important enough either to get invited by Khrushchev himself to reform the Soviet Union or to get arrested and sent to Siberia. He ends up lecturing their poor little exhausted guide for hours about ideology while she politely listens and tries not to fall asleep.

42 Finally Jimmy blurts out a confession that he invited Harry along on impulse. Harry realizes that hes not important. He looks crushed but thanks Jimmy for the learning experience. They go home to Britain, and Jimmy later hears that Harry married the widow and got her pregnant. Jimmy is not sure if it signifies Harrys life. He made a point of thanking me for getting him on to the delegation A very valuable experience, he said it was. I went to see him last week. Hes married the widow at last and shes pregnant, I dont know what that proves, if anything (GN466) . Another feature towards the close of the red notebook, which makes

it similar to the black notebook, is the newspaper cuttings. Also like the cuttings on Africa, these are also about violent in Europe, the Soviet Union, china and the United States in the same period. The Bricollage technique which is a most significant feature of the post modernism, is once again used by Lessings in the red notebook, which makes it similar to the black notebook, another notable feature highlighted towards the end of this book is that in 679 places Anna has marked the word freedom in the newspaper cuttings and its suggests that entire world goes violent to uphold the high ideals of freedom (GN 462). The yellow notebook reads like the manuscript of a novel and Anna calls this novel The Shadow of the Third. She writes this novel to fictionalize her own intense psychic conflicts and her tormenting experiences of passional love. As the title suggest it is the presence of a third person in the life of Ella. Ella is living with her friend Julia in the

43 house that Julia owns. In reality, Julia is Molly, who also owns a house and is an actress. Ella is working for a womens magazine, replying the letters of unfulfilled working-class housewives who write in for advice. To add to the reflexive ness of The Golden Notebook, Ella the heroine of Annas novel is herself writing a novel about suicide. She goes to a party hosted by her coworker Dr. West and meets his coworker, a psychiatrist named Paul with whom she has an affair for five years, The idea for this novel had come to Ella at the moment when she found herself getting dressed to go out to dine with people after she had told herself she did not want to go out. She said to herself, rather surprised at the thought: This is precisely how I would commit suicide. (GN 165) Ellas novel about suicide gets published to good reviews. Her affair with Paul, however, grows more toxic. He is married to a childlike woman whom he claims is utterly dependent upon him as a father-figure, and they have two children he has affairs with other women as well as Ella. Paul accuses Ella of having relations with other men and is involved in having another affair simultaneously with a colleague, Stephanie, Paul has almost abandoned his mute, docile and homely wife Muriel to sleep with his smart gay and sexy mistress Ella. Paul says that Ella looks like a severe school mistress when she puts on simple clothes and when she switches over to low cut blouses, he really becomes jealous and envies her smart seductive looks. As years roll by she realizes that Paul has completely left her for Muriel. Yet she waits for him day after day, dresses for him, cooks for

44 him still hoping that one day he would drop in she realizes her frustrations are due to the absence of a real man in her real life and that the cost of freedom being a free women is emotional frustration.She thinks that nothing has occurred which has not been happening all her life. Married men, temporarily wifeless, trying to have an affair with her etc. etc., ten years ago she would not have even noticed or remarked on it. All this was taken by her as part of the hazards and chances of being a 'free woman'. But ten years ago, she realized, she had been feeling something that she had not then recognized. An emotion of satisfaction, of victory over the wives; because she, Ella, the free woman, was so much more exciting than the dull tied women. Looking back and acknowledging this emotion she is ashamed. Yes, the stupid faith and naivety and trust had led, quite logically, into her standing at the window waiting for a man whom she knew, quite well, would never come to her again (GN 209). Ella, who is dumped by Paul in the last installment, is sent to Paris by here editor to negotiate for the rights of a melodramatic French story to be published as a serial in the English womens magazine that employs Ella. In reality, Ellas editor is not especially interested in obtaining the French melodrama and is actually trying to give Ella a vacation. Now Ella, in Paris cannot stop thinking about Paul and feels vulnerable and alone. She hates herself for letting her relationship with Paul transform her: before Paul, she would have had a great time in Pairs, talking to strangers and flirting with Frenchman,

45 It was true that with Paul she had taught herself never to look at a man, even casually, because of his jealously; she was, with him, like a protected indoors woman from a Latin country. But she had imagined this was an outward conformity to save him from self-inflicted pain. Now she saw that her whole personality had changed. (GN 277). Ella goes to meet the French editor with whom she must negotiate for the rights to the Melodrama. He is a big, ox-like man and they go for lunch where he ogles all the women who pass by. On seeing his fiance, she realizes that the poor women is ugly and has an relationship with the man only because he needs her money. As days passes by, Ella decides to go back to Britain. The plane had mechanical problems and everyone, including Ella, is frightened to abode the flight. Only an American man, named Cy Maitland who is sits beside Ella shrugs it off with good humor, She had climbed into the aircraft as she would have climbed into a death-chamber; but thinking of the shrug given by the head mechanic; that was her feeling too. As the aero plane began to vibrate, she thought: Im, going to die, very likely, and Im pleased. (GN 285) Ella accepts Cys invitation for dinner, they meet and he talks about himself. He says that he is married and is highly ambitious and achieves everything in life. She finds herself physically attracted to him and inspires by him for his good-humoured personality.

46 Ella frets about her suspicion that she might not be able to have an orgasm with a man whom she does not love. She wonders she regards men as simple creatures and goes home and tells her friend Julia that she had a date with a man who was not real great in bed, 'Free,' says Julia. 'Free! What's the use of us being free if I they aren't? I swear to God, that every one of them, even the best of them, have the old idea of good women and bad women. And what about us? Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they're with a woman they don't give a damn about, but we don't have an orgasm unless we love him. What's free about that?', (GN 404). The third section of the yellow book opens, when Ella moves into a new flat which makes her friend Julia resentful. Ella now feels less protected from the attentions of man. She is now definitely a woman living alone; and that, although she has not realized it before, is very different from two women sharing a house.(GN 397). Ella receives calls from her male acquaintances, announcing that their wives are out of town and inviting Ella for dinner. Invariably she ends up sleeping with them and after words they devastate her with a cutting remark. Then the same men try to come back to her for more sex, a few weeks later. Even Julia, faces the same problem and they renew their friendship and Ella decides to give up sex, To quote, Ella finds herself in a new mood or phase. She becomes completely sexless. She puts it down to the incident with the

47 Canadian script writer, but does not care particularly. She is now cool, detached, self-sufficient. Not only can she not remember what it was like, being afflicted with sexual desire, but she cannot believes she will every feel desire again. She knows, however, that this condition, being selfsufficient and sexless, is only the other side of being possessed by sex .(GN 404) Ella now decides to concentrate on her writing; she visits her father, who has become a sort of a mystical hermit. He seems pleased by her visit but not with her sex life. She reminds her father that her dead mother had so little interest in sex that he went out and had affairs. She questions about her mother and their sex life. He admits and he says that he writes mystical poems and shows her a few poems. The last section of the yellow notebook contains a series of eighteen short stories about women who long for the right man. But each attempt fails miserably, leaving her desperate and emotionally barren. These short stories either anticipates. some events in Annas life or point to the inner division and conflicts in her It also contains parodies and pastiche the latter which is the symptom of Annas writers block, A healthy woman, in love with a man. She finds herself becoming ill, with symptoms she has never had in her life, she slowly understands that this illness is not hers, she understands the nature of the illness, not from him, how he acts or his illness is reflected in herself. (GN 468) There is a description of three guys bumming around New York city that reads like a parody. Anna adds: If Ive gone back to pastiche,

48 then its time to stop (GN 475). She then draws a double black line across the page, marking the end of the yellow notebook which is a recurring technique used by Lessings. Which is seen at the end of every notebook, The fellows were out Saturday-nighting true-hearted, the wild-hearted Saturday-night gang of true friends, Buddy, Dave and Mike. Snowing. Snow-cold. The cold of cities in the daddy of cities, New York. But true to us. Buddy, the ape-shouldered, stood apart and stared. He scratched his crotch. Buddy the dreamer, pitch-black-eyed, sombrely' staring, he would often masturbate in front of us, unconscious, pure, a curious purity. And now he stood with the snow crumb white on his sad bent shoulders. Dave tackled him low, Dave and Buddy sprawled together in the innocent snow, Buddy winded. Dave drove his fist into Buddy's belly, oh true love of true friends, mensch playing together under the cold cliffs of Manhattan on a true Saturday night. Buddy. (GN 474) The blue note book functions as Annas personal diary. Here she makes a deliberate attempt not to turn everything into fiction, but to try to keep a factual account of what happens in her life. Her personal diary has a veracity the other versions lack. The most highlighting feature in this notebook, is that it describes her breakdowns in detail and her affair with an American, Saul Green. At times the diary entries are short and factual, sometimes longer and reflective. It gives a detailed factual account of her life, her session with a psycho-therapist Mrs. Marks, the end of her love affair with Michael, and

49 her relation with her friend Molly. The material that goes into the making of this diary is all connected with her life, I came upstairs from the scene between Tommy and Molly and instantly began to turn it into a short story. It struck me that my doing this - turning everything into fiction - must be an evasion. Why not write-down, simply, what happened between Molly and her son today? Why do I never write down, simply, what happens? Why don't I keep a diary? Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself. Today it was so clear: sitting listening to Molly and Tommy at war, very disturbed by it; then coming straight upstairs and beginning to write a story without even planning to do it. I shall keep a diary. (GN 211) Mrs. Marks inquiries whether Anna keeps a diary. Anna admits to the Blue Notebook, but finds the question so intrusive that she stops writing personal entries. For the next eighteen months she does not make any entry in the book except short scribbling and clippings of newspaper headlines of the early 1950s: the Korean war, the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya etc., March, 50 The modeller calls this the 'H-Bomb Style', explaining that the 'H' is for peroxide of hydrogen, used for colouring. The hair is dressed to rise in waves as from a bomb-burst, at the nape of the neck. Daily Telegraph July 13th, 50

50 There were cheers in Congress today when Mr Lloyd Bentsen, Democrat, urged that President Truman should tell the North Koreans to withdraw within a week or their towns would be atom-bombed. Express .(GN 219) Finally, she once again starts recording her dreams and psychoanalysis session though she continues to insist to Mrs. Marks that she wont write anymore novels because it seems futile in the face of the worlds horrors. She and Mrs. Marks part friendly in 1954 as she comes to the end of her psychoanalysis. She acknowledges the fact that Mrs. Marks has taught her how to cry which has made her more vulnerable and strong, It was from my dreams that I knew he soon would; he soon will. In my sleep I watch these scenes of parting. Without emotion. In my life I am desperately, vividly unhappy; asleep I am unmoved. Mrs Marks asked me today: 'If I were to ask you to say in a phrase what you have learned from me, what would you reply?' 'That you have taught me to cry,' I said, not without dryness. She smiled, accepting the dryness. 'And so?' 'And I'm a hundred times more vulnerable than I was.' 'And so? Is that all?' 'You mean, I am also a hundred times stronger? I don't know. I don't know at all. I hope so.' 'I know,' she said, with emphasis You are very much stronger. And you will write of this experience .(GN 229) In the next entry, Anna feels too depressed to write and gives a break for a day and again she writes about waking up in bed with Michael staetles who is out of a dream , who has frequent nightmares as the

51 Nazis killed his entire family. Then he wants sex but she is tense about her young daughter Janet waking up and intruding them. They have sex and he seems to resent her for leaving the bed to go to Janet right away, It must be about six o clock. My knees are tense. I realize that what I used to refer to, to Mother Sugar, as the housewifes disease has taken hold of me. The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on : I must dress Jane get her breakfast send her off to school get Michaels breakfast dont forget Im out of tea etc., With this useless but apparently unavoidable tension resentment is also switched on. Resentment against what? Unfairness. That I should have to spend so much of my time worrying over details. The resentment focuses itself on Michael, although I know with my intelligence it has nothing to do with Michael. (GN 298) Anna gets Janet off to school and Michael off to work, and then puts on a dress liked by Michael and runs down for some quick shopping at the grocer and the butcher. She prepares dinner, tidies the flat and gets ready to leave fro the job with the British communist party, And now I must hurry. I wash again and dress. I choose a black and white wool dress with a small white collar, because Michael likes it, and there mightnt be time to change before this evening. Then I run down to the grocer and the butcher. It is a great pleasure, buying food I will cook for Michael; a sensuous pleasure, like the act of cooking itself. I imagine the meat in its coat of crumbs and

52 egg; the mushrooms, simmering in sour cream and onions, the clear strong, amber-coloured soup. Imagining I create the meal, the movements I will use, checking ingredients, heat, textures. I take the provisions up and put them on the able; then I remember the veal must be beaten and I must do into now, because later it will wake Janet. So I beat the veal flat and fold the tissues of meat in paper and leave them.(GN 302) Anna realizes that she has her period and she gives a detailed account of it in two pages. Then she takes the bus to the office where she meets with nice Comrade Jack and Cranky Comrade Butte to help them decide whether or not the party should publish two bad manuscripts of fiction. Anna realizes that it is futile: the party, concentrates in the authority of Comrade Butte, and has decided to public these awful novels, and its pointless to discuss it. She is reminded of Comrade Jack telling her that once Comrade Butte was a witty young firebrand who writes creatively and well. Anna realizes that every member like herself turns into an old fossil if her or she stays too long and hence she resolves to leave the party. She tells herself that she must leave the party, and then immediately goes to Comrade Jacks office to speak with him. She conveys her disillusionment with the Party and its contradictions, Yet when I leave the party, this is what I am going to miss the company of people who have spent their lives in a

53 certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that their lives must be related to a central philosophy. This is why so many people who would like to leave, or think they should leave, the Party, do not. There is no group of people or type of intellectual I have met outside the party which isnt ill-informed, frivolous, parochial, compared with certain types of intellectual inside the party. (GN 306) Jack infuriates her by claiming that individuals such as him and Anna cannot see the whole, and in the course of time will sort it all out. She then resigns. He tells her that he thinks she is in danger because without working she will sit and brood at home. Anna goes home and prepares dinner for Janet and makes her sleep, and then cooks a separate dinner for Michael. As hours pass by, she knows he is back with his wife and she knows that he is breaking it off with her, Well, Anna and so our great love affair to an end? My dear Anna, if you insist on sleeping with a man who is history of Europe over the last twenty years you mustnt complain if he has uneasy dreams. This was resentful: the resentment was because I wasnt party of that history. (GN 296) Molly comes in and talks about Tommy and her disapproval for his Jory girlfriend, and about how she did not understand him. Then Molly leaves and Anna fees lonely. She receives a call from Michael who says he is working late and he will not come home. Anna goes to bed totally unhappy. She writes a short dispassionate statement about how she decided to leave the party and she adds,

54 I must now be careful not to start hating the Party in the way we do hate stages of our life we have outgrown. Noted signs of it already: moments of disliking Jack which were quite irrational. Janet as usual, no problems. Molly worried, I think with reason, over Tommy. She has a hunch he will marry his new girl. Well, her hunches usually come off. I realized that Michael had finally decided to break it off. I must pull myself together. (GN 326) In the third section of the Blue Notebook, Anna writes about her conversation with her analyst Mrs. Marks in which she accuses the other woman of putting across an impatient reaction whenever Anna wants to analyze her feelings in an intellectual way, and only smiling in approval when she examines her feelings in the context of folklore or mythology. Anna admits that she herself finds the mythology of her dreams highly seductive because it means her pain is safely contained in the story and cant hurt her. But she knows that she has to get to the next stage in her life where she leaves the safety of myth and walks forward alone, Im going to make the obvious point that perhaps the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact Ive reached the stage where I look at people and say he or she, they are whole at all because theyve chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves. (GN 413)

55 Mrs. Mark points out that Anna first starts doing psychoanalysis because she could not feel anything, and now she is regaining the ability to feel. Anna admits that her ability to feel pain now has made her stronger, but she hates Mrs. Markss insistence that she separates herself from the experience of her pain by classifying it as just another piece in the great mosaic of human experience. She experiences things that no other woman has ever experienced before. Mrs. Marks says that there have always been creative, sexually independent women out there. Anna disagree this statement, by arguing that the time period in which she lives makes all the difference. Anna adds that she meets people who seem split or cracked open, and she thinks that they might be keeping themselves open for something important and new. Mrs. Marks turns the conversation back to Annas writing, urging her to get back to it. Anna gets impatient, claims that she could never provide enough context to get across the truth. She also claims that people want art to have an message but are disturbed by formless works of art that claim everything is meaningless, My people may separate them. I dont. At least, not till this moment. But now Ill say its a question of form. People dont mind immoral messages. They dont mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good; sex for sexs sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a title. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they cant stand is to be told it all doesnt matter, they cant stand formlessness. (GN 417)

56 Lessings literary technique of using lines is seen recurring in the notebooks. Anna draws a thick black line across the page. Then she describes how she buys her current flat to provide room for her ex-lover Michael, but also to provide room for her four notebooks. She describes how distributed she feels after Michael rejects her and she brings out her four notebooks and reads through all of them. She feels that Michaels rejection changed her entire personality, and that her notebooks are filled with untruth content. It occurs to me that what is happening is breakdown of me, Anna, and this is how I am becoming aware of it. For words are form, and if I am at a pitch where shape, form, expression are nothing, then I nothing, for it has become clear to me, reading the notebooks, that I remain Anna because of a certain kind of intelligence. This intelligence is dissolving and I am very frightened. (GN 419) She describes her most terrifying nightmare, which is about destruction. First, a primitive wooden vase comes alive in her dream and starts dancing around. Later the wooden vase became a misshapen old man in the nightmare. The destructive force is always deformed but lively and energetic and it radiates joyfulness. Anna describers the nightmare to her analyst, Mrs. Marks and asks if she senses anything good or creative about the weird little figures vitality. Anna thinks the figure is totally evil, but Mrs. Marks says its only dangerous as long as Anna fears it. Anna has the nightmare again, and this time the figure is not a vase or an archetype but is embodies inside an actual acquaintance of hers. Recognizing this force in an actual

57 human is far more frightening than seeing it in an image out of mythology, Last night I dreamed the dream again, and this time it was more terrifying than anything Ive experienced, because I felt that terror, the helplessness, in face of the uncontrolled force for destruction, when there was no object or thing or even a dwarf to hold it. I was in a dream with another person, whom I did not immediately recognize; and then I understood that this terrible malicious force was in that person who was friend. And so I forced myself awake out of the dream, streaming and when I awoke I put a name to the person in my dream, knowing that for the first time the principle was embodied in a human being. And when I knew who the person was, I was even more frightened. For it was safer to have that terrible frightening force held in a shape associated with the mythical or the magical, than loose, or as it were at large, in a person, and in a person who had the power to move me. As if writing about it sucks me even further into danger. (GN 420) Repetition of drawing heavy black lines is the most striking feature in Lessings novel The Golden Notebook. Anna draws a heavy black line across the page, and then she describes a meeting she attended at Mollys house for the comrades. Jewish Comrade Henry returns from a trip to the Soviet Union. He addressed the general meeting with a watered-down version of what he learns from Stalins mass murder of the Jews.

58 When the non-party members go home, he addressed a smaller, closed meeting and reveals the unvarnished truth. An American Jew named Nelson stands up and denounces Henry for hiding the truth from the main meeting even though Henry has suffered extreme pressure from the top brass to stop him from speaking at all. Anna enters the kitchen and finds Molly crying. Molly says Its all very well for you, you arent Jewish. (GN423) Anna steps outside and Nelson insists on taking her home. He is a man of about forty, Jewish, American, pleasant-looking, a bit of a paterfamilias. I knew I was attracted to him and (GN423) and again draws a heavy black line. Anna draws a black line once again to express her unwillingness to write about sex. She furnishes all details regarding her affair with Nelson and how she likes at first because he is nice to her daughter, Janet,. Molly was crying in the kitchen. She said: Its all very well for you, you arent Jewish. Yet Nelson and I would not have so easily been in communion without having shared all that experience, even though it had been in different countries. On that first evening he stayed late. He was courting me. He was talking about me, the sort of life I led. And women always respond at once to men who understand we are on some kind of frontier. I suppose I could say that they name us. We feel safe with them. He went up to see Janet, sleeping. His interest in her was genuine. (GN 423) Nelson decides to leave his wife and he is desperate to have a real relationship with a woman. He says that he will come after Janet sleeps (GN424) and he speaks as a potential lover on his return, his eyes never meets Annas and she is really disappointed,

59

I loved him for the sense of the after Janet was asleep and the understanding of the sort of life I have. When he came that evening he was very late, and in a different moodgarrulous, talking compulsively, his eyes darting everywhere, never meeting mine. I felt my spirits sink; it was form my own sudden nervousness and apprehension that I understood, before my mind understood it, that this was going to be another disappointment. (GN 424) Nelson confesses to Anna that he fought in the Spanish civil war on the side of the communists against Franco. Her heart sinks as he talks about his war experience, he said that innocent people had been shot, through him, though he had not believed at the time they were innocent (GN 424). For a couple of weeks Nelson is in a dilemma between being a nice guy and a neurotic wreck. He invites her to a party attended by several other Americans at his flat; she being the only English person present. They treat her in good manner and they pretend that Nelsons marriage is not cracking up. There is a heavy pressure for Anna, who is Nelsons mistress. Anna even dances with Nelson to keep the peace, And then Nelson says, loud, jerking his thumb at me: Im going to dance with Anna. I cant dance, I cant do anything, you dont have to tell me that, but Im going to dance with Anna. I stand up, because everyone is looking at me, saying with their eyes: Go on, youve got to dance, youve go to. Nelson comes over, and says loudly in parody: Im going to

60 dance with Anna. Dance with m-e-e! Da-a-ance with me, Anna. (GN 431) Anna goes home, really worried for They are tied by the closest of all, bonds (GN 433) and will never leave each other. Nelson telephones Anna after this and gets hysterical and insulting. Then he calls back and asks obviously if she is hurt with the previous conversation. Anna starts having the nightmare with energy embodies in Nelson, I havent had the dream again. But two days ago I met a man at Mollys house. A man from Ceylon. He made overtures, and I rejected them. I was afraid of begin rejected, of another failure. Now I am ashamed. I am becoming a coward. I am frightened because my first impulse, when a man strikes the sexual note, is to turn, run anywhere, out of the way of hurt. (GN 435) Anna draws another heavy black line across the page. Then she describes De Silva from Ceylon whom Anna met years ago at Mollys house. De Silva had come to London, married an Englishman, had a kid, and started a half-hearted career as a journalist. Unable to earn his living in England he abandons his wife and children. De Silva comes into Annas life when he pops up in London again, looking to borrow money from Molly. Anna feels sorry for him and asks him to dine at Mollys house. De Silva acts and insists on telling Anna creepy stories about women hes slept with. She repels but goes and sleeps with him,

61 For me, the night was deadly, like his interested, detached smile. He was a cool, detached, and abstracted. It didnt matter to him. Yet at moments he suddenly relapsed into an objective mother-needing child. I minded these moments more than the cool detachment and the curiosity. For I kept thinking stubbornly: Of course its him, not me. For men create things, they create us. In the morning, remembering how I clung, how I always cling on to this, I felt fooling. Because why should it be true? (GN 439) The next morning Anna feels as if there was no life or warmth left in me (GN439) She goes ahead and makes him breakfast and then tells him she will never sleep with him again, the seems furious, but then calms down. Later on he calls her and says that he wants her to take over her daughter Janets room for night so that she can hear him in there having sex with a prostitute. Anna hangs up on him. She starts having the joy-in-destruction nightmare with the spiteful energy embodied in De Silva. Molly returns home and tells Anna that De Silva obviously had a second child in Ceylon with his wife white he left for England, The point of all this is course that he talked his wife into having the second child, which she didnt want, just to make sure of nailing her fast and leaving him free. Then he buggered off to England where I suppose he expected me to smooth his brow. And the awful thing is, if I hadnt been away at the crucial moment, I would, Id have taken the whole thing as its face value : poor Cingalese intellectual

62 unable to earn a living, has to leave wife and two children to come to the well-paid intellectual marts of London. What fools we are, perpetually, eternally and we never learn, and I know quite well that next time it happens Ill have learned nothing. (GN 440) In the last section of the blue notebook, Anna considers her daughter Janets life to be no more than a charming conventionally intelligent little girl, destined by nature for an unproblematic life (GN 476) despite the influence of mollys house, her long affair with Michael and his disappearance and despite the fact that shes the product of a broken marriage. Janet wants to free herself from the complicated atmosphere and hence decides to go to the boarding school, Its true that with her I banish the Anna who is listless and frightened. But she must feel that Anna is there. And of course, the reason why I don't want her to go is that she is my normality. I have to be, with her, simple, responsible, affectionate, and so she anchors me in what is normal in myself. When she goes to school.(GN 476) As Anna is running in short of money. She decide to rent her room upstairs for an American named Saul Green .She discusses with him left using politics, her writers block and her break down and begins to look at her life again. Under his influence not through a fragmented consciousness, but a new illumination seeing fusion, likeness and wholeness where none existed before. Anna regards Saul Green as an American on the loose in Europe. hell be writing the American epic novel and hell be in psycho

63 analysis and hell have one of those awful American marriages and Ill have to listen to his troubles I mean problems (GN 477). She considers all the American whom she meets as good humoured people and emotional. But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a halflove or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves, But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a halflove or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves. (GN 478) It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only. Anna is anxious, when she hears that Saul green is coming to her flat and hence she makes all arrangements and is totally annoyed when he apologies saying that be will be coming the next day. Later Molly,

64 telephones saying that her son Tommy and his wife, Tory meet Mr. Green and did not like him, but she says that Anna will probably like him. Saul Green and Anna speaks freely and he gives a lecture on the pitfalls and rewards of a women living alone (GN 483) she is expecting a man from the company to buy Frontiers of war but later on she is not interested in selling the novel for a film. Once again he begins to lecture regarding the things one should not be afraid of (GN 484). The absence of Janet makes her not necessary to get up in the morning, no outer shape to her life and is longing to give it an inner shape, Molly rings Anna, saying that any woman involved with Mr Green is out of her senses (GN 485) Anna is suffering from an anxiety state which is due to Saul Green (GN 486). To Quote, Then I sat down to find out why I have an anxiety state - I am not worried about money, being short of money has never in my life upset me, I'm not afraid of being poor, and anyway one can always earn it if one sets one's mind to it. I'm not worried about Janet. I can see no reason at all why I should be anxious. 'Naming' the state I am in as an anxiety state, lessened it for a while, but tonight it is very bad. (GN 486) Anna realizes that she is in love with Green, she remembers how she first ridiculed the idea, then examined it and finally accepted it. She goes for supper with molly and she considered the man-women loyalty stronger than the loyalty of friendship (GN 488). She questions him about his life in America and the barrier of evasions. He replies that he is not yet used to Europe and that no one ever asks if someone is a

65 communist. Anna regards him as the familiar mixture of bitterness, sadness and a determination to keep some sort of balance that we all are (GN 488). Anna accuses Mr. Green of being anti-feminist.(GN490). His words softened her and they speak about politics. She says that she is hopelessly in love with this man. At last he comes and puts his arms around her and says (GN 491). I noted there was a touch of sullenness as he said it, but chose not to hear it. I'd forgotten what making love with a real man is like. And I'd forgotten what it was like to lie in the arms of a man one loves. I'd forgotten what it was like to be in love like this, so that a step on the stair makes one's heart beat, and the warmth of his shoulder against my palm is all the joy there is in life. (GN 491) Saul makes love with Anna just to keep out of fear. Fear of being alone she responds saying that they were two frightened creatures, loving through terror. For nearly a week he did not make love to her she realized the female creature shrink, then grew angry and jealous. It is really terrible and she didnt recognize in herself and hence goes upstairs to Saul and says,

66 What sort of a man, you ask? You may very well ask. I said: 'I suppose you are writing that great American novel, young hero in search of an identity. Right, he said. But Im not prepared to take that tone of voice from inhabitants of the world who for some reason I don't understand never have a moments doubt about their identity. He was hard, laughing, hostile; I was also hard, and laughing. I said, enjoying the cold moment of your hostility: Well, good luck, but don't use me in your experiments.' And went downstairs. A few minutes later he came down, no longer a spiritual tomahawk, but kindly and responsible (GN 493).

Saul says, Anna you are looking for a man in your life, and youre right, your life, and youre right, you deserve one, but, but, Youre looking for happiness. Its a word that never meant anything to me until I watched you manufacturing it like molasses out of this situation (GN 493). Anna is depressed and discouraged and green comforts her saying that people of their kind of experience is always bound to the depressed and unhopeful. They speak about his childhood and his broken home. As a result of his parents splitting up he is not able to work for hours at a stretch Green longs to go for a walk, Anna suspects him, if he has sex with Jane Bond and he says, I think you ought to try and understand something -we're very different people. And another thing, the way you were living here before I came wasn't good for you. It's all right, I'm here.' With this he laid me down on the bed and began

67 soothing me, as if I were ill. And in fact I was. My mind was churning and my stomach churned. I couldn't think, because the man who was being so gentle was the same man who made me ill. Later he said: 'And now make me supper, it'll be good for you. God help you, but you're a real domestic woman, you ought to be married to a nice settled husband somewhere. then, sullen.(GN 498) When green leaves her flat she reads his papers and is annoyed (GN 501) she rings up Dr. Paynter to know what is wrong with someone who has no sense of time and seems to be several different people. Green is not interested in wasting his money on a psychiatrist when he gets treatment from her free (GN 502). Anna assumes that Saul is making love to Dorothy and reaches the house sick from nerves tension, when questioned about this to Green be begins shouting "You spy on me, youre the most jealous woman Ive even know I havent touched a women since Ive been here and four a red blooded American boy like me, thats something(GN 507) and he says that sex isnt important to him, He shouted: 'I'm a mensch. I'm not a woman's pet, to be locked up.' He went on shouting, and I recognized the feeling I'd had the day before, of descending another step into will-lessness. I, I, I, I, I, he shouted, but everything disconnected, a vague, spattering boastful-ness, and I felt as if I were being spattered by machine-gun bullets. It went on and on, I, I, I, I, I, and I stopped listening, and then I realized he had become silent, and was looking at me with anxiety.

68 'What's -wrong with you?' he said. He came over, knelt beside me, turned my face to his, and said: 'For Christ-sake's, you must understand sex isn't important to me, it just isn't important. (GN 507) Anna and Saul Green have an argument and when he says that he will leave, she tells him: go then whenever, green takes the other form, being a pschye, she feels her sense of identity fade, and her stomach clench and her back begins to hurt. But within few minutes, he becomes normal and things go on well, But not in triumph. I was aware of myself as he saw me, a woman inexplicably in command of events, because she could look back and see a smile, a movement, gestures; hear words, explanations - a woman inside time. I disliked the solemnity, the pompousness of that upright little custodian of the truth. When he said: 'It's like being a prisoner, living with someone who knows what you said last week, or can say: three days ago you did so and so, I could feel a prisoner with him, because I longed to be free of my own ordering, commenting memory. I felt my sgnse of identity fade. My stomach clenched and my back began to hurt. (GN 510) Anan intends this book to be the most truthful of the notebooks. The moment she realizes its impossibility, due to her frustration with relationships, she stops recording for the time being. One of the special features noticeable in the blue notebook is the presence of heavy black lines. The reason Anna gives is I drew that line because I didnt want to write it. As if writing about it sucks me ever further into danger (GN

69 421). Her sense of fear of exposing herself through the most truthful notebook, creates a confusion, which reveals itself in recurring dreams. Anna takes a unified view of her life, with the help of the American writer Saul Green, who scribbles in the front of it in pencil, without her knowledge. She discards writing the four books and decides to start a new notebook. The Golden Notebook, Whoever he be who looks in this He shall be cursed That is my wish. Saul Green, his book. (GN 536) She tries to give the order to the chaos in The Golden Notebook instead of allowing her life to be dissolved in the chaos. She is not distracted by disparate, fragmentary experiences, but she sees a fusion, a pattern emerging into her life and hence she develops a detached, controlling, personality a critical intelligence, and looks straight at the scenes of her own life. The Golden Notebook Anna synthesis the various experiences kept separate in the other notebooks so that they approximate to a kind of wholeness of vision. Instead of allowing her life to be dissolved in chaos. She develops, fragmentary experiences but sees a fusion. a pattern emerging in life. Once Anna attains this integration, she is able to overcome her writers block. The Golden Notebook has a fragmented form and a dislocating effect on the readers. The readers are shown the other aspects of Anna, her past life in Africa, her political involvements, her writers block and

70 her psychotherapy, it makes the readers realizes the inadequacy of traditional realism to cope with all the complexity without fictionalizing it, making it smooth and malleable. The essential need of Lessings women is Love. Her women marry and remarry because they strive for love in the form of understanding sharing and participation and not because they want to gratify their sexual urges. Woman is likely to give up her individuality in love as well as in marriage, and man regard this as self gratification. In woman sex hunger is the result of emotional hunger and she cannot enjoy sex unless she loves the man. The men portrayed by Lessing are largely uncurable womanizes, having a number of mistresses or keeps. Despite their marriage, they have a number of affairs. The Golden Notebook, Paul bored with his wife, spends his might with Ella and finally leaves Ella most callously and decodes to settle in Nigeria with his girl friend. Similarly Anna and Michael after a four year affair Micheal breaks it off and leaves her for another woman. Neena Arora regards that the process of woman developing solidarity among themselves is defined as sisterhood women develop deep social relationship with one another and they cease to be rivals of each other or stop completing for the attention of a male In order to face the male hegemony, feminists exhaust women that they should protect advise and boot each others morale. As G.Alison Raymond also tells women, if they do not take initiative to change conditions no one else is likely to do so.2 Sisterhood aims at cutting across the racial, political class or age barriers.

71

The Golden Notebook is a best example of sisterhood, Anna and Molly who are separated from their husbands, live together, provide security, support and company to each others privacy or identity. Lessings women seek wholeness in a male world and are not separatists. A feminine trait has been alleged to jealously. Molly infuses courage in Marion to assert her necessary individuality against the raucous, hostile and oppressive attitude of Richard. Her women help each other confide in each other and whatever freedom is possible it comes with the help of the women friends alone. The deepest and the most problematic of all human relations is marriage. Sociologists define it as a cultural phenomenon which sanctions a more or less permanent union between partners conferring legitimacy on their offspring. The problems and sufferings of women in marriage, feel entrapped, oppressed and doomed to the care of husband and home and show their reaction to it in their novels and they delineate with keen perception and sensibility. Marriage is an emotional stifling and lyranical institution for women confers Doris Lessing. Her women are victims of gender oppression and do not want of gender oppression and do not want to define themselves in relation to men and in-away seek identity and individually in their own way. Lessing finds nothing wrong in relationships based on mutual love and respect and does not ad ovate sexual liberty for women and hence is regarded as the champion of womens freedom.

72

Anna in The Golden Notebook fluids motherhood as a satisfying and soothing experience. It is a hindrance in pursuing any career successfully and satisfactorily. Lessings women try to combine the two equally demanding roles, i.e Motherhood and career. The men all along remain indifferent and selfish and never help women in the process of child rearing, If the child rearing responsibility is shared by the parents there will be an increase in happiness and satisfaction. Motherhood is considered good for only married women, to be an unwed mother is an offence and her children a stigma or a handicap. In The Golden Notebook, Anna living with Max wulf without marriage, marries him when she conceives so that their child (Janet) is not illegitimate, she finally divorces him after the birth of the daughter . Lessings woman willingly accept their fate unhesitatingly, but most of her women gasp for freedom and in due course reject the stereo type by going in for separation or for divorce to live a life with meaning. Her women witness that the tradition of family is very ardent and thus makes a strong plea for the preservation of it, by inviting men to involve themselves in it.

73 CHAPTER III This dissertation deals with Literary Craftsmanship of Doris Lessings The Golden Notebook. The introduction presents the various techniques used in the novels. It focuses on life and works of Doris Lessing and also gives the scope of the thesis. Chapter I is the introduction which highlights the use of the technique in the novel. It further focuses on life and works of Doris Lessing. It also includes the scope of the thesis. Chapter II entitled The Literary Craftsmanship in the Golden Notebook focuses on the structure and the various techniques employed by Lessing in her novel. It highlight fragmentation of life and its excruciating Consequences the two dominant themes of The Golden Notebook. It also deals elaborately with the various narrative techniques namely Novel-within the novel, epistolary novel, clippings of newspaper, themes and also intertextual readings. Dreams serve as a thread to connect disintegrated plots. The Golden Book is markedly different in design and theme. It was received by the public as a triumphant expression of feminism and as confessions of Doris Lessing. In an interview given to Roy Newquist in 1964 and to Florence in 1966 Lessing described the book as a failure because people had failed to read it in the right context. This prompted her to include a preface in the 1971 edition of the book, which was meant as a check to the unwarranted criticism that was being given to the book

74 since its publication. In the preface she states clearly the theme of the book as break down (GN 8) and crack (ing) up as a way of self healing. Ever since many critics began to look at the novel from different angles and to write sensible criticism on The Golden Notebook. In Lessings own words, The Golden Notebook is a highly structured book, carefully planned: The novel is a combination of two projected books, a fictional work dealing with a novelist suffering from a writers block and a book of literary criticism which would employ various styles so that the shape of the book and the juxtaposition of the style would provide the criticism in such a way the completed work would make implicitly a statement about alienation both in theme and structure. She also says, it is an attempt to break certain forms of consciousness and go beyond them. Splitting and fragmentation recurs as themes in The Golden Notebook, and not only in the field of emotional relationships. Anna joins the communist party because of a need for wholeness, for an end to split, divided, unsatisfactory way we all live (GN 171). But she realizes that the split is in fact intensified, since the theory and objectives of the party are so at odds with the real world. And even within herself she recognizes at least two political personalities: one is detached and wise, the other a party fanatic. All the four notebooks focus on the events taking place between 1950 and 1957, but they shift backward and forward in time, oscillating between topicality and the timeless ones, between chronicles of historical events, reveries, fantasies, ideas of fiction and stylistic experiments. Thus Anna creates an artificial and imposed form of split personality to guard herself against real madness.

75

Form, the way in which something is said and contents what is actually said are always interrelated. One affects the other, although in prose this may not be so obvious as in poetry. We are perhaps so familiar with the realist novel that we barely notice its formal aspects, and we usually concentrate instead on the story. But the realist novel relies on a set of conventions which are often disguised by its highly referential language and its attempt to imitate the familiar surfaces of real life. These conventions include an omniscient viewpoint, a chronological, casual narrative with a beginning middle and end; conventional sentence structures, a substantial investment in individual characters as knowable, and non- reflexive subject matter; that is the realist novel seldom examines its own form, but looks outside itself to the real world. These realistic conventions are characteristic of the nineteenth-century novel, and they operate most successfully at a time when there is a generally agreed consensus about what constitutes reality. Doris Lessing greatly admired the ninetieth- century novel and she began her work in the realist mode. But as she became more interested in the working of the unconscious mind, she began to question the techniques of realism; the rational the casual delineation of experience became inadequate. What was needed was a variety of methods to convey the many layers of consciousness of her characters, and their states of breakdown and madness. In addition, she began to question the veracity of the novel, whether or not the novel, despite its functionality, can say something true. Examining the novel form so thoroughly within The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing makes an important contribution to the post

76 modernist debate about the nature of fiction. Her novels are never purely formal. She is deeply interested in her raw material and the ways of representing it, and she never loses sight of the real world. The strength and innovation of The Golden Notebook is the degree to which it combines both aspects the realist story and the examination of realism. The disconnected form of The Golden Notebook points continually to its own divisions, its lack of a carefully to its own divisions, its lack of a carefully smoothed out synthesis, its lack of carefully smoothed out synthesis. Even towards the end of the novel questions are left unanswered solutions with held. Yet it is very difficult for the reader to rest with its disorder. Doris Lessing is parodying the conventional realist novel and by its flatness allows us to see how the chaos vitality of the notebooks has indeed been structured, but in the process diminished. The notebooks each finish in various kinds of frustration, it is finally dissatisfying without the juxtaposition of the notebooks to flesh it out, free women would be dry and skeletal. It plays an integral part in The Golden Notebook, as a whole, elaborately echoing and prefiguring essential themes. During the reading of The Golden Notebook we involuntarily supplement the text of free women with our knowledge of events and moods from the process of fictionalization that Lessing painstakingly breaks down The experience of a reader, reading a novel is usually linear but in The Golden Notebook, the reader is constantly forced to reexamine linearity by being presented with startle or cyclical arrangements of the same objective events.

77 The immense complexity of this novel is seen in theme and structure. Lessing has gathered her earlier themes, a few of which are racial discrimination, political commitment, psychological maladjustment and alienation combing them with the themes of feminism, breakdown and madness. The complexity is seen in the thematic range of the novel, at one level it constitutes a history of the political and cultural life of the England of the fifties and at another level it is an archetypical Journey of the self for wholeness and illumination As far as the structure is concerned it is even more greater. Lessing herself has laid emphasis on the novels structure and regards it as innovative. The stories in The Golden Notebook usually mirror, echo or interact with each other and in a way consider factuality, fictionality, self deceit and literary lying. The contemporary historical truth is sterile and chaotic. In a time, when the female personality is fragmenting under pressures of modern change. the social cultural elements cannot cohere as a whole. A new emotional and existential expectations arise. Annas requirement is to search for a changed morality of life, a search for truth which does not simplify, categorize, sanitize, conventionalize and impoverish. The crisis she explores is also a crisis of her own inventor ie Anna. Anna is a stammerer she has to abandon a lecture on the history of art since she is confused. I keep trying to write the truth and realizing its not true (GN 272). Creation of alternate realities or secondary realities are the two resorts usually followed in post modern fiction. In The Golden Notebook, Anna is a writer and is an actress and not only creates other worlds but provide different dimensions and perspectives. In The Golden Notebook the realities created are not entirely a historical. Lessing uses the post

78 modern homeopathic technique of catching history through alternate histories. Games and deception are common. The fictional character Ella is writing a book on suicide and she also entertains thoughts of suicide. She is on the fringes. The juxtaposition of The Shadow of the Third with Free Women and a final synthesis of all in The Golden Notebook and the confusion of Anna where to place her material reveal word games. The frequent and repeated use of capitals, large types crate a feeling of exhibiting the exteriority of the text creating a center of no value. The experimental is always uncanny like moves in a game. Chance absurdity, irony and contradiction makes its presence felt in The Golden Notebook. Leasing being a committed writer resorts subverting the normal discourse based on ideology through parody .As Annas agents are ready to take parodies of film synopses, she. starts writing imaginary journals but they too are accepted by the media fraternity .An ironic twist occurs in the whole parodic discourse as the readers subvert the parody and regard it as a familiar discourse and hence calling into question the very nature of discourse and the result is parodying the whole affair. Thus on one level, the Golden Notebook is a case where the text is in dialogue with other texts, in act of absorption, parody and criticism, rather than as autonomous artefact. Ambiguous strategies abound in the Golden Notebook. Characters in the four books criss-crossing and characters in the Free Women finding their alter egos in the books are common. These very same characters are later transported into the world of media-scripts and with

79 the influence of technology they enter into the world of Boudrillardian Simulacrum. In one of her dreams Anna has a casket in her hands and when she opens it, it contains characters, mass of fragments and pieces, bits and pieces from everywhere-a lump of red earth from Africa, gun metal from Indo China and bits of flesh from the Korean War. Lessings postmodern techniques asks the reader to throw his vision into the spectacle or shuffle things into order and thus increase the chaos. She uses newspaper cuttings to create end subvert a sense of time and also to trivialize great events in history to bits and pieces of information. Using this bricollage technique a transformation in the tone is affected. Things are made unbelievable by the frequent use of fantasy and dreams. Annas dreams enter into the realms of the grotesque and uncanny. Her dreams presented are from her subconscious, ready to be transformed into art through the trial and error method. In her sleep, the cities she builds are infact her creations. She tries to ignore them for a while and inserts newspaper clippings to break the smooth patterns and thus opens up her play with form. Anna keeps five notebooks and the era of miniaturization, of remote control, and a micro processing of time, bodies and pleasure which has come to be the crux of the various books. Thus for Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook acts as a bridge between realism the kind of writing (mythopoeic, metaphoric, mystical). She felt was needed to convey experiences beyond the range of traditional realism. After this novel she confidentially uses realism as only one from of communication in fiction.

80 The Golden Notebook, Lessing fiction is deeply autobiographical and attempts to deal both the crack in the consciousness of the heroine, Anna wolf, as well exploring the fissures in narrative structure which were to become one of the important features of the post modern novel. On winning the Nobel Prize in literature the Swedish academy decried her as that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power as subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny. Lessing is the eleventh woman to win the prize in its 106 year history, and also the oldest person ever to win the literature award. The Golden Notebook is of universal value and most relevant to modern times. It is an undeniable fact that they would challenge consideration in the best of audience and claims a memorable place in the realm of Literature.

81 PRIMARY SOURCES Lessing, Doris, The Golden Notebook, London: Harper Perennial, 2007 Secondary Sources Books Barret, Michele, Womens Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist feminist Quadrangle/ Analysis, London: Verso, 1980 The New York Times Book co., Third paper back Hole, Judith and Levine, Ellen Rebirth of feminism New York: Printing, 1975 (1971). Wandor, Machalene, Comp, The Body politic: Womens Liberation in Britain, (1869). Juliet, Miutchell, and An Oakley, ed. The Rights and wrongs of women, Centry, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. 1965. Raymond, G. Alison, Half the worlds people New York: Appleton. Wollstone craft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792: ed. Mirriam kramnick; Penguin, 1975. Lessings, Doris, Going Home, London: Michael Joseph, 1957. Rev. ed. London: Panther, 1968, and New York: Ballantine, 1968. Lessings Doris, Mistaken Identity, London: Heinemann, 1988. Arora, Neena, Nayanthara SAHIGAL and DORIS Lessing: A feminist study in cocomparison. Prestige: 1991. Fergussion, Mary Ann, Images of women in Literature, Houghton Miffin boston. 1973. London: Stage 1, 1978 Reprint (1972). Mill, John Stuart. The subjection of women, London: Oxford, 1966

82 Articles of Lessings Carey, John L. Art and Reality in the Golden Notebook. Contemporary Literature, 14 (Autumn 1973), pp. 437-56. Hite, Molly. (En) gendering metafiction: Doris Lessings Rehearsals for The Golden Notebook:. Modern fiction studies, 34, No. 3 (Autumn 1988), pp. 481-99. Internet Sources http://www.dorislessing.org/bibliogrophy.html.bibliography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.Doris_Lessings