The Golden Notebook: Free Women: 3 Summary & Analysis

Since the novel declares that Tommy will die, then reveals that he survives only after lengthy excerpts from Anna’s notebooks, Molly is calling out the reader as much as herself and Anna, as well as pointing to the mystery of what is fact and fiction in this book more broadly—which Tommy’s blindness here also represents.

The people around Tommy have difficulty connecting his past self to his present one and do not worry that he will eventually carry out his earlier suicide plans, even as they continue to see him as malicious and misanthropic; while Richard wants to give Tommy false hope, Molly considers it better to confront than potentially delay the realization of ungainly truths.

As in the previous sections of Free Women, Tommy confronts and accepts the truth like the “latter-day stoic[s]” Anna suggested they may be, even though he is also now cut off from the world by his blindness—like Anna’s, his life now largely consists of reading and writing alone in his room. As character foils for one another, they both seek to communicate the world’s truths despite restricting themselves to a confined space and perspective.

Tommy completely withdraws from the social world, too, in a way even more extreme than he had before his suicide attempt. As he pushes Molly away, her sense of motherhood begins to erode and his future is no longer the central question in their relationship.

Tommy’s mere presence in the household—others’ fear that he is listening in, rather than his interactions with anyone—begins to also erode Molly’s connections to the rest of the world: he draws her into the same isolation that defines his existence. While isolation brings Tommy a sense of tranquility and wholeness by absolving him of any obligations to his mother or the rest of the world, Molly experiences this isolation as breakdown, since her sense of value in life hinged on her relationships to others.

Anna worries that, when Tommy read her notebooks, the despair and negativity she hoped to keep private spread out into the world, exactly as she’d feared—although Tommy wanted her precisely to unify and publicize her turmoil. Perhaps Tommy’s suicide has something to do, at least symbolically, with giving Anna “another chance,” as he promised.

Marion and Tommy’s relationship, a kind of surrogate marriage, threatens Richard because it relieves them of their previous dependence on him; despite (or perhaps because of) his obvious, immense power in the workplace, Richard seems unable to grapple with the possibility of losing control over his wife and son.

Relationships between men and women seem to be about a mutual, unhealthy need for unequal power. Anna implies that Tommy somehow needs his mother’s continued misery for his own sustenance, which seems strange given Tommy’s newfound happiness and relationship with Marion. Perhaps she is pointing to the fact that Richard cannot stand Marion’s happiness, and—like his son, apparently—wants to keep his wife “as his prisoner” rather than letting her pursue her own happiness. Of course, Richard momentary keeps Anna as a literal prisoner in his office, making her substitute for his failing marriage just as he tried to make her substitute sexually for his wife through an affair—yet Anna seems to desire, even “need,” this imprisonment just as Molly lets Tommy control her life rather than pursuing it independently of him.

The prospect of giving Tommy a job is no longer about Tommy’s future, but about ensuring Richard’s continued control over his son; Richard ironically complains about losing the normal nuclear family he had long since abandoned, and then about his job, even though he insists on the nobility of his profession and wants Tommy to follow him into the business world. This confirms Tommy’s suspicion at the beginning of the book: capitalism erodes people’s spirit through alienating work, even among the bourgeoisie (the class that owns property and capital, like Richard).

Anna interprets these rush-hour commuters through her Marxist perspective on capitalism: even though Richard is unhappy as a corporate executive, she sees the deeper misery among those forced to work their lives away in unfulfilling jobs in order to stay afloat. Richard creates the city’s “terrible pressure,” everyone else gets subjected to it, and nobody ends up happy. Anna feels the same sense of alienation and salvages her identity only by thinking about how her labor as a mother is necessary. This recalls Tommy’s comparison of Anna and Molly (who are “several things”) with mindless office workers like Richard (who could “never be different”)—but Anna seems to be losing track of her multiplicity as she starts to define herself through labor.

As Anna confronts capitalism’s assault on her identity and humanity, she must also confront this man’s: she can see him reducing her to her body, imagining her as a tool for his sexual pleasure. While, on the one hand, Anna is losing her usual resilience to the world, she is also finally opening herself to the full horror of the fact that “this happens every day.” Her search to find “immunity” through beauty clearly represents her search to insulate herself from the violence of markets and men through art.

While Anna takes no issue with Ivor and Ronnie’s homosexuality in itself, she does think of them as deficient men (whereas, despite their homosexuality, Paul and Jimmy were still “real men”). Under her valorization of “real men,” Anna clearly recognizes that her feelings are vague and problematic, and that there is a profound difference between being a good lover and a good father—she struggles to square her internalized desire to be controlled with the equality and respect she knows should define a healthy relationship.

Anna at once sees Ivor and Ronnie as overly feminine (and therefore not “real men”) and as more extreme versions of “real men,” with a deeper misogyny that, unlike straight men’s, is not tempered by a desire to be with women. Their effeminacy, to Anna, at once betrays their failure as men and parodies women. Ivor and Ronnie take over Anna’s household just as Tommy takes over Molly’s—but they do so by threatening her own role as Janet’s mother and sole caregiver. Even though Ronnie is “mocking ‘normal’ love,” he and Ivor seem to have a much more equal and stable relationship than anyone else in the book.

Marion seems to have taken on Tommy’s sinister air, but so has the whole world: Anna is seeing unreal threats everywhere, in everyone, and Marion is harmless as ever—her only threat to Anna is her apparent happiness, which reminds Anna of what she is missing (much like Ivor and Ronnie’s relationship).

Marion now clearly sees that Richard’s indifference was the cause of her unhappiness but also that she has the power to escape it by leaving him; she seems delightfully “free,” just as she has always thought Anna to be. Yet, in reality, Marion has still put herself under a man’s control (Tommy’s) and Anna resents the lack of human connection that defines her “freedom.” Anna doesn’t feel free because she is free; Marion feels free because she is not; Lessing questions whether there is a real distinction between freedom and unfreedom, or whether (like so many words for Anna) these ideas have lost their meanings.

Anna hates Marion’s naivety—something she remarked in the yellow notebook that Ella has lost as a result of her breakup. Yet Marion reflects not the juvenile naivety of a blind faith in love but independence—both a faith in her ability to survive without Richard and a faith in the same liberation struggles that Anna quickly lost hope in during her time in Africa. Yet nothing about Marion’s faith is original, much like that of the optimistic workers and writers whom Anna encounters in the Communist Party.

Tommy seems to be offering Anna the second chance he promised her; oddly, he tries to kill himself before trying to save the world when his initial plan fails—both are ways of dissolving his own self, and his inhuman sense of confidence and invulnerability points to the sense in which such blind activism also emerges from bad faith. Locked away in a prison, Tom Mathlong represents the impossible, intangible revolution in which Western Communists have so much naïve faith—and the futility of writing to him parallels Anna’s sense of futility in her own writing, which has never seemed to catch a likeminded audience.

Anna always tries to put on a façade of happiness and certainty for Janet, who now begins to see through it. Anna’s anger at Ronnie seems to be a much greater threat to Janet than Ivor and Ronnie’s apparently feminine influence.

Anna now recognizes that Ronnie is her “problem” but also feels torn between her desire for control of her household and her sense of obligation to help the queer couple avoid the discrimination they would face elsewhere—just like her contradictory desire for “real men,” her instinctual sense of property contradicts her more basic values.

Anna’s animosity toward Ronnie clearly represents her disdain for women who marry for money and status rather than love—in a sense, this means betraying their humanity for the sake of material ends, but in another sense their values are exclusively material, an extreme symptom of the erosion of love that Anna continues to feel. Now, Ivor and Ronnie clearly do mock Anna with descriptions of grotesque femininity—but she directs her anger at herself for letting herself be affected by something she knows does not matter.

While Anna is clearly troubled by her realization that she cannot feel strong on her own—that she needs to derive her strength from a man’s love—her ability to admit this suggests that she is finally and sincerely confronting the anxiety she preferred to disregard at the beginning of Free Women.

The water in Anna’s dream represents the wholeness, strength, and happiness she hopes to achieve through love—but her dream about a failed quest for water instead points to the obstacles she must overcome for love. While this dream fails to remedy Anna’s pain, it does spur her to action—perhaps her first decisive action in all of Free Women.

Anna’s precise motivation for evicting Ronnie (whether genuine concern for Janet, jealousy and displaced anger about her own relationships, or homophobia) remains unclear, but she nevertheless overturns the household’s new order, reclaiming her previous control—it is, in this sense, born of a conservative impulse.