Impact of Transition in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Abstract

InThe Golden NotebookDoris Lessing shows an effect on individuals of the chaotic experience of twentieth-century political and social upheavals,giving particular attention to possible consequences to the artist, as archetypal imagesof the creative individual. Anna Wulf,theprotagonist of the novel is a former political activist and novelist now paralyzed by a sense ofimpotenceand futility. Like her creator, she suffers torments of dissatisfactionand incompletion because she isincapable of writinga book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order to create a new way of looking at life. Psychologically blocked, politically disillusioned,physicallyabandoned by her lover, Anna retreats intothe privacy of the four personal diaries which symbolize her life, and the four walls which she covers with news clippings to symbolize the world outside herself as perceived and interpreted through an isolated feminine intelligence. She approaches the brink of madness but returns, in the end,to care for her child, take a job as a social worker,and completeanovel.