The Golden Notebook #4: Everything, Everywhere

Why The Golden Notebook is a Feminist Classic

Daunting Classic: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Progress: 93 Days, 368 Pages

The Golden Notebook #1: Artists Talking

The Golden Notebook #2: Cynicism vs. Idealism

The Golden Notebook #3: Nesting Dolls

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Structure

Last time we visited Doris Lessing’s classic, we spent a lot of time unpacking its complicated structure that toggles between autofiction and metafiction. To recap: the novel is made up of multiple-colored notebooks for different narrative strains which include: journals from the main character Anna about her own life (blue); thinly-veiled fictions of Anna’s affairs with men (yellow); more autofiction about Anna’s life that influenced her first autofictional novel (black); and tales of Anna’s trials and tribulations in the communist party (red, duh). As a bonus complication the book is also broken up into sections, or parts, titled “Free Women” numbers 1-5.

After tackling 2/3rds of the book I can confidently say that I do not understand the superstructure of The Golden Notebook at all. Today, I’m mostly going to explore one particular part of the section “Free Women #2”, but it’s worth noting that a lot more happens in this part than I plan to highlight: Anna tells a fictional communist propaganda story; Anna meets with a film executive who comically tries to change both the setting and the plot of her novel for a tv show; Ella, Anna’s fictional stand-in, has a second affair with a married, bright-smiling American neurosurgeon whose excess enthusiasm results in unsatisfactory sex. A professor of literature might care to unpack and connect all these threads. However, as an interested, but non-manic reader, no particular logic jumps out at me (they are all interrogations of self, I guess, but what isn’t?). Instead, my focus was pulled to one part in this section that suddenly made it clearer why The Golden Notebook is largely billed as a novel about women’s liberation (“This book can change that women think of themselves”).

Two Dinners

Near the end of section two, our protagonist Anna — not one of her doppelgängers — describes one of her days that epitomizes the ordinary nightmare of modern womanhood, a recognizable depiction to any 21^st century reader of the accumulating burdens gender roles can carry.

Anna wakes up at 6 a.m. with the man she’s having an affair with, Michael, he has quick sex with her while Anna is mainly focused on the fact her daughter could walk in at any moment and can’t enjoy it. Michael goes back to sleep and Anna gets up and spends the next hour-and-a-half getting her daughter Janet up, cooking her breakfast, and getting Janet off to school while she mentally makes a grocery and errand list for later that day. With Janet off, Anna has to wake Michael so that he can get to work on time, he’s a doctor so this is very important. As Michael rolls out of bed and gets ready, he chides Anna for being “so efficient and practical.” Toast and coffee is ready for him already and then he’s off. Anna gets ready for work in a rush, while thinking of the evening ahead for Michael, who says he will come back for the rare two nights in a row. Not even 9 a.m. and Anna’s hectic day is complicated by her period. Anna then goes to work at her Communist organization, where it is her job to critique possible novels for publication. She rightly trashes two novels under consideration and her boss roundly ignores her and plans to move forward publishing them despite any of her reservations (as she knew he would). She is on her period and in pain. Heading home, it rains (it’s England after all) and Anna’s nice dress she’s worn especially for Michael is smudged. She gets to the grocer just barely in time before it closes. Finally, she baths and cooks a meal for her daughter, getting her to bed before Michael is to arrive again for dinner.

And this is where the crescendo of Anna’s terrible day happens. She has just cooked one meal for her daughter and then she begins cooking an entire separate meal for Michael. To complicate any simple notion of grievance for all the work she is doing Anna starts off by expressing joy in this: “All the kitchen is full of good smells; and all at once I am happy, so happy I can feel the warmth in my whole body.”

But quickly, this unravels as the enormity of her responsibility overwhelms her.

“Then there is a cold feeling in my stomach, and I think: Being happy is a lie, it’s a habit of happiness from moments like these during the last four years. And the happiness vanishes and I am desperately tired. With the tiredness comes guilt…Perhaps I don’t spend enough time with Janet…I am too egotistical…I shouldn’t dislike Rose [her co-worker] so much…it’s only luck that [my] book was a best-seller…Then I talk about this with other women, they tell me they have to fight all kinds of guilt they recognise as irrational, usually to do with working, or wanting time for themselves; and the guilt is a habit of the nerves from the past, just as my happiness a few moments ago was a habit of the nerves from a situation that is finished.”

The coup de grâce: Michael, her lover, calls to tell her he will not be showing up for the elaborate second, date-night meal she has cooked after all.

In this novel published in 1962, Lessing writes an entire passage about the unfairness of this gendered labor balance, a sentiment radically ahead of its time. Ideas that have just started to become more widely accepted in the past ten or twenty years. And she does it by showing, not telling. Anna on the surface is a single, free, independent woman, but her day in the life is anything but those things. The invisible labor stacks up, there are no allowances made for her physical health, her bosses dismiss her, and at the end of a very long day she’s not taken one second to do or think about anything for herself. Meanwhile, Michael, who has an entire family in addition to Anna his mistress, simply gets up, gets ready, and is a “professional man, smooth-suited, clear-eyed, calm” by mid-morning. He has not and is not expected to contribute one thing to anyone else, serving his work and himself—it is clear to see why he is at such ease.

Part of being a “classic” can be its timelessness: nothing like it comes before or after. But the other part of being a classic is its influence, and here is where we finally see the seeds that The Golden Notebook has planted and the ideas that would follow. What does the veneer of freedom and independence mean for women if functionally they must be everywhere and doing everything?