Golden Notebook Research Articles

“Exploring Gender and Identity in 20th-Century Literature: Feminist Perspectives in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber”

This research investigates the themes of identity and gender in twentieth-century literature, with an emphasis on the role of feminism in Doris Lessing's The Brilliant Notebook )1962) and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979). The research aims to examine how the two writers question and dismantle conventional gender roles, featuring the impact of women's activist ideas in molding female identity inside the setting of the sociopolitical changes of the 20th 100 years. The objectives are to examine the women's perspectives introduced in every text, research the depiction of female independence, and investigate the crossing point of gender, power, and personality in the account structures. The methodology is a relative scholarly examination, using women's activist and gender theory structures to examine the texts. Essential sources, including the two books, are broken down closely by optional academic deals with women's activist scholarly analysis. Key subjects like female freedom, the disruption of man-centric designs, and the rehash of personality are investigated through character development, narrative techniques, and imagery. The outcomes show that both Lessing and Carter utilize their attempts to challenge regulating gender builds, with Lessing's The Brilliant Notebook focusing on the fracture and remaking of female identity, and Carter's The Bloody Chamber utilizing Gothic and fantasy themes to scrutinize conventional gender roles. The conversation underlines how each creator adds to women's activist artistic talk by offering complex, nuanced depictions of ladies who explore, oppose, and eventually reshape the jobs forced upon them by man-centric culture. This study concluded that Lessing and Carter, through their specific strategies, offer tough women's dissident assessments that continue to reverberate in contemporary discussions on gender and identity. Their novels feature the phenomenal ability of writing to test gender principles and advance feminist ideologies. Keywords: Gender, Identity, Feminism, The Golden Notebook, The Bloody Chamber

Female Identity and Gender Dynamics in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Analysis of the Female Characters

Female Identity and Gender Dynamics in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Analysis of the Female Characters

Feminist Crisis Narrative in The Golden Notebook

Feminist Crisis Narrative in The Golden Notebook

What's the Time, Anna Wulf? Crisis, Temporality and Feminist Untimeliness in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook

Abstract: When Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook was first published in 1962, it was instantly lauded as a timely novel. In this essay, I investigate what is timely about The Golden Notebook through an analysis of the novel's complex temporality. Taking the book's phenomenal critical legacy as a signal indication that its timeliness is yet to be exhausted, I explore how Lessing's provocative figurations of time illuminate the ideological and representational structures that confine Lessing and her characters. In doing so, I also gesture, speculatively, toward how these structures might be subverted in the future.

Doris Lessing's Personal Pilgrimage From Communism To Sufism

This paper chronicles Lessing's journey from her early involvement in the London Communist Party to her disillusionment with Marxist theory after the Hungarian crisis of 1956. It discusses her major works, such as "The Grass Is Singing" and "The Golden Notebook," which challenged traditional narrative structures and investigated the complexities of identity and consciousness. With vivid imagery and symbolism, the abstract highlights Lessing's ability to depict diverse domains, including colonial Africa, social disintegration, and mental breakdown. The contributions of Lessing to literature are recognised, and her unique perspective as a Marxist feminist author is emphasised. The abstract also discusses her 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature and her reactions to it, illuminating her independent and unyielding nature. Lessing's writing voyage paralleled her personal development throughout her life, from political activism to a profound exploration of inner and outer space, which ultimately led her to Sufism.

Exploring the Traces of Humanism: An Investigation into Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

This research article dwells upon the exploration of the various colours of humanism as reflected most impressively in Doris Lessing’s most famous novel, The Golden Notebook. During her long-spanning literary career, she did receive a very deep impression and motivation from her contemporary female-writers such as Mary Wollstone Craft, Kate Millet, Elain Showalter, Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and some others. Like all these feminist-writers, she too was very deeply concerned with the mental harassment, rape-violence and the sexual exploitation of the females in the existing phallocentric society. She too accelerated the movement of feminism even in the contemporary period. Being a woman, she could understand much better the issues and the problems of the females. Thus, through her novels, she has very strongly advocated for the equality, liberty and fraternity to the females without any kind of gender-discrimination. She is not an object of sexual gratification, confined to the domestic activities, but rather she has her oven self-esteem, love and honour. She cannot lose her self-esteem at any cost. By dint of her novels, she very strongly raised her voices against gender-discrimination, social injustice, sexual exploitation, mental torture and misconduct being committed to the females. In her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, she happens to introduce the two lady characters– Anna and Molly, living together in a London flat in 1957 in their free and independent life-style. These intermittent narrative frames four huge sections dedicated to Anna’s notebooks of the 1950’s,’ a black notebook dealing with the African experience, out of which, she has written her only novel; the red for politics – the decline and fall of the communist myth; blue a record of free relations with men, and of rosy dreams and sessions with her analyst; yellow in which she takes up stories; mostly drafts of a novel in which ‘Ella’ re-enacts a large part of Anna’s experience. In all this, what it means to be ‘free women’ is very thoroughly articulated and worked out. The question of living “lives like men” poses an illusion within the narrative. Despite Anna’s engagement in a sexual relationship with the same liberty as a man, it inevitably culminates in an undesirable dependency. This aspect alongside the overwhelming freedom of choice that stifles her literary endeavors, the unchecked freedom permitted by the world’s irresponsible state, and the paradoxical liberty of a woman obsessed with the notion of integrity, who is fatefully bound to navigate randomly to discern the significance of her actions, collectively construct the novel’s intricate framework. Despite the evident complexity, the novel’s most remarkable attribute does not lie in its profound or original difficulty. Contrarily, it resonates a compelling conviction of closely mirroring actual experiences. Within this realistic depiction, the anticipated concerns of a mid-twentieth-century writer organically find their respective positions, enhancing the authenticity and relatability of the narrative. It is simply an exceptional documentation of the experience of female autonomy and responsibility in connection to men and other women. It illustrates the endeavor to achieve self-reconciliation regarding these relationships, as well as issues of writing and politics. The document’s distinctiveness is highlighted by its unwavering honesty and extensive scope, providing a unique exploration of these multifaceted dimensions. It has got a very wide range of interest among the readers. Thus, it remains as a sort of the book that determines the way people think about themselves.

The Journey to Dialogic Self in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and The Diary of a Good Neighbour

The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) by Doris Lessing are two novels providing insight into the perceptions of their protagonists, Anna and Janna, regarding life and self. When approached from the dialogic standpoint of Russian linguist and literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin, both novels are notable with respect to the conflicts they issue between the self as a monologic outcome of life experiences, and the necessity felt for moving towards a dialogic conceptualization of self, and hence, of life. While addressing the one-sided observation an individual performs in the way she understands her self and surroundings, the novels carry a scrutinizing aspect to the psychological and social impacts of this monologic demeanor. This paper reveals how, in Lessing’s two novels, Bakhtin’s dialogic principle, and based on this, a concept of dialogic self is applicable. Analyzing the protagonists’ relations with their selves, it argues that their monologic interactions with the self and the world evolve into living, dialogic ones fed by their new perceptions.

"A Study of Men-Women Relationship in Doris Lessing's Novel: The Golden Notebook

"A Study of Men-Women Relationship in Doris Lessing's Novel: The Golden Notebook

On the analysis of Imperial diaspora awareness of white South Africans in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

As Alice Ridont and Susan Watkins remarked in their symposium Doris Lessing: Border Crossings, born in Persia, raised in Rhodesia and living in her parents’ hometown---England postwar, Doris Lessing’s experiences of space border crossings has an important influence on the thematic and cultural border crossings of her literary creations. Lessing’s experiences of border crossing both physically and spiritually are in a great degree her diaspora experiences. Influenced by her parents and sense of personal identification, Lessing had an awareness of imperial diaspora in her early years, reflected by the white South Africans in her work The Golden Notebook. This sense of imperial diaspora is embodied in idealizing the motherland, treating the culture of the resident country as the “margin”, whereas taking that of native land as the “centerpiece”, and having a partiality for the lifestyle from motherland, and meanwhile longing for a return to the motherland. This preference to the "myth of roots" is not an exception but a common feature of the imperial diasporas.

Revolutionizing criticism: collage as feminist critical practice in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962) and Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that Doris Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook (1962) draws from and extends the feminist critical approaches of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938). Where previous critics like T.S. Eliot described the purpose of criticism as the establishment of absolute objectivity through the comparison of “facts” with “opinions,” Woolf and Lessing develop a counter-approach to criticism that I call “collage as feminist critical practice”: a critical approach grounded in subjective embodiment, juxtaposition, and endless, non-hierarchical particularity. Through her protagonist Anna Wulf and the narrative form of The Golden Notebook itself, Lessing adapts Woolf's critical methods and feminist insights about juxtaposed, embodied differences to realize material contingency as its own kind of critical and ethical “truth.”

The Fiction of Doris Lessing: Re-Envisioning Feminism by Ratna Raman

Reviewed by: The Fiction of Doris Lessing: Re-Envisioning Feminism by Ratna Raman Carmen García-Navarro THE FICTION OF DORIS LESSING: RE-ENVISIONING FEMINISM, by Ratna Raman. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2021. 317 pp. $76.50 hardback. The general theoretical approach offered in The Fiction of Doris Lessing: Re-envisioning Feminism by Ratna Raman applies feminist thinking to Doris Lessing's narrative work. The volume's structure comprises an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, all richly annotated, including a bibliography and index. The book's narrative unity allows readers to enjoy its subtleties, which are made with precision and acuity, and to explore the most significant advances made in the field of Lessing research in India. Raman refers to her own status as a woman, academic, and connoisseur of Lessing's works, beginning with her excitement as a young reader who discovered threads of connection to Lessing's writings, as both women writers grappled with a British colonial past. Against this background, Raman places Lessing as a significant figure in India's literary and cultural life. Raman's feminist perspective highlights Lessing's importance as a key writer in and outside of the European context, not only in terms of the development of form but also because her texts reflect her concern for a world that was vanishing. As Raman notes in her insightful introduction, Lessing witnessed the tensions of colonial and postcolonial relations in the country of her youth, Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). These life circumstances gave Lessing the chance to observe and participate in the twentieth-century cultural landscape and, at the same time, exercise a critical distance from Eurocentric socio-political viewpoints—distance that became essential to her writing (p. 13). As Raman explains in the first chapter, entitled "Lessing and Feminism," the contributions of Lessing's position on feminism have been the subject of much critical debate, particularly since the publication of The Golden Notebook (1962). Lessing expressed a desire to break with an ancient structure that had been assimilated from many symbolic and material positions, a structure for which feminism was an obstacle (pp. 28-29). The first chapter also provides a brief history of Lessing's life in Zimbabwe, her family and love relations, her desire for education, and her need to write. With her move to London, Lessing carried the remnants of historical events such as World War I that had a lasting impact on her parents, the gradual fall of the British Empire and the colonial state, followed by the interwar period, the advent of World War II, and the emergence of a new world order. Thus, Raman's work springs from the need to revise and adjust old notions and reaffirm the place of writers like Lessing, who was a young woman asking for recognition from a specific postcolonial cultural and geographical space. [End Page 364] The second chapter of the book, entitled "The Interrogation of Liberal White Feminism," is devoted to Lessing's novel The Grass is Singing (1950) and examines the role of women in the context of African colonialism. According to Raman, this role needs to be reconsidered in light of the ambiguous stance of some white feminists who benefited from racial privilege despite having to be content with gendered limitations (p. 75). In this regard, the place of Asian, Indian, and Black women, who have been marginalized by a segment of feminism that has been slow to question the patriarchal, imperialist, and racist state's silence regarding them, is one of the concerns that white liberal feminism still needs to address (p. 89). The third chapter focuses on The Golden Notebook. Raman is drawn to Lessing's inquiries into the issues that women faced in mid-century politics, the knowledge they identified with, and the voices represented in the novel. She also emphasizes the importance of the foreword Lessing wrote for the 1971 edition, which focuses on how knowledge about women is created, shared, and received, as well as on the changes needed to ensure that women's authority is recognized. In Raman's view, Lessing drew on this authority when creating a "cultural matrix" composed of the five novels in The Children of Violence (1952...

Analysis of the “Free Woman” ? Anna’s Image in The Golden Notebook from the Perspective of Feminism

The Golden Notebook is Doris Lessing’s masterpiece, which was considered as the monumental feminist novel after World War ?. This paper studied and summarized the novel “The Golden Notebook” from the perspective of feminism, further exploring the causes of the confusions of the modern women and the female’s “The Other” status, as well as the heroine character: Anna’s approaches in realizing “Free woman,” based on the comparison and analysis on the female characters in the novel. Through the re-rendering of the heroine Anna’s image of free woman, the article discussed how modern women fight against their fate in a male-dominated society. Aiming at this specific question, this study also pointed out how the character Anna changed her “The Other” status by struggling to look ahead in the bitterness and overcoming the inner nature. Although Lessing refused to attach a feminist label to her work, she had depicted a character, Anna, who has always taken initiative in many aspects of life to realize women’s freedom and self-value.

THE PARADOX OF FREE WOMEN IN DORIS LESSING'S “THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK”

Although Doris Lessing's “The Golden Notebook” is regarded as a feminist novel by many scholars, it is also mostly criticised due to the overt male domination upon various female characters. Moving away from the feminist purpose by focusing on the experiences and struggles of these different women characters, Lessing emphasises the significance of peeling off all the socially constructed labels and recognising the distinctive true identity particular to each woman. Following this focus, the author also creates an analogy between the content and the form of the novel by reflecting the chaos in the mind of the women characters to the chaotic form which is divided into parts. Hereby, it can be aptly argued that by building a chaotic atmosphere around the women characters who deem themselves free, Lessing problematises the concept of free women in this particular novel. This paper sets out to analyse how Lessing illustrates the paradox of free women in “The Golden Notebook” through the chaotic content and form.

The Golden Notebook: a masterpiece among its Isms

<i>The Golden Notebook</i>: a masterpiece among its Isms

Triviality, Materiality and Synchronicity in the Lessing Archive

Triviality, Materiality and Synchronicity in the Lessing Archive

THE CHARACTERISTICS AND APPROACHES OF IMMANENCE CRITICISM IN DORIS LESSING’S NOVEL OF “THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK”

Unlike the XIX century, literary culture of the XX century made a strong aesthetic leap in women’s identity. This process has caused to the emergence of a large number of new generation women writers in world literature and moreover, these writers had succeeded in revealing a real and contemporary literary phenomenon, such as “immanence- immanentism” which is focused on female landscapes in their stories and novels. In general, the works of “immanence” authors have a feminist background. As a doctrine, imamnence is used to explain the connection with the spiritual world, which is confirmed by some philosophical and metaphysical theories and critics. But later, immanence was replaced by Kant as a philosophical concept, and this awareness began to include a philosophical disposition perceived by the senses on the basis of personal experience. Lessing, who donated many works to world culture, created a portrait of the physical and spiritual characteristics of people (especially women) with her strong logic and talent in all her stories and novels and tried to explain in detail the special feelings that exist in them. With the help of this concept, Lessing aimed not only to represent the love experiences and emotional vibrations of women in her novels, but also to present a strong and courageous woman in a socio-cultural and political context, unlike female literature. In this paper is discussed, the feature elements of immanent culture in Doris Lessing’s novel in (“The Golden Notebook”). In the novel, Lessing interprets the classic drama of a woman of art who is free ones like as herself and in their examples, examines the potential and profiles of creative women seeking their place in social society. In her works, Doris Lessing reproduces the female perspective in the universe by thinking from the prism of immanentism and pays particular attention to the psychology of female characters and the identification of their inner states of heroes. Based on all of these, the author also refers to the expanding principle of women sovereignty regarding the rights and the status of women in society. At the same time, Lessing also explores the possibility of a relationship based on the concept of mundane reality as an alternative to romantic love parodies of postmodernism, and with this in mind, she erects a “protective wall” against the expansion of the “Western world” in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Key words: existence, immanence, Sufism, "The Golden Notebook", socio-cultural

Commodification and Objectification of Women in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: New French Feminism’s Critique

New French feminism asserts that the structured deprivation of women has its core in language. A society governed by the Symbolic order views women through patriarchal lenses and considers them as verbal constructs. Such representations reflect the cultural views of society. This paper uses the psychoanalytic and language theories of new French feminism to explore the depictions of women in The awakening and The golden notebook to identify the representations that subjugate, exclude, and repress them from selfhood. The analysis is more of a textual interaction than sociological, with emphasis on the use of patriarchal language in creating the woman. While The awakening and The golden notebook seem to confirm the representations of the woman as an object, a deficient binary opposite of the male and nothing more than a caregiver and sex provider, this study foregrounds the underlying voices of the texts sceptical of the representations. Both texts question these representations implying that the arbitrariness of language highlights the dichotomy of ascribing fixed and negative identities to the female; hence, patriarchal language is defective.

Incest in Contemporary Literature

Incest in Contemporary Literature

Doris Lessing, Antipsychiatry, and Bodies that Matter

In The Golden Notebook (1962), The Four-Gated City (1969), and Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), Doris Lessing examines the inadequacies of traditional models of madness and considers in their stead an antipsychiatric model championed by R. D. Laing. While ostensibly the three novels strive to conceive of madness in terms of Laing’s antipsychiatric thought, this article will argue that they in fact serve to reveal that Laing’s “lived body” (but gender-neutral) theory of schizophrenia failed to account for the discursively constructed, “inscribed” bodies of Lessing’s female characters. Lessing’s madness novels deconstruct Laing’s phallocentric approach to schizophrenia by rewriting his theory of madness as a gendered and embodied experience.

Doris Lessing’in The Golden Notebook İsimli Eseri: Sosyalizmin mi Yoksa Sosyalizmin Stalinizasyonunun mu Eleştirisi?

Even though it is a well-accepted fact that most socialists have been opposed to the one-man rule of the Stalinist regime, described as “a whole river of blood” by Trotsky (1937), the name of Stalin is deliberately manipulated and linked with socialism in order to implicitly charge Marxism with inherent despotic inclinations. In this context, the aim of this study is to unearth the fossilised hierarchal structure of the Stalinist bureaucracy, to investigate the impacts of the ideological hegemony of the Stalinist dogma on the revolutionary practices of socialist activists and to reveal that Stalinism, above all, victimised and tyrannised socialist activists, through a close reading of Anna’s critical attitude towards the Communist Party in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. This study will also focus on the role of the left-wing writer in a mid-fifties communist milieu and examine the dogmatisation of Marxism and the widening gap between theory and practice in left-wing politics during the Stalin era. This will provide a framework to discuss whether the novel is actually intended or functions more as a critique of socialism or specifically of Stalinism. Over the course of the study, some short excerpts from Lessing’s interviews and autobiographical work, Walking in The Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962, will be used.