research paper
Doris LessinS ShiJiesYol 27 Nos. 1 & 2
Free Women and Freeman: The Language of Lobotomy in The Golden Notebook
Temj ReilKj University ol Alaska
Although Roberta Rubenstein has observed that the eom- mon denominator in Lessing's fietional world is the eoncept of "the mind diseovering, interpreting, and ultimately shap- ing its own reality" (7), Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger have also pointed out that "psychoanalytie theory, that inex- haustible ally of Lessing's concems, has generally and only rudimentarily surfaced in influence studies" (23). The lack of such criticism may be due, in part, to Lessing's vehement responses to any psychoanalytic interpretation that attempts to discuss her works in terms of speeific psychological models or antecedents such as Jungian archetypes or Lain- gian psychopolitics.' Despite Lessing's insistence that her eomplex visions of the human psyche come "out of [her] own thoughts" (in Whittaker 13), her obvious familiarity with the history, diverse languages, and various perspectives concerning psychiatry and psychoanalysis begs some sort of psychoanalytic interpretation.
Here, I will discuss The Golden Notebook not via an or- thodox clinical psychoanalytic reading, but rather from two overlapping perspectives, both of which emanate from the practice of, and the discourse concerned with lobotomy, a socially sanctioned, medically induced form of trauma. The first describes an historical context concerning neuroscience and psychosurgery from 1935 to 1962 (the year The Golden Notebook was published) and identifies ways that Lessing shapes elements of this context in The Golden Notebook. The second explores both the languages and discursive modes that neuroseience and psychosurgery generated dur- ing this time, and ways that Lessing reproduces these lin- guistic features in her novel. Such a dual focus, then, one that combines social and medical history with literature and literary theory, illuminates ways that events and discourses from neuroseience and the arts both paralleled and influ- eneed each other during this historical period.
As I have argued elsewhere, lobotomy can be deseribed as medically prescribed neuro-trauma induced to faeilitate forgetting with the tacit (although paradoxical and counter- intuitive) implieation that the quality of a person's life can be improved by damaging those parts ofthe brain that con- trol memory, emotional ground tone and concepts of time.^ The language of lobotomy, following Mikhail Bakhtin's definition of language from "Discourse in the Novel," can be deseribed as the unique communication system of post- lobotomy patients that ineludes common features ordered in a regular and partieular manner.^ The language of lobotomy occurred within the broader discourses of post-World War II
psychosurgery and neuroseience, two areas of study that evidenced a radieal shift in intellectual history as, for per- haps the first time in the history of Western thought, trauma- induced forgetting was privileged over and eonsidered more desirable than remembering. The significance of this shift was not lost on writers familiar with lobotomized people and with the praetiee of lobotomy—writers such as Tennes- see Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey,'' and, in the con- text of this paper, Doris Lessing—who were able to access the language of lobotomized people and then reproduce it within stylized artistie forms. Before discussing The Golden Notebook, however, it is first necessary to trace some of the signifieant events in the history of lobotomy.
Although now generally regarded as a barbaric proce- dure from the dark ages of primitive psychotherapy, lobot- omy—or leucotomy as it was known in Europe—was pre- scribed for Ameriean and European mental patients with increasing frequeney from the late 193O's until the mid- 195O's, and in 1949, Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurosurgeon, was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for developing the proeedure of frontal lobotomy. Prior to this award, knowledge about lobotomy had been restricted to a few neurologists, neurosurgeons, and medical personnel in psychiatric institutions in the United States and Europe. Af- ter 1949, however, lobotomy began to attraet a great deal of attention, and public and professional discussions began about whether mental illness eould actually be eured by de- stroying part ofthe brain. Within the next five years, several hundred articles, case studies, and medieal books appeared whieh discussed the efficacy of lobotomy.'
For the general publie, perhaps the single most alarm- ing feature of these early articles was the surprising number of lobotomies that had already been performed. In his book Ethical Jssues in Psychosurgery, John Kleinig notes that by Oetober 1949, the United States Health Service reported "more than 10,000 lobotomies had been performed" in the U. S., and more than 6500 had been performed in England (7). Kleinig also notes that the number of lobotomies "peaked in 1949 . . . and remained high until 1955, when there was a notieeable decline. [B]etween 1936 and 1978, some 35,000 operations were performed in the United States . . . about 5000 in 1949. Worldwide, the number of opera- tions has, perhaps, been double the U.S. figure" (7). Thus, although lobotomies are occasionally still perfomied today, essentially the history of the surgical procedure known as lobotomy eovers the period from the early 193O's to the early 196O's, when psyehosurgery began to give way to other forms of treatment—espeeially to the use of psyeho- tropie drugs sueh as thorazine. During this period, medieal professionals in Europe and the United States produeed a large corpus of documents in which they discussed ways that lobotomy affected higher forms of eognition, ineluding memory and the ability to speak and write.
As early as 1950, a survey of the medical literature re- veals an increasingly active debate among those either for or against lobotomy. In 1951, Carney Landis aeeurately synop- sized the cause of this debate when he noted, "everyone who
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^mis LessinS SjuJiesYol 27 Nos. 15^ 2 J has dealt with [lobotomized] patients has been impressed with the faet that something changes. The literature, how- ever, is most controversial as to what that something is" (413, Landis' emphasis). The most vociferous advocates for lobotomy were the two teams of Ameriean neurosurgeons, Walter Freeman and James Watts, and Harry Solomon and Milton Greenblatt (Kleinig 7). Freeman was espeeially zeal- ous in espousing the efficacy of lobotomy, suggesting that it provided a quiek, effective, and relatively inexpensive means to bring about "personality ehanges of an autonomy- enhaneing and beneficial kind" (Kleinig 73). A survey of Freeman's cases—as identified in his book Psychosurgery and the Self—reveals that during the post-World War II pe- riod, he not only performed lobotomies for increasingly less severe emotional disorders that often eonfused psychologi- cal symptoms with social behavior, but he also came very elose to touting lobotomy as a panacea for virtually all forms of perceived psychological, physical, and social devi- ance. Perhaps even more disturbing, his arguments derived from a basic premise that behavioral uniformity is not only desirable, but that it should be the ultimate goal of psyeho- surgery ((Kleinig 12; Freeman and Watts, Psychosurgeiy 514). This eoncept of psychological and social uniformity is what The Golden Notebook, as a radical and experimental novel, most strongly resists.
A ease for Lessing's familiarity with the practice of lo- botomy and the eorpus of writings about it can be built based on several passages from the section in Walking in the Shade (325-350) that address the composition of The Gol- den Notebook. In Walking in the Shade, at the beginning of her discussion of The Golden Notebook, Lessing writes about her various periods of hospitalization in and around London (326-337) during the late 195O's and early 196O's, and of her "experiences with doetors" (326) at the time. Al- though she mentions several times that she was tested and treated for the tropical parasitic disease bilharzia, she does not make elear exactly why she was repeatedly hospitalized for rather extended periods. Lessing may have become fa- miliar with the procedure of lobotomy while in one ofthe London hospitals, where most ofthe lobotomies in England were performed in the 195O's and early 196O's. Moreover, Lessing makes a number of problematie references to au- thors and texts concerned with issues of mental illness, in- cluding R.D.Laing's The Politics of Experience and a book titled The Inner World of Mental Illness, which she attrib- utes to an author named Haimi Kaplan.* Lessing's familiar- ity with these and other authors and/or texts, as well her friendships and acquaintances with the various doctors she mentions in Walking in the Shade, imply that she was very familiar both with contemporary mental health issues (of which neurosurgery was the foremost) and with the litera- ture that considered and debated those issues. Sinee the de- bate concerning the effieaey of lobotomy was the most im- portant mental health issue of the time, and since the two most important texts eonceming this issue were written by the teams of Walter Feeman and James Watts, and Harry Solomon and Milton Greenblatt, I think it is reasonable to
assume that Lessing—always the voraeious reader—would have been familiar with the praetiee of lobotomy and with these texts.
Thus, the strong echoes of the names of the Ameriean neurosurgeons in The Golden Notebook must be regarded as more than mere eoineidence:^ Anna Freeman Wulfs maiden name duplieates Walter Freeman's surname and informs the pun in the title Free Women; the characters of Saul Green and Milt in the later sections of the text conflate the names of Solomon and Milton Greenblatt. The correlations be- tween the American neurosurgeons and the eharacters in The Golden Notebook involve much more than simply names, however. The episode with Cy Maitland, the Wyo- ming leueotomist cum Senator (Yellow, 2),* parodies the historical figures of Antonio Egas Moniz (lobotomist and member of the Portuguese Parliament) and Walter Freeman (Freeman writes like Maitland talks), as well as the correla- tive soeial and psychological implications of psychosurgery. Though Ella here describes Maitland as "a healthy savage" (266), she notes that he is also "the sort of man I would be if I'd been bom a man" (267). The idiomatic, slangy style of the Cy Maitland episode both echoes and parodies the tone and style of Walter Freeman's writings about lobotomy: though these are occasionally dense and clinical, they are more often jocular, exuberant, folksy, offensive, and quite coarse.'̂ The Cy Maitland episode, then, together with its attention to psyehosurgery, gender relations, politics, and communism—including Maitland's comic desire to go to Russia, where psychosurgery was outlawed in 1951 (Kleinig 9)—becomes a parodie miniature of the forces at work in The Golden Notebook. TTie representations of Solomon and Greenblatt in the text undergo more subtle forms of inver- sion and transformation. Differenees between the eharac- terizations of Saul Green in Blue 4 and "The Golden Note- book" and Milt in Free Women 5, as they display pre- and post-lobotomy personalities, are topics that 1 will discuss in greater detail shortly.
Opponents of lobotomy cited moral, ethical, and prag- matic concems: E.L. Hutton, for example, felt that the op- eration "destroyed the soul" (32). Mauriee Partridge, taking a more secular tone, underscored the doubly counterintuitive nature ofthe operation: first, the concept that a patient could be cured and second, that intelligence and personality could be improved, by destroying part of the brain (2-4). One product of this debate was the emergence of psychometry as a quantitative and qualitative tool in the 195O's. Psyehomet- rie testing at this time can perhaps best be broken down into two distinet eategories: some tests sought to measure ab- straet thinking and the processes of planning, reasoning, synthesis, and connective relationships, while others ad- dressed non-intellectual concrete eoncepts such as speed, perseveranee, and attitude (Tow 227). With regard to the structure and organization of The Golden Notebook, the two most important psychometric efforts were objeet sorting tests and attempts to measure speaking and writing differ- enees in pre- and post-lobotomy patients.
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Perhaps the most obvious parallel to psyehometric testing in The Golden Notebook occurs in the representation of ob- ject sorting tests. The most widely used of these, the Weigl Test, consisted of "twelve flat plastic figures of three differ- ent forms: squares, triangles and circles. Each of these forms has one side colored eitJier red, yellow blue or green" (Co- lumbia-Greystone 222). In the first phase of the test, the instruetor asked the patient to sort the objeets and to de- scribe "why they belong together." In the second phase, the instruetor grouped the objects and then asked the patient to deseribe why they had been grouped that way. The process was then repeated, aeeording to a different organizational logic (Columbia-Greystone 223-225). A corresponding type of object sorting test, administered by P. MacDonald Tow and other psychometrists in England, used twenty-six items such as books, notebooks, pens, pencils, matches, cigarette eases, paper clips, etc., grouped as reading, writing, draw- ing, smoking and fastening implements. These items were black, blue, green, silver or golden (Tow 156-169). Among all the psychometrie tests administered to post-lobotomy patients. Tow observed that the objeet-sorting test revealed the most striking difference between pre- and post-lobotomy performance, noting a "gross deterioration of performance after operation" and eoncluding,
[the patient] does not easily grasp the nature of the problem. If there is any reason or plan at all in his method, it is more rigid and stereotyped. The subjeet looks blank at the examiner's questions . . . [and] con- tinues to sort according to the first choice of method. It is obvious that his ability to sort is greatly reduced. (162-163)
The findings of Tow and others emphasize that while lobot- omy patients in the early post-trauma period consistently have problems with sorting and organization, they become obsessed with the concept of sorting.
In The Golden Notebook, Le.ssing conflates these two forms ofthe object sorting test and calls attention to the un- derlying premises of perspective and organization. As Anna sorts the fragments of her existenee, past and present, "real" and fictional, philosophical and pragmatic, into the black, red, yellow and blue notebooks, she eannot integrate or syn- thesize these elements into something new until the appear- ance of Saul Green. Green comes to represent the embodi- ment ofthe missing pieee ofthe puzzle—the missing green notebook from the Columbia-Greystone tests—and it is he who facilitates the creation of "The Golden Notebook" whieh was originally the Green notebook, ''his book. (!!!)" (507, Lessing's punctuation and emphasis).
Through this echoed reinterpretation ofthe object sort- ing tests, Anna organizes the fi-agments of her existenee from the first four notebooks and then manages to finish her novel. Paradoxieally, the "madness" of Saul Green and the apparent formlessness of "The Golden Notebook" allow Anna to synthesize her experiences in the highly structured, eonventional novel Free Women. Lessing, however, as the author behind the author, reverses the perspective and pre- sents the reader with a fragmented, ambiguous collection of
multi-leveled novels and eolor-coded notebooks that require some form of organization before they can be interpreted as a logieal or eohesive whole. In this way, the text duplicates the two phases of the objeet sorting test. Anna as patient sorts and arranges her life according to some unstated plan; Anna as examiner then organizes the material and presents it to us as readers for interpretation. Lessing then imposes a similar task on the reader: she presents us with a veritable eneyelopedia of fragments whieh we must organize, while simultaneously ereating an organized whole which we must interpret. A monolithic or rigid reading ofthe text thus be- comes an elaborate joke on critical readers; they—or we— like post-lobotomy patients, tend to "eontinue to sort ac- cording to their first ehoiee of method."
Perhaps the most useful way to understand the impor- tance of "sorting" and the object sorting tests in The Golden Notebook is through Lessing's discussion of compartmental- ising and sorting as it pertains to "the interesting shape" of The Golden Notebook:
[It] had a framework made by thinking. The thought was that to divide off and eonipartmentalise living was dangerous and led to nothing but trouble . . . [but] I have always seen The Golden Notebook as a failure . . . [flor has this book changed by an iota our tendency to think like computers set to sort everything—people, ideas, history—into boxes? No, it has n o t . . . But I was in the grip of discovery, of revelation. 1 had only just seen this Truth: I was watching my own mind working like a sorting machine, and 1 was appalled. (Walking in the Shade 2,^%)
Lessing's choice of this form of representation in The Gol- den Notebook ealls attention to the limits of rationality as epitomized by the objeet sorting tests and by the very notion that "sorting" can produce meaningful interpretations of life: instead, as she indieates, Lessing prefers to celebrate the open-endedness of human potential, the "reeklessness of infinite possibility" (GN 127).
In addition to objeet sorting tests, psychometric tests designed to measure writing differenees in pre- and post- lobotomy patients parallel the different styles and languages in The Golden Notebook. P. MacDonald Tow's 1951 .study of thirty-six patients at the Tavistock Clinic in London pro- vides a clearer picture of pre- and post-lobotomy personali- ties and writing styles. Tow required that eaeh patient write a short autobiography both before and after they were lo- botomized. He then compared the pre- and post-lobotomy essays in terms of style, content, and tone. Tow notes that while many of the pre-lobotomy essays were written in fiu- id, vivid styles and were generally optimistic, the post- lobotomy essays tended to be written in a halting style that revealed the writer's sense of despair and vague feelings of unattributable sadness. One ease study Tow eites bears re- markable similarities not only to the style and content of The Golden Notebook, but to Lessing's life as well. Case 28 was a young English woman who married in 1939 and then moved to Afriea during the war, where her husband became a civil servant. In the pre-lobotomy essay, she writes of "the
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Doris Lessin¿ StueÙesYol 27 Nos. 1 &- 2
enormous glee and excitement of . . . those bright gay months. Life was one long musical comedy heaven of par- ties, dances, entertaining, and dinner parties" (in Tow 209). Despite this idyllic scene, she eventually separated from her husband, noting, "Cedric still bored me, more so in every way as 1 met and liked other men" (in Tow 209). In her post-lobotomy essay, case 28 writes:
My feelings now cannot but be very closely allied with those previous to my operation, and forever with me but tinted by the certainty that they are not, and can never be parallel with them. For me, the feelings are always tainted by my questionings, 'Can these things be so, and if they are so, is it due to the loocotome [sic]?' At night all is dull despair and destitution: 1 lie in indi- gence and lack of strength. All my will is overcome with dull despair and diffidence: there is no force within me to overcome fatigue and daydeadness. Eve- rywhere on professional grounds 1 am assured that this will soon lessen into nothingness, but 1 myself regard this as the forming of an unbreaking habit. So what? (in Tow 210-211)
The style and content of the pre-lobotomy essay mirrors the first chapter of the Black notebook, in which life in Africa during the war is optimistic and is vividly described (as in parts of the early Martha Quest novels), while the post- lobotomy essay echoes the despair of Blue 3: "Yet now I read those entries and feel nothing. I am increasingly af- flicted by vertigo where words mean nothing. Words mean nothing" (396).
Tow emphasizes the qualitative differences in Case 28's two essays, which epitomize changes in many post- lobotomy patients:
[I]n the matter of style, there appears to be a definite degeneration. The emphasis of the content seems to shift from an initially well-balanced attitude towards thought and action, to a more disintegrated preoccupa- tion with thoughts and feelings for their own sake, ra- ther than with them in relation to the outside world. The post-operative account contains fewer descriptive pas- sages and much more introspection . . . [thoughts] tend to be thrown out one after the other by no discernible process of association. Similarly, there is a lack of theme or continuity in the material itself . . . there is a lack of relatedness between facts and feelings . . . the 'frontal' subject, regardless of intelligence and educa- tion, tends to write as he would talk. (205-216)
Tow adds that patients often comment that they feel their post-operative 'self is some sort of copy or replica of their fonner self in a metonymical and slightly imperfect way. Such self-absorption is reflected in their writing: "in pre- operative writing . . . the personal pronoun ' I ' is hardly ever used, but after the operation it occurs in every sentence" (217). Tow attributes this and other syntactic anomalies in post-operative writing—"especially the use of present tense verbs, as well as neologisms, inverted commas [and] brack- ets" (217)—to a focus on the present at the expense of a sense of the past or the future. In The Golden Notebook, of
course, this linguistic style is one of Saul Green's dominant features, as Anna notes: "He talked and talked—I found myself absent-minded, then with my attention half on what he said, realized I was listening for the word / in what he said. 1, 1, 1, 1, 1—1 began to feel as if the word was being shot at me like bullets from a machine gun"(462). Tow trac- es the appearance of syntactic anomalies in post-operative writing, especially in the extensive use of present-tense verbs, as well as "neologisms, inverted commas [and] brackets" (211). The Golden Notebook echoes these forms, such as Tommy's question while reading Anna's note- books—"And you bracket bits off?" (224) or the description of Nelson:
[He] said he had started psycho-analysis and expected to be 'cured' soon. (1 could not help wanting to laugh at the word 'cured' which is how people talk, going into psycho-analysis, the clinical talk, as if one were submit- ting fmally to a desperate operation that would change one into something else.) (402)
In this startling passage, Lessing alludes to the possibility of positive outcomes promised by purveyors of psychoanalysis and lobotomy using the stylistic and syntactic anomalies inherent in post-lobotomy patients.
While Freeman and Watts note many of these same post-operative changes in conversations with their patients, they refer to it as "the bleaching of affect" {Psychosurgeiy 21), a term which strangely prefigures Frederic Jameson's comment that "the waning of affect" represents one of the primary identifying features of postmodern culture and artis- tic language (10). Moreover, when Jameson describes what he calls the "constitutive features of the postmodern," he sounds as if he could be paraphrasing Tow:
[the postmodern is characterized by] a new depthless- ness, which finds its prolongation both in contemporary 'theory' and in a whole new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a subsequent weakening of historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new forms of our private temporality, whose schizophrenic structure (following Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more tempo- ral arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone . . . [and] the deep eonstitutive relationships of all this to a whole new technology . . . (6)
All of these comments, taken together, point to the sense of "depthlessness" and transformed "emotional ground tone" that characterizes both psychometrists' descriptions of the language of post-lobotomy patients and of Jameson's vision of postmodern culture. This imbrication and intersection of discourses, then, points to a startling example of how medi- cal, scientific, and literary discourses can develop side-by- side.
As Patrocino Schweickhart and I have argued else- where. The Golden Notebook supports a reading as a sat- ire,'" and many of its satiric features become particularly evident when the text is considered alongside the wide- spread contemporary debate concerning psychosurgery. The satiric interplay between gods and men found in classical
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í Doris LessinS SiuJiesYol 27 Nos. 1Ô" 2 works of satire (such as Apuleius's The Golden Ass) gives way to relationships between doctors—Marks, West, North, Paynter, Tanner, Maitland, Allsop, etc.—and lay people, most of whom may be deseribed simply as "patients." As The Golden Notebook (and "The Golden Notebook" in par- ticular) integrates and synthesizes oppositional features normally associated with narrative satire, it emerges as a personalized psychological creation myth. Through this process, Anna is able to capture and to reproduce the psy- chological and social Zeitgeist of contemporary England in Free Women, and she uses the language and connotations associated with lobotomy to express that vision.
On one level, the rigid structure and plot line of Free Women, "an absolutely whole conventional novel" (Lessing in Schleuter 81), ultimately questions the ability ofthe con- ventional novel—and of convention in general—to ade- quately and artistically express the complexity of modern life. The "problems" in Free Women are clear cut and straightforward: for Anna, "everything's cracking up" (3, 37, 318, 540); to Molly, everything is "so (or very) odd" (3, 25, 45, 313, 553). Anna has writer's block; Molly, Richard and Marion have unhappy marriages; and Tommy suffers from a contemporary "paralysis of the will" (222). These simple problems are matched by the simple solutions and "happy endings" which Free Women provides: Anna de- cides to join the Labour Party and do "matrimonial welfare work" (552); Marion buys a dress shop and is "surrounded by a gaggle of little queers" (552); Richard marries another nut brown maid; Molly marries another "progressive" busi- nessman and moves to the suburbs. And finally, with cau.Stic irony, Anna writes that Tommy shoots himself in the head and not only recovers, he "gets better," becoming first a Messiah figure and then deciding ultimately "to follow in Richard's footsteps" (551). In short, all ofthe characters follow Richard's and Milt's warnings to "preserve the fonTi.s"(22, 551).
Viewed from the context of the contemporary debate over lobotomy. Tommy becomes the satiric focal point of Free Women. In Free Women 2, after checking out "half a dozen books on psychology from the library" (212), Tommy shoots himself in the head, performing, perhaps, the first "successful" do-it-yourself-at-home lobotomy. Tommy's recovery, detailed in Free Women 3, mirrors the post- operative condition of Freeman and Watts' lobotomy pa- tients: "he gave no evidence of a collapse into unhappiness or self-pity . . . he was patient, calm, co-operated pleasantly with the nurses and doctors . . . he was, as the nurses kept repeating . . . 'A model patient'" (GN 319, Psychosurgeiy, 137ff). Tommy's shooting and subsequent recovery, which occupy most ofthe third chapter ofthe five chapters of Free Women, call attention to the shape and style of this "conven- tional novel." The reactions ofthe other characters to Tom- my's "accident" develop paradoxical themes of illness and recovery: though Molly says that Tommy is "like some kind of zombie," she adds that "he's happy for the first time in his life . . . he's all in one piece for the first time in his life" (313). Anna echoes this sentiment, though with careful qua-
lifications: "[Tommy] had this terrible damage done to him—and yet now 1 see him as a sort of zombie, a menace, something to be frightened of And we all feel it. No, he's not mad, that's not it, but he's tumed into something else, something new . . . " (333), Anna's fear derives from the fact that while Tommy is "happy" and "better," he repre- sents a prophetic or messianic vision ofthe future that Anna finds horrifying. Tommy's subsequent actions, particularly in choreographing the "rebirth" of Marion, both confimi and question Anna's fears.
Tommy's post-lobotomy personality—what Freeman would describe as the perfect model patient who is "relieved of eertain distressing symptoms [though asked] to pay a certain price" (P.sychosurgery 377)—serves as an emblem ofthe inescapable sense of disappointment and leveling that infonn the structure and style of Free Women. Viewed from this perspective. Free Women can be seen as explicitly fol- lowing the pre- and post-operative plan outlined by Freeman and Watts, a plan expressed in the monotonie, present- oriented, emotionally gutted language ofthe post-lobotomy patient—what Partridge describes as "factual, restricted, and unrefiective . . . less imaginative, more limited in awareness, and with fewer ideas" (71). Free Women, then, becomes a complex parodie representation in which past-oriented ele- ments of the conventional nineteenth-century social novel combine with the contemporary language and context of lobotomy to project "happy," though rather banal and bleak, visions of both the present and the future. Paradoxically, the post-traumatic claustrophobic conventionalism that Lessing produces in Free Women is both contained within and liber- ated by the multi-faceted and open-ended narrative that is The Golden Notebook. Thus, while a focus on the contem- porary practice and discourse concerning lobotomy helps to trace and illuminate some ofthe emerging cultural impliea- tions of socially sanctioned and medically prescribed trauma in The Golden Notebook, it simultaneously questions and critiques both the methodologies and goals of such lines of inquiry.
NOTES
Rubenstein's description of strong parallels between R, D. Laing's The Politics of Experience and Briefing for a Descent into Hell, for example, prompted Lessing to re- spond: "1 had not taken Laing as my starting point. 1 had not read the piece in question by him , , , [m]y book was written out of my own thoughts, not other people's" (Whittaker 13). For other articles that compare Lessing to Jung and Laing, see Marion Vlastos and Ellen Cronan Rose.
See Reilly, "Lobotomy, Literature and Postmodern Discourse from Egas Moniz to Jameson," especially 4 4 3 - 444,
^ Bakhtin describes "language" as "any communication system employing signs that are ordered in a particular man-
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ner" (439) and "discourse" as "bothi individual word and a method of using words that presumes a type of authority" (427).
'' This essay is part of a book-length project that dis- cusses works of certain writers—Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Ken ICesey, and Lessing—within the socio- historical context of psychosurgery and neuroseience. Gins- berg's mother suffered from progressive mental illness and, eventually, Allen and his brother Eugene decided that their mother should be lobotomized (Miles 16). Ginsberg docu- ments his experiences with his mother's illness in at least two poems, "Howl," and "Kaddish." It is quite likely that Ginsberg's experience with his mother's lobotomy influ- enced the plot—and Randall McMurphy's lobotomy—in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, since Kesey and Ginsberg were friends in San Francisco in the 195O's. Perhaps the most comprehensive look at the relationship between lobotomy and literature occurs in the works of American playwright Tennessee Williams, whose sister Rose was lobotomized in 1937 (Spoto 58-61). Williams' plays frequently reference Rose's lobotomy, as well as his inability to prevent it (he was away at college when Rose was lobotomized), and the stripped down, minimalist lan- guage of many of Williams' female characters not only re- produces Rose's language, but also what I am calling the language of lobotomy. Perhaps the elearest example occurs in the character and language of Laura Wingfield in Wil- liams' heavily autobiographical play The Glass Menagerie. Williams revisited the topic of Rose's lobotomy again in Suddenly Last Summer (1957), which takes shape from a neurosurgeon's conversations with Mrs. Violet Venable, who seeks to have her niece, Catharine Holly, lobotomized to remove an unpleasant memory.
bibliography to the 1950, second edition of Walter Freeman and James Watts's book Psychosurgery in the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain, for example, lists over three hundred entries that specifically discuss lobotomy.
^ As I have pointed out elsewhere, Lessing's references to some of these authors and books are problematic. For example, Lessing asserts that Haimi Kaplan wrote his book The Inner World of Mental Illness in "the fifties," and she writes that it was an important source for The Golden Note- book (Shade 343). However, the only book published with that title was edited by Bert Kaplan in 1964, two years after the publication of The Golden Notebook (Reilly, Note 7).
' Lessing, of course, loves to play with names and nam- ing in her texts, invoking, with names sueh as Martha Quest, Shikasta, Jane Somers, and the various incarnations of An- na/Ella in The Golden Notebook, complex identities that produce meaning both symbolically and allegorieally.
The duplication of character names, notebooks, and "chapters" has proven to be literary quicksand for many critical analyses of The Golden Notebook. Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger, however, use an effeetive system that classifies Free Women and the notebook chapters by num- ber (e.g.. Blue 2), and 1 will use that format. All citations from The Golden Notebook are from the 1962 Simon and Sehuster edition and will be referred to parenthetically with the abbreviation GN.
* Freeman describes Case 156, a "negress of gigantic proportions":
The operation was successful and there were no fur- ther outbreaks, but . . . when she could well have been taken care of at home, her husband refused to try it. He was still scared of the 72 inches and 300 lbs. of fero- cious humanity. Yet from the day after the operation (and we demonstrated this repeatedly to the timorous ward personnel), we could playfully grab Oretha by the throat, twist her arm, tickle her in the ribs and slap her behind without eliciting anything more than a wide grin or a hoarse chuckle. (Psychosurgery 405-406)
For a more compassionate and equally provocative descrip- tion of post-lobotomy female case studies, many of whom echo symptoms and characteristics not unlike those of some ofthe characters in The Golden Notebook, see Partridge.
'" See Sehweickart, cf, and Reilly, "Reading Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook through Apuleius's The Golden Ass. "
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, M.M. "Discourse in the Novel." Michael Holquist, ed. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.259^22.
The Columbia-Greystone Associates. Selective Partial Ablation ofthe Frontal Cortex: A Correlative Study of Its Effects on Human Psychotic Subjects. Ed. Fred E. Mettler. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949.
Freeman, Walter and Mary Frances Robinson. Psycho- surgery and the Self New York: Grune and Stratton, 1954.
Freeman, Walter and James W. Watts. Psychosurgejy in the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain. Second edition. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Tho- mas, 1950.
Greenblatt, Milton, Robert Amot, and Harry C. Solomon, eds. Studies in Lobotomy. New York: Grune and Strat- ton, 1950.
Greenblatt, Milton and Harry C. Solomon, eds. Frontal Lobes and Schizophrenia: The Second Lobotomy Pro- ject of Boston Psychiatric Hospital. New York: Springer Publishing Co., 1953.
Hutton, E.L. "Personality Changes after Leueotomy."
Journal of Mental Science 93 (1947): 31-42. Jameson, Frederic. Po.'itmodernism: Or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, ¡991.
K-leinig, John. Ethical Issues in P.sychoswgery. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985.
Landis, Carney. "Psychological Observations on Psychosur- gery Patients." Psychiatrie Quarterly 32 (1951 ): 317- 338.
Lessing. Doris. The Golden Notebook. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.
—. IVa Iking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiog- raphy 1949-1962. New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Partridge, Maurice. Pre-Frontal Leucotomy. Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1950.
Reilly, Terry. "Lobotomy, Literature, and Postmodern Discourse from Egas Moniz to Jameson." Landscapes of Memory. Eds. Isabel Capeloa Gil, Richard Trewin- nard, and Maria Laura Pires. Lisbon: Universidade Ca- tólica Portuguesa, 2004. 443^52.
—. "A Note on Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography. 1949-1962." The Doris Les.sing Newsletter 18.4 (Winter 2000): 7, 13.
—. "Reading Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook through Apuleius's The Golden Ass. " Doris Lessing Studies 23.1 (Winter 2003). 6-9, 26-27.
Rose, Ellen Cronan. "Doris Lessing's Citta Felice." Massachusetts Review: A Quarterly of Literature, the Arts and Public Affairs 24.2 (Summer 1983): 369-386.
Sehleuter, Paul, ed. A Small Personal Voice. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
Schweickart, Patrocino. "Reading a Wordless Statement: The Structure of Doris Lessing's The Golden Note- book." Modern Fiction Studies 31.2 (Summer 1985): 263-279.
Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tenne.ssee Williams. New York: Little Brown and Co., 1985.
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"A fit country for heroes to live in": Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist as Trauma Text
Diana Austin University oí New Brvinswick
We are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it. A war does not end with the Armistice.
Doris Lessing, Under My Skin 10
Lessing's startling pronouncement echoes historian Eric Leed's argument that the First World War had complex and continuing effects throughout the 20"' century, since "the cessation of hostilities did not mean the end of the war ex- perienee but rather the beginning of a process in which that experience was framed, institutionalized, given ideological content" (xi). Lessing's 1985 novel The Good Terrorist of- fers further evidence to support this claim by serving as a contemporary imaginative enactment of one element in the trauma experienced both individually and collectively in Britain after the First World War: the sense of betrayal pro- duced by the breaking of pereeived promises. "Even as it was being fought the war was perceived as a force of radieal change in society and eonsciousness" (Hynes xi) but, as many studies have pointed out, the changes did not material- ise as expected. Both returning soldiers and civilians who had lost loved ones clung desperately to the hope of a recon- structed British society that would recognise the war's sacri- fices by committing itself to a brighter, fairer future for all, and thus lend meaning to what otherwise could only be de- spairingly viewed as four years of senseless slaughter. Less than two weeks after the Armistice, with British society still reeling from the war, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, delivered a speech that seemed to recognise the debt the country owed its soldiers and to acknowledge the sacrifice of these men, who had idealistically signed up at the start of the war and who had continued to fight with a dogged determination long after their ideals had been tram- pled into muddy battlefields. Lloyd George seemed to prom- ise the country a commitment to change by asking, "What is our task?" and answering, "To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in" (9). However, as the government re- sponded with force to post-war civil unrest that suggested a possible "Bolshevik threat" (Marwick, Britain 147-50), the hope for social reconstruction soon became just one more casualty left behind by the war, like those damaged soldiers described by Jay Winter. He points out that in addition to the nearly three-quarters of a million British soldiers who had died, more than a million survivors had injuries requir-
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