| Doris·Lessing (1919-), who was awarded Nobel Literature Prize in 2007, is one of the most important contemporary British writers, and she has received 12 nominations of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lessing is also known as the greatest woman writer after Woolf, and she has obtained a number of world-class literary awards apart from several Nobel Prize nominations. Her works are characterized by the unique and variable styles, profound thoughts, sharp and innovative insights, which are challenging all the time. Doris·Lessing is the author of The Grass is Singing (1950), The Children of Violence, The Golden Notebook, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971 ), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), The Sweetest Dream (2001), Love, Again (1996) and many other works, among which The Golden Notebook is regarded as her masterpiece. The Swedish Institute sings high praise for the epic meaning of Lessing's female experience, which with keen insight has revealed a real spiritual state of women's life for readers. Award word also mentions Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook "is the groundbreaking among those works which describe the relationship between men and women in the twentieth century".The Golden Notebook is Lessing's masterpiece. This novel is not qualified with "plot" in the traditional sense because in this work Lessing breaks the sequential narrative writing methods in the past, but she shows the heroine Anna·Freeman·Woolf s life from several different angles and respects which help describe the experiences of young women as lovers and mothers. Hence millions of people worldwide have treated the story as a textbook for independent women. The Golden Notebook is the story of writer Anna Wolf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. The book intersperses segments of an ostensibly realistic narrative of the lives of Molly and Anna, and their children, ex-husbands and lovers—entitled Free Women—with excerpts from Anna's four notebooks, colored black (of Anna's experience in Central Africa, before and during WWII, which inspired her own bestselling novel), red (of her experience as a member of the Communist Party), yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna's own love affair), and blue (Anna's personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life.). Each notebook is returned to four times, interspersed with episodes from Free Women, creating non-chronological, overlapping sections that interact with one another. This post-modernistic styling, with its space and room for "play" engaging the characters and readers, is among the most famous features of the book, although Lessing insisted that readers and reviewers pay attention to the serious themes in the novel.This thesis, based on the text of famous British feminist writer Doris·Lessing's novel The Golden Notebook, has explored the causes and manifestations of modern women's social status of the "other", has shown women real state of survival that they are of confusion, uncertainty, helplessness and self-division as many social roles, and has revealed a trip of searching for subjectivity position and self-value of modern women.Beauvoir, from the feminist standpoint, sharply raises this issue, "Why a woman is 'The Other". She uses a lot of scientific knowledge and philosophical knowledge to study the aspects of women's physical, psychology and behavior from the perspectives of biology, psychology, and philosophical and proposes a profound interpretation of "The Other" status of women. Beauvoir's The Second Sex has put an emphasis on except the difference in physiology between male and female, all "female" characteristics of women are the result of society, as are men. She has raised in her book that because women are poor at physical strength, women feel themselves weak and afraid of freedom in the need of physical strength in life, but a man has fixed women's low status with a legal systems and the traditional invisible moral concepts to imprison women thought, which women are willing to obey. By presentation and analysis of different life circumstances of the images of women described by Lessing in The Golden Notebook, this paper has deeply exposed women typical different identities as a man's wife, mother and lover and so on, has subverted the traditional concept of the female as "good wife and mother ", and finally has excavated the true state of the female obscured by culture. By Lessing's unique narrative perspective and detailed description of the innermost heart, readers can read the secret inner world of the modern woman: the presentation of the love, resentment and hatred as well as complaints in the heart of traditional image of mother without any desire, the statement of exhaustiveness and hate of the heart as wife toward her husband infidelity, the performance of loss and fear in the heart as mistress toward the lover's irresponsible leaving. Beauvoir's feminist ideas have been proposed mainly through the study of the real situation of women, and she claims a viewpoint of women in the secondary and "The Other" status. Beauvoir views that "the One" and "The Other" exist in every aspect of life. From a gender perspective, men become "the One", and women become the absolute "otherness". Between men and women exists the relationship of the subject and the object, the relationship of the essential and the inessential mainly for females define themselves based on men rather than women themselves.This article has compared and analyzed different female images in The Golden Notebook, highlighting both passive resistance of complaining wives or active opposition of liberal women are women self-transcendence of the life value. After the twists and turns of life, whether they have to choose to return home in order to get rid of the solitude and reluctance of their inner heart or continue to pursue self-independence and freedom, has proven to women Utopian dream of "complete freedom" if without men. Therefore, the ultimate resolution of conflicts and contradictions of gender in man-dominated society depends on the mutual understanding and support of the two genders. Only through mutual communication and integration can modem female be completely out of the predicament of survival, and build a harmonious relation between the sexes freely and equally.This article includes three parts of introduction, the main body and conclusion, and the main body is divided into four chapters. Chapter one, based on the famous French feminist Beauvoir's theory of the "other" and the existentialism theory in The Second Sex, has discussed the confusion of the typical modem woman as different roles in modem society described by Lessing and the source of confusion. The second chapter has analyzed and compared the different fate of the modem female image and their different methods of protest. Chapter three has summarized the end of different images of modem women and the proposal of the significance of feminism in the patriarchal society and its development. Chapter four will present some ways and manners to realize women's freedom and independence. |
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