Spatial Art In The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook is regarded as the masterpiece of Doris Lessing. As the winner of NobelPrize for Literature in2007, she ranks as one of the most distinguished contemporary novelists inBritain. The Golden Notebook is remarkable not only for Lessing’s exploration into the inner conflictsof so-called “free women” in post-modern society, but also for Lessing’s creative experiment on theform. This paper attempts to analyze the spatial form in the fiction, investigating the employment ofspatial art and the effect of its usage in the fiction, aiming to provide a new interpretation of TheGolden Notebook.Since its publication in1962, the fiction The Golden Notebook has aroused wide attention fromliterary critics both at home and abroad, with diverse interpretations from multiple perspectives, suchas feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxist ideology, narratology, oriental cryptic philosophy and Sufism,etc. This thesis focuses on Lessing’s application of spatial form in the novel. More exactly, the thesisstudies how spatiality is created through the techniques of juxtaposed images, characters, and stories,and spatialized multiple narrative perspectives. The employment of spatial art endows the novel withnew textual meaning and the aesthetic value. In terms of the textual meaning, spatial art in the fictioncontributes to creating multiple spaces, reinforcing the core theme and providing readers with thechance to reconstruct the decomposed text. And the aesthetic value is enhanced at the same timethrough the use of spatial form with the effect of defamiliarization and impressionism. It is thereforeconcluded that the practice of spatial art in The Golden Notebook introduces a new method to novelwriting and novel reading, which greatly enriches the art of modern fiction.