The Interpretation Of Doris Lessing's Ecological Holism In The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing is one of the most famous writers in contemporary literary world. The Golden Notebook is considered as her representative work in contemporary British literature, and now it is translated into many languages. The novel is very meaty with unique representation, which plays an important role in Britain and the United States literary circles. In 2007, Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. She was described by the Swedish Academy as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny".Ecocriticism is a kind of literary criticism, which probes into the relationship between literature and nature under the guidance of ecologism, especially Ecological Holism. It explores the ideological cultural roots leading to eco-crises through literary research as well as the eco-aesthetic experience and its expression in literary texts. The essential mission of ecocriticism is to explore how the thoughts, cultures, science, production or living modes of human beings and social developing patterns have affected ecosystem, and how they even decide man's bad attitudes and abominable behaviors towards nature, leading to eco-crises. The goal of the ecological thinking, firstly, is to revolutionize the ideological culture, and then to give impetus to the revolution of the living modes, production modes, scientific research and the social developing patterns, and finally establish a new civilization and harmonious relationship between man and nature. The ideological basis of ecocriticism is Ecological Holism. Ecocriticism is constructed on the philosophical basis of the eco-theories of Rousseau, Darwin and Engels, "Heideggerian Ecophilosophy" as well as Ecological Holism of Leopold, Rolston, Lovelock and Deep Ecology, the theory of the eco-harmony, and the theory of ecological intersubjectivity. Ecocriticism opens a new perspective and blazes a trail for literary criticism, aesthetics studies and literary theory, putting forward new topics and inputting a new driving force for their development.The Golden Notebook 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 "free woman" Anna's life, including professional life, political life, emotional life, and psychological life. Four different roles in real life bring a lot of confusion to Anna, because four roles in her life could not be standardized, which makes her personality split. Four notebooks are the mental course of Anna's getting rid of the split personality, while the last golden notebook is a conclusion of Anna's life experience. Since its publication, The Golden Notebook has attracted attentions of many critics both at home and abroad because of the novelty of its theme and innovation of its narrative technique. Their interpretations of the novel include feminism, post colonialism, post modernism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and so on. But so far, few people did systematic researches on Lessing's works from the perspective of ecological criticism, nor the relevant writings on Lessing's The Golden Notebook from the viewpoint of the combination of the ecological literature criticism and female discourse analysis.Inspired by this, this thesis will employ Ecocriticism to probe into Lessing's The Golden Notebook from the aspects of content and form. In content, this thesis explains Lessing's Ecological Holism from two aspects. One is the origin of Lessing's ecological consciousness, the other is Lessing's Ecological Holism in The Golden Notebook: anthropocentrism criticism, phallocentricism criticism and colonialism criticism, thus hoping that our human beings can reflect on the roots of-the various social crises we're currently confronted with, and how to build an ecological civilization of the harmonious coexistence between human and nature. Meanwhile, it can provide a new perspective for the study of Doris Lessing's works. In form, this thesis analyzes the great experiment on the way of text-construction of The Golden Notebook. The combination of the internal focalization and the extraordinary narrative structure challenges against the single perspective of traditional patriarchy text in order to write the female experience, subvert the objective and the otherness position of the female, and establish female subjective position, making them become the real experience subject, thinking subject and narrative subject. So far, the "aphasia" of the female has been ended in the man-woman binary opposite system.