The Golden Notebook: Analysis of Major Characters

Author: Doris Lessing

First published: 1962

Genre: Novel

Locale: London, England

Plot: Social realism

Time: Summer, 1957; the early 1940's; and 1950–1956 as the past recorded in notebooks

Anna Freeman Wulf, the protagonist, a sensitive, highly intelligent woman, a writer who labels herself as a “minor talent.” Neat, delicate, and prim, she is small, thin, and dark, “with large black always-on-guard eyes,” a “pointed white face,” delicate hands, and “a fluffy haircut.” She must force herself to take the lead, as she is by nature shy and self-effacing. She lives on the royalties of a commercially successful novel about her 1940's experiences in southern Rhodesia and is compiling four notebooks to exorcise her personal demons and to explore the meaning of her life and its relationships. These record her present life (psychoanalysis, friendships, affairs), her African days (the hypocrisies of apartheid, her fear of domesticity), her political change (from liberal to communist to disillusioned idealist), and various drafts and ideas for story lines. Her thirteen-year-old daughter, Jane, produces her sense of emotional stability; past failed relationships with men produce her sense of inadequacy. Ultimately, her real sources of strength are her role as a mother, her sister-hood with a fellow divorcee (Molly), her relationship with the exasperating Saul Green, and the self-knowledge that comes from analyzing herself and her past in her notebooks and from undergoing a process of fragmentation and breakdown that ends in an integrated self.

Molly Jacobs, a worldly-wise Jewish actress, Anna's best friend, both her complementary opposite and her mirror image, “a free woman.” Although she is tall and big-boned, Molly appears slight, even boyish, with rough, streaky gold hair, cut like a boy's, and a varied wardrobe. Fluent in half a dozen languages, “abrupt, straightforward, tactless,” and frankly domineering, yet full of life and enthusiasm, she is forty years old (in 1957), with an adult son, Tommy. In 1935, when she met Anna, she worked for the Spanish Republican cause while supporting her husband, Richard, a failed artist. She sang, danced, gave drawing lessons, worked as a journalist, and became involved in Communist cultural works. Anna and Molly once shared a house but now live a half mile apart. Both are divorced, rearing a child alone, and sharing basic Communist ideals, following a lifestyle condemned by conventional society. She, like Anna, feels nostalgia and anguish about the Party, and, despite occasional jealousies, she provides a solid relationship (sister/friend) on which Anna can depend.

Tommy Jacobs, Molly's only son by her long-divorced husband, Richard. At age twenty, Tommy looks like his father: round, dark, heavy, and “almost stupid-looking.” He moves in slow motion, as if imprisoned by his own nature. Contact with his tycoon father's world of wealth and choices makes him hostile. Tommy's brooding is the subject of much soul-searching by Molly, Anna, and Richard. When his attempted suicide leaves him blind, he plays on their guilt to wield power over them. He seems triumphantly malicious, happy to be the center of attention and determined to cause pain and mayhem while feigning innocent helplessness. He attacks the values, sensibilities, and commitments of all around him, dogmatically and menacingly.

Ella, Anna's fictional creation, her alter ego, a separate entity though similar in appearance (thin, small-boned, with a pointed face) and situation (a failed marriage, a failed affair, self-doubts, depression, and loss). Ella served in a canteen for factory workers and then wrote for a women's magazine, first doing articles on dress and cosmetics and then answering letters to the medical column of a personal, nonmedical nature. Her ongoing novel about a young male suicide allows Anna to explore Tommy's real suicide attempt. Ella's Molly is Julia. Ella's affair with Paul Tanner, a London psychiatrist with a wife and family, parallels Anna's former affair with Paul Blackenhurst, a witty, charming South African. Ella blinds herself to the signs of conflict that should have warned her that her five-year-long, intense relationship with Paul Tanner was doomed; the loss of her lover shatters her ego, reduces her independence, and undercuts her self-confidence. Unlike Anna, she suffered from tuberculosis, has a former army officer for a father, cares nothing about politics, and undergoes no positive transformation. She tries to be hard, cold, and indifferent; to live alone; and to thrust away the pain caused by an empty relationship, but a trip to Paris and involvement with a jovial American, Cy Maitland, “a healthy savage,” frees her painfully to re-evaluate her life.

Saul Green, a neurotic, guarded American writer, Anna's most significant lover. Saul is fair, with gray-green eyes, close-cropped hair, broad shoulders, a slight build, and the pallid look of ill health. His initial relationship with Anna is jarring, hostile, and competitive. He drifts into various personalities, but when he begins to discuss shared political and social views, to reveal his hidden side, and even to help her with the theme for her next book (“Free Women”), he enables her to achieve a richer, more emotional, more creative life. Frank, insightful, and sexy, at times he seems to merge identities with Anna.