The Interpretation Of Realism In The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing, a famous British writer who is regarded as a great female writer after Virginia Woolf. The Golden Notebook was published in1962, and it established Lessing’s position and reputation in the literary world in the contemporary era. This great novel was eventually listed into one of the classics of British literature in the20th century after a long time of argument and became a landmark of western literature. By writing this book, Lessing gained the Nobel Prize for Literature in2007.The Golden Notebook contains two main parts:one part is an independent novel named Free Women which tells of the daily life of Anna and her best friend Molly; the other part contains Anna’s five notebooks-black, red, yellow, blue and golden. These five notebooks record Anna’s life experience in Africa, her political life, emotional life, spiritual life and in the end these four kinds of separated life are put into the independent golden notebook completely. This thesis is the interpretation of realism in The Golden Notebook; it intends to analyze the realism theory used in the novel in order to testify that it is hard to get rid of various bondages for women to gain real freedom under the special historical and social background in the middle of the20th century, especially during the period of post-war.This thesis contains four chapters. Chapter One is the introduction about Doris Lessing and The Golden Notebook as well as its background of creation and literary review. Chapter Two is the definition and development of realism and its three main concepts. Chapter Three, Chapter Four and Chapter Five make up of the main body of the thesis which interoperates the reflection of realism in The Golden Notebook in detail. Chapter Three analyzes the reflection of realism in these five notebooks, including racialism and colonialism in the Black Notebook, communism in the Red and the Blue Notebook, free women’s emotional life in the Yellow Notebook, free women’s mental crisis in the Blue Notebook and free women’s self-salvation in the Golden Notebook; Chapter Four reflects the use of realism’s typical theory through analyzing typical environment, typical figures and typical relationships; Chapter Five briefly introduces realism’s historical requirements reflected in The Golden Notebook by analyzing the development of the outer world and the development of the characters’inner world. Chapter Six is the conclusion in which through analyzing the realism in the novel to testify that at that time freedom for women wasjust a remote Utopia.