On Doris Lessing's Feminist Consciousness And Female Narrative

Doris Lessing (1919- ) is one of the world's most important living English novelists. Until now she has written more than ten novels, seventy short stories, two dramas, one collection of poems, many papers and reminiscences. Among these the most famous book is The Golden Notebook. Throughout her career, the themes of her works are consistently concerned with the modern society and philosophy ranging from Marxism, Feminism to Sufism. In the process, it has become increasingly critical of Western European culture, and the rational, liberal humanist tradition so central to it. She was awarded Somerset Maugham Award of the Society of Authors for Five: Short Novels in 1954 and French Prix Medicis for Foreigners for The Golden Notebook in 1976.This paper, from the viewpoint of feminist criticism, through analyzing the heroine "free woman" Anna in The Golden Notebook and the heroine Mary in The Grass Is Singing, tries to reveal these women's marginal social position and the oppression they have felt in the modern industrial society, which is full of patriarchal and colonialist culture and shows their resistance to the patriarchal rule so as to assert the female freedom, subjectivity and self. This paper also uses the method of narratology to analyze the narrative strategies of The Golden Notebook and Lessing's early realistic novel The Grass Is Singing from the aspects of narrative subjectivity, narrative level, narrative perspective, plot and language so as to show how the narrator and character Anna and the heroine Mary subvert the traditional male discourse and obtain the female narrative authority and to show that women's self- consciousness can be expressed through a reformed language. The paper tries to link the feministcriticism and narratology properly in the text analysis, to combine the different concepts of "voice" in feminism and narratology and argues that many of novel's innovative structural and thematic strategies serve specific feminist aims. That is to say, the form is the meaning.Whether The Golden Notebook is a feminist novel or not is hotly debated in the critical field. Lessing herself, in a rather bitter 1970 introduction to the novel, claimed that The Golden Notebook was "not a trumpet to women's liberation" or merely a took "about the sex war". She doesn't neglect there is a feminist theme in the novel. The heroine Mary is seeking female self-consciousness in The Grass Is Singing. Anna is looking for freedom in politics, marriage and writing in The Golden Notebook. In this we can find Doris Lessing's feminist self-consciousness. Through analyzing the narrative strategies of The Golden Notebook and The Grass Is Singing , the aspects of over-narrative, narrative perspective, focalization, focus character, fragmented plot and foregrounded features of language, we can see Lessing's intention to subvert the traditional male rational, lineal narration and tries to construct a new female discourse for narrative authority.