Feminist Reading Of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing(1919---) is one of the most extraordinary post-war writers in English literature. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. As a woman writer, Lessing has certainly articulated many of the issues concerning women and almost all her novels are dominated by female protagonists,which present her profound feminist sense. This paper tries to discuss Lessing's feminist ideas from her novel The Golden Notebook。As her masterpiece, The Golden Notebook is regarded as the"Bible"by many feminists because of its successful depiction of an image of free women represented by Anna and its subtle delineation of women's awkward marginal position and living plight they suffer in the modem industrial society dominated by patriarchy. Besides feminism, critics also label the novel with communism, racism, Marxism, Freudian, and Jungian psychology, existentialism, mysticism, etcThe paper consists of four parts. The introduction briefly introduces Lessing's life experience and her literary works, the historical development of feminism and the content of feminist criticism. Chapter one and two is the textual study by using the relative theories of feminist criticism. The Golden Notebook succussfully depicts the image of modern women represented by the protaganist, Anna Woolf on whom we can see their living plights and spiritual crisis while they bravely pursue the freedom and integrated selfhood. Chapter three analyzes Lessing's bold and authenic description of women's genunine life expereice of sex, dream and body to get rid of the bondage of male discourse so as to increase feminist sense and construct female discourse. Finally, the thesis comes to the conclusion that The Golden Notebook fulfills its keen insight of women's life and their inner world in the modern society.Meanwhile,its constructs the authority of female discourse. Though Lessing claims never to be a feminist, the significance in ideology, sociology and culture reflected in this novel distinctly interprets the efforts and struggles Lessing has made on the way of women's liberation.