3. Women’ s Plights in this Novel

The Golden Notebook comes up with many based issues about the living conditions of women. It surprisingly expresses their eager, frustration and their struggles for their identity. Under Lessing’s pen, Anna is a free woman searching for a personal identity. And her family roles such as wife, mother and mistress, manifested a significant preoccupation of feminist literature. The free women represented by Anna experienced many sufferings and dilemmas in the pursuit of inpidual identity. They suffered from marital dilemmas, emotional plights and spiritual plights.

3.1 Marital Dilemmas  

In the Golden Notebook, Lessing depicts the images of two types of women, one is traditional women represented by Marion and Paul’s wife Muriel. They are the victims of the  traditional marriage. What they need to do is to serve their family members and take the kitchen as the center of their activities. It is impossible for them to have their own independent identities. They can not set themselves free from the dull household life and participate in the public labor. The word like housewife expresses the women’s space clearly. Their time is on boring household life and looking after their husbands and children. Washing clothes, cleaning house and cooking meals made them busy from dawn to night. They are limited in the room and have little communication with the outside world. They have no independence. To them, marriage is their shelter which can offer them a living. In terms of spiritual and economic aspect, they can not live independently without their husbands and children who they rely on too much. Paul once said to Ella, “when I go home I deal with everything, the gas heaters, and electricity bill and where to buy a cheap carpet, and what to do about children’s school, everything”(Doris Lessing, 1994: 211) Although Muriel, just as other wives, knows there is no love in her marriage, she still maintains the marriage with a hurt heart. “Sometimes he does not come home all week. I get low in my spirits. This has been going on five years now.”(Doris Lessing, 1994: 210) In Muriel’s eyes, her marriage is the most important thing , even her own happiness subordinated to her husband without taking herself into account. Although marriage brings her endless pains, she is not brave enough to be herself and find a better way to exist. Facing the fact that no love in marriage and a disloyal husband, she can only turn to her children. “......, the wife was sitting here, night after night, reading Women at Home or looking at the television set and listening for the children upstairs.”(Doris Lessing, 1994: 209)