Sex and the New Woman in "The Golden Notebook"

Abstract

Doris Lessing is not a feminist, and The Golden Notebook is not a feminist novel ?Lessing's remarks outside her fiction have been numerous and emphatic enough finally convince everyone of these facts.1 But the reasons for a great deal of confusion in the not-so-distant past about the aims of The Golden Notebook are extremely significant, for this novel provides more insight into the lineaments of liberation than any other contemporary work by and about women. Women read Lessing with the same intensity and anxiety that accompany their own philoso phical and pragmatic struggles create a new, viable selfhood. As Alison Lurie says, we come Lessing to find out, first, How it really is, and second, What do about it.2 Because The Golden Notebook asks all the questions that obsess women striving for liberation, it seems imperative find out why Lessing has tried suggest only some of the answers. Moreover, what Lessing considers the novel's true subject?the relation between the individual and his society?far from denying its feminist value only increases its relevance the contemporary women's movement. For women have been dehumanized and victimized largely because of the limitations of their sanctioned social roles and their remoteness from the larger political context in which they exist. If they are emerge as fully developed individuals they must learn establish their own relation the world without relying on men as intermediaries. As a novelist Lessing is famous (in some eyes, infamous) for her inclusiveness, and The Golden Notebook is the last and greatest of her novels be fully inclu sive. While the book explores in detail and in depth virtually every situation, idea and feeling that may involve a woman, Anna herself inquires into all of the world, all of life. The reader who is herself striving be genuinely intellectual as well as liberated feels that she has a true counterpart in Anna, a companion who is in