The Road To Self-Search

Doris Lessing, as one of the most prominent epic novelists in the world, enjoyed a worldwide reputation for her diversified thematic concerns and particular careful design of the structure in writing. The Golden Notebook, as the masterpiece of Lessing, was such a novel which contained splendid content within an intricate structure. It reflected people's sentimental state in both spirit and moral areas in British society during 1950s. Shortly after its publication in 1962, it was considered as a milestone in contemporary British literature and brought Lessing the status and fame in the literature world. Glorious like fascinating magic, the novel attracted almost all fibers of contemporary concerns. The thesis here attempted to analyze the protagonist of the novel, Anna's development of mental breakdown and her self-healing into integration at last in accordance with the presupposition of Lacan's the Mirror Stage Theory and Three Orders Cognition Theory.This thesis consists of an introduction, the four-chapter main body and a conclusion. The Introduction presents the brief critical responses and studies to The Golden Notebook and the significant necessity of reviewing the novel in Lacan's theories.Chapter One mainly deals with Anna's mental breakdown caused by the various crisis and frustrations in her life. The author adopts the main points of Lacan's Mirror Stage Theory to analyze Anna's experiences of trapping in the disillusionment of social relationship in religious, profession, family and sexual fields which made her lose the identity as a whole and united ego. According to Lacan, human beings were born prematurely. In the pre-mirror stage, the infant could not sense the otherness between himself and other, let alone to form the subjectivity as an individual. All these chaos, confusions and disillusion broke Anna down, split her into pieces and made her go back to the state of an infant in the pre-mirror stage. Anna stood helplessly in front of the mirror, trying to find out the image to identify with and form the united ego, but only got the fragmented split selves there. In order to resist the confusion in her life and the fear of losing her self, she began to write four notebooks at the same time. Anna split herself deliberately into four parts, and used four notebooks which are distinguished from each other by different colors to record each part of her life.Chapter Two dissects the painful and unavailing seeking for the subjectivity of Anna in the Imaginary Order. Anna devoted to the significant careers one after another, from political to artistic, from emotional to mental, because she was desperate for flinging to others to identify with. With the fulfilling of her Ego Ideals, she hopes that she could reintegrate her Ideal Ego. In the black notebook, she recalled her early life in Africa. Based on these experiences she wrote her novel Frontier of War, as a means to achieve her goal to be a writer who would tell the truth. However, no one cared about the profound racial problem she wanted to reveal in the novel. People only misunderstood it as a simple love story. The wreckage of Anna's Ego Ideal which was to be a serious writer made her suffer from the writing block. While in the red notebook, she wrote down her political life as a member of British Communist Party. Anna hoped this could help her clear out the mass and bring some significance to her life, since Communism had highlighted the post-war disillusionment with relatively possible models of political ideology. However, by facing the truth that the great Party was nothing but somewhere full of lies and falsity, Anna was forced to say good-bye to her ideals for creating a better world by the cruel reality and left the Party. Since Anna was searching her self or ego in the Imaginary Order full of illusion and lure, she was doomed to fail.Chapter Three analyzes Anna's psychological state in the Symbolic Order. In the yellow notebook, Anna explored a totally new way to piece together her split selves. The main part of this notebook was a novel written by Anna, named The Shadow of the Third, based on the things happened between herself and Michael (her lover) according to her memories. It was actually a psychological re-act of their relations, an analysis through hypothesis for clearing out her disordered emotional life. It was the first step that Anna encountered her emotional and sexual nature intentionally. In the blue and golden notebook, Anna emphatically portrayed her involvement with Saul Green. Saul was an American writer who also tormented by the fragmentation of personality, like Anna. The two isolated soul understood and influenced each other deeply. They fell in love in the end. Just like one half met another, they form the whole. During their profound, helpless, interdependent and mutual repulsive relationship, the false patterns which they had kept in the past were shattered. By getting ride of the negative effects of both outside and inside, they eventually healed into reintegration. Anna finally submitted to the Law or the Name of the Father, and admitted the fact that neither the world nor her was or would be perfect. Imperfection was the nature of both the society and human beings. During this process, Anna left away the Imaginary Order and registered herself in the Symbolic Order at last.Chapter Four discusses Anna's dreams and hallucinations in detail. Those are the only clues to trace for the impossible and unknowable realm of the Real Order. By submitting to the Law of the Father, Anna succeeded in ending her state of chaos and madness, achieved the ultimate integration and lived a new ordinary peace life. She became a relative new Anna with different cognition of both the society and human beings. However, those, in order to enter into the Symbolic Order Anna had to give up, would not just fade away. They could neither be imagined nor symbolized, and thus were constrained and transferred into the Real Order. Therefore, by analyzing Anna's dreams and hallucinations, the author shows the process of Anna's psychic varying on her road to achieve self-search and self-salvation.The Conclusion unscrambles the significance of interpreting the novel. The thesis here, propped up by Lacan's cognition theories, reviews Lessing's The Golden Notebook from a new perspective. Anna's suffering during her road to self-search was not just individual experiences, but a representative for all human beings'psychological problems in the 1950s. Rather than those so-called heroic deeds, Anna finally realized that the essence of life was the little courage and endurance people showed when they confronted the inevitable injustice and evils in life. She accepted her fate to be a boulder-pusher and learned to get along with the imperfect and chaotic reality, and did what she could. Even in today's society, many people, especially women pursuing successful in career are facing the adverse conditions similar to Anna. The constant wreckage of ideals breaks them down and splits their personalities. Here, Anna's experiences are still instructive for them. The thesis intended to give the readers some inspirations through the analysis on Anna.