1 Introduction
1.1 Doris Lessing and The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing (1919-2013) is recognized as the greatest English writer of the postwar period, with her masterpiece, The Golden Notebook, as her best-loved and most influential work. Doris Lessing had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.
Doris Lessing was born on October 22, 1919 in Iran. Her parents were from Britain. At the age of five, she, together with her parents, moved to Rhodesia, Africa. She lived in the poor family for nearly 20 years. She dropped out of school at the age of 15 and studied at home. Lessing started to work at the age of 16. She was active in the left-wing political movement against colonialism when she was young.
Doris Lessing is a productive female writer. Her first book The Grass Is Singing was published in 1950, which marked the starting of Lessing’s career as a writer. It’s also this book that made Doris Lessing well-known in literature field overnight. This book reveals racial oppression and racial conflicts in colonial Africa through the story of a black male servant killing a white female host. Her other works include The Cleft, Walking in the Shade, The Children of Violence, Love, Again and The Fifth Child except The Golden Notebook and The Grass Is Singing. The themes of Lessing’s works range from political topics, feminism, to environmentalism. Lessing was so famous in the literature circle that many of her works were translated into many languages, such as Chinese, French, German, Russian, and Polish.
The Golden Notebook is the representative work of Doris Lessing. It’s quite different from the traditional fiction in the form and narrating style. This book consists of five colored notebooks, which are black, red, yellow, blue and golden. The four notebooks whose entries separate the five “Free Women” sections are written during a seven-year period beginning in 1950 and ending in early 1957. The black notebook looks back on Anna’s sojourn in Africa during World War II, Frontiers of War, a novel she wrote about this time, and her encounter with the literary establishment. The red notebook is a journal of Anna’s membership in the British Communist Party. In the later yellow, blue and golden notebooks, the novel moves from historical realism to modernist interiority with its focus on Anna as a writer who analyzes sexual and emotional relationship of women and men.
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1.2 Literature Review of The Golden Notebook
Since its publication in 1962, The Golden Notebook has received vast amounts of literary criticism from a great variety of perspectives at home and abroad.
1.2.1 Studies Abroad
With a great number of readers and followers, Doris Lessing is deemed as one of the most famous writers of the day. However, it took a long time for The Golden Notebook to become a masterpiece and get known by readers. There are doubts and disputes about this book since its publication in early period. The study of The Golden Notebook started in the 1960s in the western academic circle, and witnessed a boom from the 1970s to the 1990s. It continues to draw academic attention nowadays for it documents women’s crisis of identity and the worsening environmental situation.
Artistic technique study and theme study are two main categories of the research of The Golden Notebook in the upsurge period.
The theme study of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook centers on the perspectives of psychology, religion and feminism.
Many scholars analyze this book from the perspective of feminism, which is the hottest focus of the research orientation. Some critics deem this novel as a representative work of feminism. Margaret Drabble, a British novelist, praises The Golden Notebook as “document in the history of women’s liberation”.Elaine Showalter, an American feminist, hails The Golden Notebook as “the work of essential feminist implications.”
The feminist analysis of The Golden Notebook often connects with the theme of freedom, which includes two aspects: one is the concern over women’s living predicament and social status, the other is the contradiction and connection between individualism and communism. Ellen Morgan stresses that patriarchal value and traditional social orders lead to women’s alienation and psychological breakdown in the thesis Alienation of the Woman Writer in The Golden Notebook.Shirley Budhos analyzes the writer’s resistance against social and psychological enclosure and the implication of the title “Free Women” in the thesis The Theme of Enclosure in Selected Works of Doris Lessing.Margaret Moan Rowe points out in her book Doris Lessing that Doris Lessing describes the predicament of a woman writer through the breakdown of the female character in The Golden Notebook. There are also some critics insisting that the theme of The Golden Notebook mainly falls in the art and representation of reality. John L. Carey insists that Anna’s use of naming experiences is a way of differentiating art and reality. Jean Pickering holds that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook conveys the essence of art and the life experience in a very complicated way in her work Understanding Doris Lessing.
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2 Women’s Craving for Nature
2.1 Kinship between Women and Nature
Assimilating the essence of both feminism and ecology, ecofeminism assumes “a close affinity, kinship or biological correspondence of women to nature, and divine immanence.”
In this sense, women have been identified with nature, and women and nature have both been seen as objects to be dominated by men. As a great masterpiece penetrated with ecofeminist theology, The Golden Notebook is a novel mixed with diary and short stories replete with minute details revealing women’s thoughts and concerns about nature.
2.1.1 Naturalized Women
In The Golden Notebook, Anna fancied herself to be a flower in a bottle. A bird’s coos were used to describe Molly’s voice. Such multiple references to kinship of women with nature suggest Lessing’s nostalgia for her life experiences in Africa, from which the prototypes of her naturalized woman images in The Golden Notebook are created. In describing the central Africa in the black notebook, Doris Lessing draws on her own experience of living in Southern Rhodesia from five years old until she migrated to Britain.
Doris Lessing was brought up in Zimbabwe, a southern African country, from which she draws endless inspiration for her literary creation. Just as Lessing said in her African Stories, “I believe that the chief gift from Africa to writers, white or black, is the continent itself... Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.”
Her happy childhood is totally immersed in the African landscape, so she develops a strong relationship with its natural environment. Just like in My Mother’s Life, she gives a vivid account of the countryside, expressing her inborn love for nature.
“It is still a wilderness that my parents were taking on. Not one acre had been cleared for planting... It is virgin bush... Every kind of animal lived there: sable, eland... All day birds shrilled and cooed and hammered and chattered.”
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2.2 Men’s Abuse of Nature and Nature’s Revenge
In the light of ecofeminism, in the male-dominated patriarchal society, nature is under domination and utilization of human beings. Nature has been degraded to the position of a resource reservoir which satisfies the needs of human beings. According to a number of the ecofeminist contributors like Loris Gruen and Marti Kheel, “there exist a parallel between men’s exploitation of women and human beings’ domination of animals.
2.2.1 Abuse of Nature
In The Golden Notebook, especially in the part of the black notebook, the narrative of men killing animals can be omnipresent in the novel. When Mr. Boothby “fancied a pigeon pie”,④ he would just take out a gun to the small vlei down there to shoot some. Sadly enough, this random attitude clearly shows that humans depreciate and neglect nature. Birds mean nothing but food that only satisfies their insatiable appetite. Intriguingly, the deliberate deployment of “pigeon” by Doris Lessing makes a special hint to readers. Unlike other birds or animals, the pigeon is the symbol of peace, which should be cherished by all peace-loving humans. It is a great pity that men are ignorant of this and even take pigeons as only an ingredient source for their meat pie.
When they went hunting, Paul bloodily shot pigeons with his rifle in the kopjes. “Pigeon cooed on. It was visible, a small… bird... Paul took up the rifle, aimed and shot. The bird fell, turning over and over with loose wings, and hit earth with a thud we could hear...”① Paul and Jimmy’s destroying nature can be clearly seen from the above description. Pigeons were shot and fell on the ground, and the sound of hitting earth can be heard by around people, which reveals the bloodiness and cruelty of men abusing nature. What’s more, when Paul asked Mrs. Boothby how many pigeons will do, Mrs. Boothby answered that “There’s not much use with less than six, but if you can get enough I can make pigeon pie for you as well. It’d make a change…” Jimmy said: “Six will be enough, because none of us will eat this pie…”② Seen in this light, six pigeons clearly outnumbered the reasonable needs for this group of people making pigeon pie. Jimmy said six would be enough and he wanted to stop the hunting. However, Paul didn’t think so, and he answered directly “I shall certainly eat of it, and so will you. Do you really imagine that when that toothsome pie… is set before you, that you will remember the tender songs of these birds so brutally cut short by the crack of doom?”③ Pigeons are merely meat for Paul, and he devalues animals’ meaning for men. He didn’t stop hunting even when the pigeons are already enough to satisfy the normal needs for these people. He abused nature without a sense of regret. In the eyes of Paul, man is the dominator of nature and nature only serves for man’s appetite.
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3 女性对男性的渴求 ............................... 16
3.1 对父爱的渴求 ................................ 16
3.1.1 父爱的缺失 ............................. 16
3.1.2 渴求的破灭 ........................ 17
4 女性超越自我的追求................................. 24
4.1 自我身份的追求 ............................ 24
4.1.1 日记作为身份重构的手段 ......................... 24
4.1.2 自我身份的重构 ........................ 26
5 总结 ..................... 30
4 Women’s Pursuing Self-transcendence
4.1 Pursuit of Self-identity
As a woman writer in the patriarchal society, Anna writes her fiction for a living and keeps a diary for recording her past and daily events. One effect of the patriarchal domination in language is the silencing of the other, which is evidenced by the film company’s request of adapting her fiction, Frontiers of War for production. So in some sense, the dominated patriarchal language has unavoidably penetrated the feminine writing. However, admittedly there exists a virgin land of diaries, in which women can listen to their own voices and pursue their self. According to H. Porter Abbott, Anna keeps diary as a “therapeutic quest for self-discovery”.
4.1.1 Diary Writing as a Means of Pursuit
In terms of the form of novel, The Golden Notebook is based on the constant interplay between the diary entries and the novel entitled “Free Woman”. Seen in this light, the diary entries in The Golden Notebook comprise the bulk of the four notebooks and the “Free Woman” Section, which Anna finally produces out of the diary material as well. Her diaries, organized and written in distinguishable colored notebooks, correspond to a different part of her life respectively. In the “envelope” of the five “Free Women” section, Anna Wulf attempts to compartmentalize her experiences:
“I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary.”
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5 Conclusion
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