A Research Of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook From The Perspective Of Feminism

Doris Lessing (1919--) is one of the world’s most significant English novelists. She has a unique place among the world women writers for the variety and scope of her works. During her literary career, she produced more than ten long novels. more than seventy short stories, two dramas, one collection of poems and some essays and reminiscences. She began to enjoy a worldwide reputation in the literary world because of the publication of The Golden Notebook in1962. Because of its profound and different concerns, this novel has attracted a great deal of critical attention and has been studied under various critical ways, all treating it as a classical work that delineates the growth and the liberation of women.This thesis, from the viewpoint of feminist criticism. through analyzing the heroine "free woman" Anna in The Golden Notebook, tries to reveal women’s marginal social position. Meanwhile. this thesis also uses the method of narratology to analyze the narrative strategies of this novel from the aspects of narrative forms, symbolism and focalization and so on in order to show how the narrator and heroine Anna subvert the traditional male discourse and obtain the female narrative authority and to show that feminine consciousness can be expressed. Doris Lessing reveals female’s colorful inner world from women’s own perspectives, which changes male writers’misunderstandings of women’s authentic experiences. The "Free Woman" in the novel is different from the traditional image of women in pursuing career, politics and true love. The "Free women", being the new independent women, stimulated one generation of Western women in the1960s to search for an ideal life.Although Doris Lessing claims that she is not a feminist, the significance in ideology. sociology and culture in The Golden Notebook greatly interprets the efforts and struggles she has made on the way of women’s liberation. In a word, we have to understand what matters to a woman is not an ultimate victory in the gender war, but a keen awareness of her true situation and a perpetual quest for freedom and identity.