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1.2 The Arguments about the Golden Notebook
The literatures of female consciousness are always related to the argument that whether The Golden Notebook is exactly a female novel or not. Lessing completes this novel from the perspective of women to reflect the situation of them at that time, and what she is concerned about is the self-awareness of the educated women in the society of men. The freedom and self-identity women need are based on the male, which is the basis for the critics to believe that the novel is not a female novel.
In the eyes of the author, the Golden Notebook should belong to female works. Both of Anna’s marriage failure and love experiences reflect Lessing’s thoughts in the real world. There is a big difference about the fate of women between this novel and other female works at that time because Lessing greatly reflects the suffering women have went through in that era and the process of their self-rescue.
The main part of this essay is to interpret the growth of the free women in the novel. It studies the plight of free women Anna, her awakening and the ultimate way she chooses to highlight the author's unique feminism.
2 Crises of Free Women
2.1 The Concrete Forms of the Crises
2.1.1 Anna's failure as a writer
Anna’s experiences fully embody her frustration and helplessness of her identity as a writer. In the process of constructing her spiritual world, Anna has a negative attitude about her only published novel Brink of War. “She feels that she has nothing to do because the novel has became the property of others” (Li Shixin, 2007:851).The social effects Anna expects of the novel have not been realized, after which Anna clearly understands, "Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion which is strong enough to create an order and a new way to look at life"(Doris Lessing, 1999:33). She cannot get self-perfection and positive meaning of life from her own works, which let Anna painfully deny herself.
As a writer, facing the social responsibility she should take and the connotation the novel should have, Anna lost in the inevitable despair. After negating the value of her work at the business meetings, she eventually has a strong feel of aversion. She falls into the morass of writing disorder and cannot extricate herself.
All of the setbacks lead to Anna’s unprecedented helplessness in the last part of the black notes. She begins to completely deny her own experience in order to get back the writer’s sense of responsibility. However, she cannot get rid of the boundless despair and the powerlessness.
2.1.2 The Disillusionment of Anna’s political ideal
As an intellectual with a strong sense of social responsibility, Lessing has always insisted on her own left-wing stance, however, paradoxically, she also pessimistically regards it as gossip. It is the political attitude Lessing gives to Anna in the Golden Notebook. Anna instinctively expects something that can make daily life meaningful and worth her to spare no effort to achieve, but she does not have a sober understanding of her political ideal. Anna’s ambivalent attitude towards the issue of joining the party dooms the disillusionment of her political ideals. After joining the Party, Anna experiences an extremely painful process of realizing self-identity. She cannot bear the chores and mediocre of daily life and the contradiction between ideal and the reality, so she has to find a utopia, in which her social behavior is suitable.来~自^751论+文.网www.751com.cn/
The most significant event that shows Anna’s political disillusionment is the shatters of her myth about Stalin. After Stalin's death, Anna realizes she finally gets nothing from the fanatical politics. Facing the struggle within the party of the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, Stalin’s statue in Anna’s eyes comes crashing down. The same political disillusionment also happens on Molly. She laments, “the next generation like Tom may talk about politics with a lot of jargons they have been making fun of for years and years, just as if they’d thought it all up for themselves, the point is, oughtn’t they to be more intelligent than we were”(Doris Lessing, 1999:226). Tom will encounter the same plight Anna and Molly have experienced.