Feminist Commitment to Left-Wing Realism in The Golden Notebook

Abstract

Working with notions of realism, communism, and feminism in The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing speaks to our current, multivalent postmodern condition. Yet in 1962, the fractured aesthetic of the novel seemed to some too narrowly focused on personal issues among women rather than on wider social concerns of interest to the Left in its time, which could arguably be captured through realistic representation. Through the complex portrayal of two independently minded single women—novelist Anna Wulf and her closest friend, London stage actor Molly Jacobs—the novel examines issues of concern among the British Left of the fifties. Another figure in The Golden Notebook—Paul Tanner—emphasizes the way class and gender concerns can be seen as distinct from one another: he says, “the great revolution of our time …. The Russian Revolution, the Chinese revolution—they’re nothing at all. The real revolution is, women against men.”¹ Today—more than fifty years hence—Lessing’s deconstructive undermining of binary, logocentric notions, such as the oppositions between the Russian and Chinese revolutions, women and men, or the personal and the political, is accepted among much of the academic community.