Impact of Transition in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
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Department of English
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.