Conflict Between Illusion And Reality

The Golden Notebook is considered as Doris Lessing's most representative work. This novel is composed of one independent story and five notebooks, with no chapters for the whole novel. The notebooks of four different colors—black, red, yellow, and blue—stand for four different aspects of the protagonist Anna's life, including her professional life, political life, emotional life, and psychological life. Four different roles in her life bring a lot of confusion to Anna. Anna's personality becomes split because four roles in her life could not be standardized. Four notebooks are the mental course of the heroine Anna who is trying to get rid of the split personality, while the last golden notebook is a conclusion of Anna's life experience.This thesis mainly analyzes the living conditions of the free women in the novel by employing the feminism theory. The first chapter introduces Doris Lessing's life experience and her works. The second chapter mainly analyzes the conflict between pure art and the materialized world. Anna wants to reflect the real world through writing but she is frustrated by reality. Chapter Three studies the conflict between Anna's political dream and the political practice. Chapter Four presents that Anna expects harmonious relationship between female and male but on the contrary, her marriage fails and her relationship with men does not succeed. In Chapter Five, the conflict between women's thirst for freedom and the bondages from the society is well explored. In conclusion, Anna struggles hard to achieve the wholeness of her personality. Doris Lessing reveals such a difficult process for Anna to gain real freedom in every aspect and Anna suffers from split personality.