The Golden Notebook and what it teaches us about the multifaceted

‘Which is that the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it’.

Lessing documented her frustrations with the reception of her infamous novel, The Golden Notebook, in the 1971 foreword to the aforementioned. The vexations she is trying to communicate in this introduction tie all too well into one of the most important themes of the book itself. To Lessing, things were being taken at face value, and the book was being deemed as one thing or another. Pressingly, she felt her novel was being branded as a piece of feminist literature, which it is still heralded as today; it was, after all, ahead of its time in its portrayal of modern femininity. However, Lessing vehemently denies that creating a ‘feminist Bible’ was her intention, rather she was simply describing women as they really are, documenting their authentic existence. It begs the question if this was a feminist act irregardless and the saddening notion that an accurate portrayal of womanhood was (is) a rebellious act. The Golden Notebook was published against the backdrop of the beginning murmurs of second wave feminism, so it’s no real surprise that such a rare piece of literature was claimed by millions of oppressed voices. But if there’s one thing Doris Lessing hates, it is singularity, hence her aversion to being branded a feminist novelist.

We really shouldn’t be surprised. Anna Wulf, the novel’s protagonist, spends most of the novel grappling with the notion of fragmentation (whether she is overtly aware of it or not) as depicted neatly in the book’s fragmentary presentation, consisting of alternating narratives and sections. The novel is framed by a linear narrative, ‘Free Women’, which depicts the story of Anna and her friend Molly in the third person, but alternates between Anna’s four notebooks, each marked by a distinct colour and theme: ‘in the black notebook she recalls the time she spent in Africa, the novel she fashioned out of her experience, and her difficulties coping with the novel’s reception; in the red notebook she recounts her ambivalent membership in and disavowal of the British Communist Party; in the yellow notebook, she starts a novel that closely mirrors her own pattern of unfulfilling relationships in London; and the blue notebook serves as her inconsistent personal diary, full of self-doubt and contradiction.’ (Learno, 2023). In this way, her identity itself is completely fragmented, facets of herself kept apart and it is exactly this that causes her descent into madness. 

Lessing insists that everyone is multiple and it is strange and unhealthy for anyone to let themselves be defined by a single thing, which gives us an insight into the thought process behind her introductory counterarguments. The Golden Notebook centres around madness and delusion, two things Lessing separates. Anna’s insistence on this division of self, represented by her notebooks, marks her delusion, whereas her madness is what we meet at the ending of the novel - it is important to note that her madness happens when she gives up these fragmented selves, but this appears a necessary act in order for her to reach fulfilment - this fulfilment is symbolised by the confrontation of chaos and her ability to finally write her novel.  According to Lessing, everyone is multiple and chaotic, and she suggests that this breakdown is a means to wholeness, rather than the opposite of it.

Some critics actually consider The Golden Notebook a response to Virginia Woolf, with the protagonist virtually sharing a last name and many integral experiences, with critics comparing it to The Waves, Between the Acts, To The Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway. The Waves comparison is the most striking; the soliloquies from six characters in actuality being a facet each of one character does link neatly into Lessing’s discussions on personal and societal fragmentation, but surely it is this exact theme we hear echoed back when attempting to pigeonhole this heterogeneity? If there’s anything we can take away from this forerunner of postmodernism (despite its, at times, traditional novelistic qualities) it is that definition is limitation - that contradiction, and the abandonment of fragmentation, is necessary for unification.