Modern Women’s Living Predicaments

The Golden Notebook is Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s masterpiece. The novel is composed of an independent story and five notebooks, with no chapters for the whole work. The notebooks of four colours---black, red, yellow and blue represent four aspects of the heroine Anna’s life namely political life, professional life, emotional life and psychological life. The predicaments are caused by her four different roles. For the four roles can’t be standardized, Anna’s personality is split. Four notebooks record the mental course of her who tries to go out of frustrations. The last golden notebook is a conclusion of her life experience.Spatial theory, a new literary critical theory, emerges in the West in the end of the20th century. The academic researches at both home and abroad explore the spatial factors in the novel from the perspectives of architectural metaphor, area, house and spatial narrative. Spatial theory has opened new critical doors in the study of this novel. However, few dissertations relate the spaces with the heroine’s living condition and psychological space. For the importance of space in literature finds ample evidence in the work, this thesis attempts to relate the spaces with the heroine’s living predicaments and psychology with spatial theory. This thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter one is the introduction. It introduces Doris Lessing and The Golden Notebook and respective study of it at home and abroad. Chapter two presents spatial theory and the representative spaces in the work. Chapter three analyzes the "free woman" Anna’s disillusionment with political ideals in Africa which is also the cradle of Anna’s split psychology. Chapter four analyzes Anna’s writing block in London where Anna moves to the abyss of mental breakdown. Chapter five analyzes Anna’s emotional confusion in her flat which is both her independent living space and confined cage. In the flat, she breaks down. Chapter six is the conclusion. It points out that the spaces in Lessing’s novel are closely related to the "free woman" Anna’s living predicaments and psychological space.