706 Lessing, Doris
vulnerable Anna been born?” The question is
soon answered by herself. “She knew: it was when
Michael had abandoned her”; she then “[smiles] at
the knowledge that she, the independent woman,
was independent . . just so long as she was loved
by a man.” In the end Anna is so hurt by the ways
of the homosexual couple that she feels forced to
make them leave her house.
What this passage illustrates is not so much the
novel’s stance toward gender, but the centrality of
this issue in the plot. The novel offers many differ-
ent ways to think about and approach gender issues;
and it focuses the reader’s attention on areas in
women’s lives that before this novel was written had
not been so openly described in literature.
Eva Lupin
identity in The Golden Notebook
Identity is a central issue in The Golden Notebook,
and Anna Wulf, the protagonist, often refers to the
question of who she is in her writings. Quite early
in the book she discusses the characters in the novel
she is writing and reflects on how once again she
is touching upon a subject that often occupies her
mind to the verge of obsession: “I mean, of course,
this question of ‘personality.’ ” One thing that aston-
ishes her about the characters she is creating for her
story is their complexity. No matter what adjective I
use for a character, she thinks to herself, I could just
as well use the opposite. But how can a person be
both kind and ruthless, both cold and warm? Anna’s
conclusion is that she knows nothing about the
characters she is describing and that words become
irrelevant. This leads her to the acknowledgment
that she accepts amorality as a stance because she
does not care. All she does care about, she says, is to
describe her characters so that the readers feel that
they are real.
Just as Anna struggles with the complexity of her
characters, so is she struggling with the difficulty of
combining the different sides of her own personality.
And structurally this thick novel mirrors her strug-
gle by consisting of the four different notebooks she
keeps. Being a writer, a political activist, a single
woman, and a mother, she struggles to map out
her own personality in writing, by keeping “a black
notebook which is to do with Anna Wulf the writer;
a red notebook, concerned with politics; a yellow
notebook, in which [she makes] stories out of [her]
experience; and a blue notebook which tries to be a
diary.” Through her writings she tries to structure
and categorize different sides of herself, and these
notebooks combine into the novel we keep in our
hands. In this way the novel suggests that identity is
a matter of story telling.
In the beginning Anna manages pretty well to
keep order by keeping the content of her different
notebooks apart; the further into the novel we get,
however, the more the stories in the notebooks blend
and blur together. Writing about Ella, one of the
characters in the novel she is writing, for example,
Anna notes: “I, Anna, see Ella. Who is, of course,
Anna. But that is the point, for she is not.” The con-
fusion of characters interests Anna, and she contin-
ues her musings: “The moment I, Anna, write: Ella
rings up Julia to announce, etc., then Ella floats away
from me and becomes someone else. I don’t under-
stand what happens at the moment Ella separates
herself from me and becomes Ella. No one does. It’s
enough to call her Ella, instead of Anna.” When the
novel starts Anna is suffering from a writer’s block,
which makes it hard for her to continue writing the
novel she is working on, but as Anna realizes the
connection between herself and her characters, her
writer’s block starts to give way.
The entries in Anna’s notebooks are fragmentary,
presented to the readers who sometimes need to
provide missing pieces of information themselves.
Readers sometimes realize the context of scenes,
or the impact of them on other incidents, only in
retrospect, and consequently we do not get a clear
picture of who Anna is, but we, like Anna herself,
end up searching for clues about her identity. Simi-
larly, Anna, by reviewing her different life situations
and her responses to different situations, slowly gets
a more comprehensive picture of who she is. Toward
the end, the only way for Anna to keep her sanity is
to acknowledge and allow for a blurring of the dif-
ferent narratives, and she does so by making it all the
same story in what she names The Golden Notebook.
Together then, Anna and the reader are presented in
this last notebook with a writer who has come one