The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf refers to two different characters in The Golden Notebook: There is the Anna of the novel-within-the-novel, Free Women, and there is the Anna who keeps the notebooks. Thus, Anna is both protagonist and writer, and as such she represents the actual author, Doris Lessing. She struggles, in both cases, with the idea of independence, and she remains, for much of the novel, mired in cyclical patterns that leave her feeling undervalued and devoid of creativity—the result, in part, of her unsatisfying relationships with men. To her credit, she does not blame these men for her predicament—the men, too, are trapped in unfulfilling circumstances brought on by socio-historical changes—but she seeks an identity that breaks free of conventional definitions of womanhood. She wants to love, and to be loved, but not at the expense of her creative self. She is also grappling with a world fundamentally disrupted by war and violence, which presents its own crisis regarding creativity: Anna cannot understand how one can make art in the face of such destruction.

The Anna of Free Women represents what would have happened should the Anna of the notebooks (that is, the author herself) have been unable able to overcome her writer’s block. This Anna retreats into a more conventional role for a liberal woman in the 1950s. Not only will she take a job—ironically doling out advice to married women—but she will also “join the Labour Party and teach a night class twice a week for delinquent kids” (665). This is in contrast to the Anna of the notebooks who will embark upon a hallucinatory and revelatory affair with another artist, which will, in turn, spur her own artistic development. This is the Anna who is working on The Shadow of the Third, with another protagonist double, Ella, and who will eventually write Free Women, as well—this is in addition to her already published work, Frontiers of War.

Throughout the novel, Anna is in the process of looking beyond her individual self, constantly working to reinvent that self: “I didn’t dislike this new person I was creating” (637). The film of her life and her stories begins to look more authentic, less glossy with sentimentality, as it begins to integrate: “the film was now beyond my experience, beyond Ella’s, beyond the notebooks, because there was a fusion; and instead of seeing separate scenes, people, faces, movements, glances, they were all together” (635). The golden notebook symbolizes the integration of Anna’s many personalities, as well as her acceptance of what she cannot control: “And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything” (636). In Anna’s acceptance of those terrible truths, she becomes more authentic, as does her writing. Ironically, the golden notebook ends with Saul’s novel. Anna freely gives him this symbol of her own artistic liberation. Now she can begin to write her own novel, which begins with the first sentence of this novel, which is the first sentence of Free Women: “The two women were alone in the London flat” (3, 639).