The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe 707step further in the effort to make all the sides of her
personality into a more integrated version of herself.
Eva Lupin
illneSS in The Golden Notebook
In The Golden Notebook writing and mental illness
seem to be connected. The narrator, Anna Wulf, is
keeping four different notebooks where she com-
partmentalizes different areas of her life. The novel
has nine sections, these different notebooks and
five different parts called Free Women, which can be
read as a novel on their own. This fragmented way
of telling the story seems to offer a way into the
consciousness of the narrator, who struggles at times
to keep the different parts of her life separated from
each other. Each notebook contains things related to
a certain area of her life; and the way she is dividing
her life into compartments illustrates the feeling she
has of herself cracking up, while her effort to try
and keep the different stories separated in effect also
keeps her from falling apart.
In the beginning of the novel, Anna seems to have
little trouble deciding what kind of experiences belong
in which notebook; but further into the novel we dis-
cover that Anna is beginning to confuse her stories,
and is having big difficulties keeping them apart. The
blurring of lines is a phenomenon Anna notices in so
many different areas that it becomes symptomatic to
the novel. At one point she identifies with the situa-
tion of fellow women to the point that she is having
difficulties separating herself from the history of
other women; at another time she gets her different
stories mixed up; and sometimes she has a problem
separating her own person from the characters in the
novel she is writing. In addition, she remarks that the
“normal” person in the family is the sickest one; only
his/her strong personality causes the other members
to act out the illness for him/her. Immediately after
noticing this, she comments that she is recording her
observation in the wrong notebook.
As the story becomes more and more fragmented,
Anna’s consciousness appears to be affected in the
same direction. As long as her writings are clearly
divided into separate stories she experiences a sense of
well-being; but as the stories begin to spill over into
each other Anna is becoming more confused. One of
her notebooks, her blue diary, is supposed to simply
record reality, but Anna realizes that her intention
is harder to achieve than she anticipated. Words, she
discovers, are not neutral and do not allow for a simple
straightforward reporting of events; she says that she
most have been mad to think that she would succeed.
Once she starts fighting her impulse to keep her
writings separated, and instead allows for them to
blend by dissolving all boundaries between them, she
starts to feel as a whole person again. Toward the end
of the book, the man she is living with is watching
as she spreads out her notebooks on her bed, and he
asks her why she keeps four of them. Anna answers
that, apparently, it has been necessary for her to split
herself up but that from now on she will be using
only one. And talking to her lover at the end of the
novel, she comments on how they both have person-
alities that include everything: art, politics, literature,
and so on. Madness, she says, is when she is unable
to keep all of these in view at the same time but
goes on to concentrate on only one thing. The last
parts of the novel become more and more dream-
like, and Anna remembers and experiences events
from all the stories that were previously separated
from each other but are now all coming to life at the
same time. Stories and characters become difficult to
distinguish from each other until Anna’s conscious-
ness collects itself in something that resembles peace.
But although we might sense that the story goes
from chaos to order, from disintegration to whole-
ness, from illness to well-being or ultimately from
madness to sanity, the novel more than anything
else refuses to make these distinctions and toward
the very end Anna concludes: “I was, in other words,
sane again. But the word sane meant nothing, as the
word mad meant nothing.” When words lose their
meaning, opposites dissolve into each other and, ulti-
mately, become the same thing. Thereby no one can
decide anymore who is ill and who is not.
Eva LupinLEWiS, C. S. The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe (1950)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first
and best known book of The Chronicles of Narnia.