Paradox of Identity in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook

Abstract

Doris Lessing (1919-), Nobel Laureate of 2007, portrays the characters in some of her novels, particularly the female ones, in a continual, struggling world problematized by environment, politics and sex. Her most famous novel The Golden Notebook (1962) exposes its protagonist Anna Freeman Wulf, caught in a whirlwind of traumatizing idiosyncratic tendencies concerning her identity. The adverse situations that challenge Anna tend to disintegrate her very self. In the midst of this order of life she subconsciously looks for ways out and becomes successful, thanks to the support of her American lover Saul Green. She essentially maintains a life corresponding to her divided self in her four notebooks. It is The Golden Notebook, her fifth book, which unites all the dismantled realities of her self. Although critics have labelled The Golden Notebook as a major feminist novel, Lessing herself disapproves of the appellation as she presents Anna dependent on both male and female for realizing her true identity. This paper attempts to illustrate how Anna overcomes the eccentricities of her surrounding, practical, internal life and reasserts her position in the society not merely as a woman, but as an individual human being.