Exploring the Traces of Humanism: An Investigation into Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
Authors: Dr. Ratnesh Baranwal  
Published: December 2023

This research article dwells upon the exploration of the various colours of humanism as reflected most impressively in Doris Lessing’s most famous novel, The Golden Notebook. During her long-spanning literary career, she did receive a very deep impression and motivation from her contemporary female-writers such as Mary Wollstone Craft, Kate Millet, Elain Showalter, Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and some others. Like all these feminist-writers, she too was very deeply concerned with the mental harassment, rape-violence and the sexual exploitation of the females in the existing phallocentric society. She too accelerated the movement of feminism even in the contemporary period. Being a woman, she could understand much better the issues and the problems of the females. Thus, through her novels, she has very strongly advocated for the equality, liberty and fraternity to the females without any kind of gender-discrimination. She is not an object of sexual gratification, confined to the domestic activities, but rather she has her oven self-esteem, love and honour. She cannot lose her self-esteem at any cost. By dint of her novels, she very strongly raised her voices against gender-discrimination, social injustice, sexual exploitation, mental torture and misconduct being committed to the females. In her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook, she happens to introduce the two lady characters– Anna and Molly, living together in a London flat in 1957 in their free and independent life-style. These intermittent narrative frames four huge sections dedicated to Anna’s notebooks of the 1950’s,’ a black notebook dealing with the African experience, out of which, she has written her only novel; the red for politics – the decline and fall of the communist myth; blue a record of free relations with men, and of rosy dreams and sessions with her analyst; yellow in which she takes up stories; mostly drafts of a novel in which ‘Ella’ re-enacts a large part of Anna’s experience. In all this, what it means to be ‘free women’ is very thoroughly articulated and worked out. The question of living “lives like men” poses an illusion within the narrative. Despite Anna’s engagement in a sexual relationship with the same liberty as a man, it inevitably culminates in an undesirable dependency. This aspect alongside the overwhelming freedom of choice that stifles her literary endeavors, the unchecked freedom permitted by the world’s irresponsible state, and the paradoxical liberty of a woman obsessed with the notion of integrity, who is fatefully bound to navigate randomly to discern the significance of her actions, collectively construct the novel’s intricate framework. Despite the evident complexity, the novel’s most remarkable attribute does not lie in its profound or original difficulty. Contrarily, it resonates a compelling conviction of closely mirroring actual experiences. Within this realistic depiction, the anticipated concerns of a mid-twentieth-century writer organically find their respective positions, enhancing the authenticity and relatability of the narrative. It is simply an exceptional documentation of the experience of female autonomy and responsibility in connection to men and other women. It illustrates the endeavor to achieve self-reconciliation regarding these relationships, as well as issues of writing and politics. The document’s distinctiveness is highlighted by its unwavering honesty and extensive scope, providing a unique exploration of these multifaceted dimensions. It has got a very wide range of interest among the readers. Thus, it remains as a sort of the book that determines the way people think about themselves.