research paper

24 Women’s Review of Books Vol. 29, No. 5, September/October 2012

life Casey Redman never lived, Alice has painted scenes of the girl from adolescence into adulthood. She knows that this is her best work. She also knows that she’ll never exhibit it publicly, not even to save her career after a disastrous show. Tom’s successful exploitation of Casey’s death is particularly repellent to Alice because it’s the result of an indulgence Alice refuses to allow herself. She sees her paintings of Casey as both gifts and penance. This work doesn’t allow Alice to absolve herself, but it does enable her to contain her guilt. The accident transforms Alice’s practice as a painter, but otherwise, her life seems to look very much as it would have if the accident had never happened.

The same can be said for Nick. While Casey Red- man’s death may have heightened his desire for oblivion, his love of altered states was well-estab- lished before he slid into the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car. And the accident has no evident im- pact on his success as a scientist. This doesn’t mean that he escapes entirely, though. Nick makes his cul- pability personal. He visits Casey Redman’s father and gets a tooth knocked out for his pains. He makes yearly pilgrimages to Casey’s mother, and serves as a liaison between her and the people who killed her daughter. And, for a time, he devotes himself—ut- terly, entirely, selflessly—to Olivia, the woman be- hind the wheel that ill-fated summer night.

Olivia is the most inscrutable of the characters Anshaw has assembled—not because Anshaw lacks the skill to make her knowable, but rather because Olivia has chosen to make herself impenetrable. As the driver of the car that killed Casey Redman, Olivia is the one who goes to prison. By the time she’s released, she has refashioned herself as something hard and secretive. Attempts at contact are deflected by her steely surface and purposeful anonymity. The author does not intrude on her character for the reader ’s benefit, and she affords Casey Redmond a similar kind of grace.

I n this narrative, the most important fact about Casey Redman is that she is gone—indeed, it is her non-presence that makes her ever-present.

Anshaw never allows herself the easy pathos of turning the dead child into a figure of romance or fantasy. There are no nostalgic scenes from Casey’s early years, no hints at her potential promise. There’s just a girl, running in front of a car at night, a girl sprawled across a windshield, a girl dead by the side of a rural road. Then she’s gone, and it’s that gone-ness that defines her. Her absence persists even in Alice’s paintings: When Alice shows her final portrait of Casey to a Dutch artist who has become her mentor, he says, “The girl, she is not alive.” Perhaps more than any other character in the novel, Alice is aware of the temptations of tragedy. On a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Alice sees similarities between Casey Redman and Anne Frank. Later in the same day, she realizes the gruesome absurdity of “self-indulgently conflating her remorse with all of Europe’s.” Casey Redman’s death is significant in this novel precisely because it is so small, so intimate—the sad, discrete result of a single stupid accident. When Alice admits, “I can’t paint her to life,” when she acknowledges the falseness of her attempts, her words describe Anshaw’s honest reticence, too.

Anshaw is not overwhelmed by the tragedy she sets in motion, and ultimately, neither are her char- acters. They live with guilt, but they live. They di- vorce. They remarry. They take new lovers. They break up. They do their jobs. They raise children. An- shaw’s choice to employ shifting perspectives adds dimension to her characters and their narratives. Carmen considers her second marriage a “small mis- take,” but Alice grows to love Rob because he so clearly loves her sister: “Alice liked how he treated Carmen, put her on a float in the parade.” And that metaphor—so light, so charming, so perfectly de- scriptive—reveals another of Anshaw’s strengths as

a writer. Her novel is rich with sharp insights and stunningly well-crafted observations, like this bit of wisdom from Carmen as she considers antichoice protestors demonstrating outside a women’s clinic: “Did you ever notice how all religions have the same timeline? First the people feel the need to worship something. The sun or the giant corn ear. That’s the first thing. Then the guys say okay, now that we’ve got the giant corn thing going, how can we use it to oppress women?”

The most moving formal device deployed by Anshaw is also the most subtle. Even when decades pass between one scene and the next, even when h er ch ar act e r s are mi l e s or con t i n e n t s ap ar t , Anshaw reminds us that they are bound together. One chapter ends with the “click and fizz” of a beer can after Nick has abandoned rehab yet again. The next begins with the sound of a cork being pulled from a wine bottle as Carmen endures a depressing dinner party. Carmen imagines her post-divorce social life as a “bleak highway, post-apocalyptic, overblown with dust, gray and lifeless except for mutants popping up here and there.” When the narrative resumes, Alice is watching a zombie movie on a flight to Amsterdam. These people are united by the catastrophe of Casey Redman’s death, b u t t h e y ’re al so t i e d t og e t h e r b y t h e joy an d heartbreak of family—the family we get and the family we make. They share the guilt of a single terrible moment, but they also share the general tragedy of being human. We are all carrying someone, Anshaw reminds us. We all carry each other.

J essica J er nig an i s a wr i t e r, con su l t an t , an d graduate student. She lives in central Michigan with her husband and their daughter.

e s s a y

i n ce i t s p u b l i cat i on i n 1962, The G olde n Notebook has never been out of print. Doris Lessi n g ’s g rou n db reak i n g —an d for m- breaking—depiction of the female condition during the mid-twentieth century became a p rimary t ex t for an ent ire g enerat ion’s

thinking about their lives as women (and men). It covered everything: heterosexual relationships, female friendship, motherhood and single parenting, political engagement, madness and unconventional forms of consciousness, and the pathologies of politics and history. During the half century since the novel’s publication, the sociopolitical situation of women in the West and the political context within which its protagonist, Anna Wulf, obsessively examines her life have changed dramatically. Half a century ago, women were virtually invisible across the range of professions. Currently, it is unremarkable to see

women in senior positions as TV news anchors, astronauts, and Supreme Court justices. Hence, in t h i s g ol den an n i ver sar y y ear of The G olde n Notebook, one may well ask: does the pre-eminent novel by the 2007 Nobel Prize recipient in Li t er at u re st i l l h ave somet h i n g t o say t o contemporary readers?

During the second decade of the twenty- first century, as virtual realities impinge upon our psyches from all directions—Facebook, texting, tweeting, blogging, e-mail, and other for ms of soci al medi a an d el ect ron i c communication—one might regard as rather unremarkable Doris Lessing’s attempt in 1962 to give imaginative verbal form to events and experiences that appear to have occu r red on l y ju st b efore h er n ovel ’s protagonist, Anna Wulf, records them. At

Going on Fifty: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

By Roberta Rubenstein

S

the time, though, the only mediums through which a writer could convey experience were by handwriting or typing—the latter conducted on that now-quaint artifact, the typewriter. Moreover, given the extended time gap between composition and publication, no novelist could achieve the instantaneity of journalism. The Golden Notebook expresses both thematically and formally the limits of the traditional narrative to capture the immediacy of experience. Through multiple narrative styles, voices, perspectives, and mediums, the novel captures the tension between the “raw material” of Anna’s experiences and the aesthetic shaping that makes their articulation appear spontaneous.

Anna Wulf bears more than a few resemblances to her creator: each grew up in southern Africa, moved to London as a divorced mother of a toddler, and published a first novel set in southern Africa during the Second World War. (Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing was published in 1950, shortly after she immigrated to England from what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe; Anna Wulf repudiates her first and only novel, Frontiers of War, published during the same decade, as nostalgic and naïve.) Yet unlike Doris Lessing— who has published nearly three-dozen novels in both realistic and speculative modes, to say nothing of nearly a dozen volumes of short stories, a graphic novel, several plays, two volumes of autobiography, London sketches, librettos for opera scores, and two collections of pieces devoted solely to the subject of cats—her fictional protagonist is unable to write another novel because she is emotionally and aesthetically blocked. She feels incapable of writing the only kind of novel that interests her—one “powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life,” as she says. Indeed, while Anna may fail in that endeavor, Doris Lessing succeeds in it with The Golden Notebook.

Early in the novel, Anna expresses to her good friend Molly Jacobs a series of oppositional terms, a drastically oversimplified and parodied skeleton key to the novel itself: “Men. Women. Bound. Free. Good. Bad. Yes. No. Capitalism. Socialism. Sex. Love.” Subsequently, each of these opposing terms is complicated as Anna attempts to record her struggle to be a “free woman.” Clearly conveying Lessing’s own concerns at the time, Anna feels that novels h ave b ecome “a fu n ct i on of t h e fr ag men t ed soci et y, t h e fr ag men t ed consciousness.” Accordingly, The Golden Notebook expresses—indeed, imitates—that sense of fragmented consciousness and social breakdown. Anna literally compartmentalizes her experience by writing about it in four notebooks, segments of which provide the novel’s structural organization: the Black notebook, which concerns her earlier life in southern Africa and as a writer; the Red notebook, which focuses on politics; the Yellow notebook, in which she fictionalizes her intimate relationships; and the Blue notebook, which functions as a diary. Close to the end of the novel, readers discover that Anna Wulf is also the author of the apparently omnisciently narrated “Free Women” sections that bookend the narrative and are intercut with each group of not eb ook seg ment s. The mult iple narrat ive frames and scramb led chronology, inventively mirroring its protagonist’s inner divisions, ultimately convey the underlying premise that there is no objective perspective from which to describe events, for all experience is necessarily filtered through an interpreting consciousness.

Moreover, The Golden Notebook pivots on a narrative irony: the same Anna Wulf who suffers a writer ’s block, lamenting the impasse between living and giving aesthetic form to her experiences, nonetheless writes—indeed, writes obsessively—in the notebooks that mirror her multiple self-divisions and her efforts to express different degrees of distance from her experience. Through her, Lessing relentlessly examines the problem of language itself: can the “raw material” of experience be authentically expressed when the very fact of giving it aesthetic shape necessarily changes it into something else? Ultimately, all versions of Anna’s experience are revealed to be fictions, though each is true in its own way. Her hard-won discovery may give pause to contemporary readers who take electronic social communication for granted: even though Facebook and Twitter may be used for less aesthetic purposes than are Lessing’s fictitious “notebooks,” verbal articulation necessarily distorts and simplifies, even as it attempts to capture, spontaneous experience.

L essing describes The Golden Notebook, in a preface, as her attempt to “write a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.” The novel is hardly

“wordless”—if anything, it is stuffed to overflowing with words. Yet, paradoxically, Anna Wulf’s artistic paralysis reflects Lessing’s view at that time t h at t he very funct ion of t he novel seemed t o b e chang i ng , from t he

philosophically profound narratives of the great nineteenth-century European realists to what Anna describes as “an outpost of journalism.... We read [novels] to find out what is going on” (emphasis in original). Accordingly, contemporary readers can read The Golden Notebook—among other reasons—to find out what was “going on” in the 1950s in America and Britain.

For starters, consider the vexed relations between women and men, then termed the battle of the sexes. Anna, divorced and the mother of a nine-year- old daughter, mourns the end of her love relationship with a married man who has left her after five years, not to return to his wife but—a cause of even greater pain for her—for another woman. Indeed, most of the male characters in the novel are sexually promiscuous and almost casually adulterous, one of several manifestations of the double standard that permeates Anna’s experience. As she laments, “women’s emotions are all still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists.” Yet to her psychiatrist, Mother Sugar, with whom she discusses her emotional pain and paralysis, Anna comments, “‘There is something new in the world.... I want to be able to separate in myself what is old and cyclic, the recurring history, the myth, from what is new, what I think or feel that might be new.’”

However, the men in Anna’s life cling to the “old” patriarchal arrangement of male privilege, expressing contempt or fear of changes in traditional gender roles. Anna herself is unconsciously complicit in this arrangement. It takes most of the narrative for her to recognize that the destructive patterns in her relationships originate in her neurotic attraction to precisely those men who bypass her intellect and appeal to traditional emotional needs of which she is not entirely aware. In a particularly telling passage, she expresses the crux of the double sexual standard through a dialogue between fictionalized versions of herself and her good friend: “‘My dear Julia, we’ve chosen to be free women, and this is the price we pay....’ Julia responds, ‘Free! What’s the use of us being free if [men] aren’t?’ Ella rejoins, ‘Free, we say, yet the truth is they get erections when they’re with a woman they don’t give a damn about, but we don’t have an orgasm unless we love him. What’s free about that?’” Despite five decades of evolving gender relations since those words were written, one may ruefully recognize vestiges of such inequities in contemporary intimate relationships. Lessing’s representations of women’s emotional divisions—even if no longer predicated on the double sexual standard or explicit social inequality—remain provocative and timely in 2012.

Contemporary readers should recognize that during the period just prior to the turbulent decades of what was then termed the women’s liberation movement—the important middle term fell away at a later point—in the United States and Britain, women were only beginning to acknowledge the cultural “givens” of sexual, social, and economic gender inequity. “The personal is the political” had only recently emerged as a mantra from consciousness-raising groups, in which women examined their own lives and advocated for major social and political changes, and in which The Golden Notebook was virtually a text. Although many of her readers recognized aspects of themselves in Anna Wulf’s inner divisions, Lessing was irritated by what she regarded as the novel’s appropriation by feminists. In an introduction that appears in later editions, she complains that The Golden Notebook was not read in the “right way” when it was published: its ambitious experimental structure was virtually overlooked, she wrote, as the book was co-opted as “a useful weapon in the sex war.”

25Women’s Review of Books

Doris Lessing

26 Women’s Review of Books Vol. 29, No. 5, September/October 2012

he Polish-born Helena Modrzejewska/ Modjeska (1840-1909) appears, if in rather special terms, to be living happily ever after i n Amer i can cu l t u re. Wh en y ou st ar t looking for her, she seems to be everywhere:

g amb ol i n g t h rou g h n ovel s, dr amas, an d screenplays; beckoning from Arden, her house- turned-museum in Modjeska Canyon in California; commemor at ed wi t h g eog r ap h i c l an dmar k s; celebrated in suitably triumphalist terms under the banners of local history and Polish-American pride; an d rel i sh ed as a sp eci al t y can dy, K en t u ck y “Modjeskas,” named after her and distributed through such national chains as Williams-Sonoma and Cracker Barrel. In Willa Cather ’s My Mortal Enemy (1926), she has a cameo as a queenly actress. In Joseph Mankiewicz’s All about Eve (1950), she is invoked as a legendary American star. And in Susan Sontag’s National Book Award-winning n ovel , In A me r ic a (2000), sh e feat u res as t h e immigrant actress Marina Zaleńska, married to a

man with homosexual desires and seduced by Ame r i ca’s b re at h t ak i n g n at u r al b e au t y an d unlimited possibilities. Paradoxically, however, Modjeska is a cultural icon who remains “obscure to the vast majority of [American] readers,” notes Beth Holmgren. Her project in Starring Madame Modjeska is to rescue Modjeska from oblivion.

Holmgren’s starting point is plain: to compre- hend Modrzejewska/Modjeska’s remarkable rise to stardom and iconic status as a great Shakespearean actress who won the American public “not as an eth- nic artist or a visiting foreign star, but as an Ameri- canized success,” it is vital to understand her binational life and career in their multiple historical, cultural, social, economic, and political contexts. A number of important studies of the actress are avail- able; however, a comprehensive biography is not among them. The American coverage of Modjeska has been rather amateurish, while scholars in Poland, who have written the best studies of the Pol- ish Modrzejewska, underplay her success in the

S ome years later, at a reading of her work that I attended in Washington, DC, in 2004, Lessing chided the young women in her audience for lacking a sense of history and taking for granted what she called “the greatest

revol u t i on of ou r t i me”: n ot t h e women ’s movemen t , b u t r at h er t h e development of effective methods of birth control, which liberated women from fear of unwanted pregnancy. Readers of The Golden Notebook in 2012 can only wince. At this very moment, the backlash against battles one thought had been won long ago—contraceptive choice and access to legal abortion—now rages in our politically divided country during this election year.

Since The Golden Notebook appeared in 1962, many areas of the world have changed not only with regard to female sexuality, and social and economic independence, but also politically. Given the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the official end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, the sections of The Golden Notebook that chart Anna Wulf ’s inner political divisions during the 1950s, particularly her disillusionment with Communism, may now seem dated. Like Lessing, Anna was attracted to leftist politics as a way to press for racial equality. However, as both Lessing and her fictional stand-in discovered, the gaps between ideology and action, the discrepancies between what people profess and what they actually do, dictated against social and political change in southern Africa at that time. The novel dramatizes the appeal, along with the cost, of utopian political thinking and naïve engagement—realizations that remain timely even though the specific circumstances have changed.

Moreover, despite the momentous geopolitical changes since 1962, it is startling for readers in 2012 to come across certain passages in The Golden Notebook—including clippings from newspaper stories that Anna pastes into her notebooks when she is unable to write—that easily could have appeared in this morning’s newspapers. An item dated 17 October 1951 may suffice as an example: “MOSLEM WORLD FLARES.... [Express]” (caps in original). Although not all of the newspaper clippings strike such a contemporary note, together they suggest that Anna Wulf/Doris Lessing was symbolically “cutting up history,” creating a verbal collage to reflect the political and social divisions she observed. Either Lessing was extraordinarily prescient in 1962 or “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” Indeed, some of both.

In a March 15, 2008, Wall Street Journal interview, Lessing hazards the opinion that her novel will “stay” because “[I]t’s a very good report of the time.... [N]o one could write The Golden Notebook now, because the time has gone.” As a form-breaking imaginative literary creation, The Golden Notebook offers a vivid record of a pivotal moment in the social history of the previous century, particularly but not only for women. The sheer ambition of its experimental structure eventually received its due attention and critical understanding. And The Golden Notebook retains the power to provoke its readers afresh. Recently, a student of mine remarked that she found the novel one of the most exciting, albeit at times confusing, reading experiences she had ever had. Other readers testify to the fact that one doesn’t simply read The Golden Notebook; one experiences it, drawn ever more deeply—as into a whirlpool—into psychological depths from which one is released only after having been challenged and changed by Anna Wulf’s relentless self-scrutiny.

Just as Anna emerges from that process with a profound new understanding of her own consciousness, as well as of the limits of verbal expression, so too may Lessing’s contemporary readers. Her literary masterpiece may now be understood as, if not strictly a historical novel, a historically significant novel. Lessing’s penetrating insights into female experience, filtered through the lenses of gender, politics, and creativity, anticipated the transformative women’s liberation movement; her rendering of the “raw materials” of one woman’s life as mother, lover, friend, and writer is reason enough to read, or reread, The Golden Notebook during this year of its well-earned golden anniversary.

Roberta Rubenstein, professor of Literature at American University in Washington, DC, is the author of five books on women writers, including The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979) and, most recently, Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (2009). She is currently completing a book on Doris Lessing and the roman à clef.

Binational Stardom Starring Madame Modjeska:

On Tour in Poland and America

By Beth Holmgren

Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012, 408 pp., $39.95, hardcover

Reviewed by Halina Filipowicz

T

Madame Modjeska as Ophelia

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