The Golden Notebook: The Notebooks: 1 Summary & Analysis

In contrast to Free Women, Anna’s notebooks are disorderly and fragmented, a depiction of her internal life and turmoil; it is up to the reader to decide which offers the most authentic, or truest, version of Anna. The notebooks’ four-part division clearly represents Anna’s own  psychic fragmentation, and the black notebook moves from the disorder of ambiguous symbols to preliminary attempts at conveying meaning through language.

Anna’s earliest entries in the black notebook are at once commentary about and evidence of the “darkness” she confronts as she tries to create meaning out of words and struggles to maintain the integrity of her art against others’ efforts to distort it. These are not merely failed first attempts at describing the trouble of writing, but also an effective summary of what Anna does successfully write in the rest of the notebook.

In lieu of truly writing—generating a coherent text out of ideas—Anna instead merely records what she can muster. The “source” column also points to the relationship between Free Women and the notebooks. In one sense, Anna’s apparently objective experiences in the former are the source material for her thinking in the notebooks; in another sense, the notebooks show the reader the source of the intentions, confusion, and struggles that Anna faces in Free Women.

The reader will soon encounter a different, lengthier version of this story, based on Anna’s own recollections (both extrapolate from Doris Lessing’s own upbringing in Africa and first novel, The Grass is Singing). Anna’s novel merges two different love stories from her past and centers a male perspective instead of her own. Also, the reader only learns about Anna’s first novel through this indirect synopsis, rather than by reading it directly. This synopsis, which through its brevity inevitably distorts the meaning of Anna’s original text, is in turn created for the purposes of people who wish to distort Anna’s novel by turning it into a film. Beyond sharing the initials FW, Frontiers of War concerns the same thematic questions as Free Women: how love can be possible in a corrupt world structured to prohibit it and whether white, Western, affluent communist activists truly do anything to advance the struggle for justice.

Anna not only recognizes that the reception of her novel depends on and changes with the times, but also that her own reactions to it would do the same: she initially focuses on the quality of her plot and writing but later focuses on the book’s political messages. This points to two differing ways of evaluating fiction and predicts The Golden Notebook’s changing reception in reverse: at first, to Doris Lessing’s disappointment, readers focused on her political messages but ignored her structural and technical innovations. Yet “the moneybags” threaten Anna’s art precisely because they want to sanitize and depoliticize it, so it does not threaten their own financial power by promoting communism; it seems that readers must not separate an artist’s talent from her message, but rather recognize form and content.

Similarly, as the world begins to “crack up,” Anna thinks art is coming to be defined by a social rather than individual perspective. Whereas philosophy is a way to find “wholeness” in oneself (by developing a system of beliefs and aligning one’s actions with those beliefs), journalism is a way to make society “whole” (by bridging communities that do not yet understand one another). Implicitly, Lessing seems to be considering whether it is possible to do both at once—and offering The Golden Notebook as an attempt to do so.

Like philosophy and journalism, Passion and curiosity are opposing forces: passion consolidates, pushing a single idea or vision, while curiosity disperses and fragments, leading people to pursue various, disconnected interests. Just as a writer must turn these opposite forces into complementary ones, Lessing offers a new “order” or “way of looking at life” through a fragmented novel.

Anna seems to hate that, by using the provocative and timely subject of British racism in Africa as a vehicle to convey her own feelings about romance and freedom, she has belittled Africans’ struggle for equality. The British “double-feeling” about the war reflects the simultaneous dangers and benefits of dissolution, or the breakdown of ordered parts into a disordered whole: it at once leads to chaos and frees people from the existing divisions that disintegrate (whether social or psychological).

Anna introduces her own experiences in reverse chronology; she seemed to stumble into her place in Africa and involvement in politics, making decisions out of convenience and impulse rather than principles and careful reflection. She sees a direct connection between her own lack of clarity and her suspicion that her novel’s message, “order,” or vision is fundamentally flimsy or contradictory.

Willi’s main contradiction is the opposition between his leftist politics and his conservative personality: he wants the world to change and the masses to seize power but refuses to change, accept change, or relinquish control, despite his relative privilege. He has strong principles but does not live them out; he acts with his personality, not his beliefs, as evidenced by his decision to pursue business (the failure of which ironically leads him to become a communist bureaucrat). Yet, unlike Anna and Molly, Willi does not seem to lose his faith in communism, precisely because he views the world in terms of theory. Anna’s feeling that she cannot describe personality with a list of words indicates language’s limited ability to capture the true depth of experience; this paradox is at the heart of Anna’s struggle to write and define herself as a writer.

As with Willi, there is a total contradiction between Paul’s apparent communist beliefs, on the one hand, and his class background and condescension toward virtually everyone else, on the other. While Willi seems to faithfully believe in his political principles but never translate them into action, Paul simply does not treat principles seriously at all, instead taking pride in his ability to get away with deceiving people into thinking he is a principled man. Paul exemplifies the contradiction of dissolution that Anna wrote about some pages before: he appears liberated and impassioned, but also power-hungry and perilously fearless.

At the end, Paul’s death is a parody of war, which is perhaps a fitting end for someone who structured his life around parodying others. Jimmy is virtually the opposite of Paul, with his crippling anxiety and lack of elegance. His love for Paul is tragic because it is impossible, but encouraged by Paul’s pretensions at homosexuality; in both these senses, Paul earns others’ affection by mocking Jimmy’s reality.

It is revealing that Ted’s benevolence and “genuine social[ism]” are grounded in his class status and personal generosity—he is clearly the only one of the group who lives out his beliefs, and Anna seems to implicitly recognize that her disillusionment with leftist politics relates to the sense in which socialism is an abstract ideal for her, with no actual impact on her life, rather than a project necessary to transform her socioeconomic circumstances.

Paul and Willi are united not only by their arguments about politics, but also by their conflict over Anna; Willi’s excellent business advice again reveals the contrast between his politics and his personality.

The group’s center of power shifts from Willi to Paul as they follow Paul’s suggestion to move to the Mashopi Hotel; despite their theoretical reverence for the working classes and belief in equality, the socialists eagerly take advantage of the Boothbys’ hospitality and the labor of those who work at the hotel: the cook, who is not yet visible, and Mrs Boothby, who notably runs the show while her husband (who technically owns the hotel) sits around and drinks. This episode shows the inequality that leads the socialists to their beliefs but also the utter insincerity of those beliefs.

The communists’ sensibilities are so out of touch with actual political possibilities in Africa that they propose class struggle on behalf of institutions that do not yet exist; their meetings are mostly limited to white colonists, and the question remains whether their influence is necessary or even wanted in African people’s struggles for liberation, which the socialists insist on reducing to the terms of class struggle. Maryrose’s position in the group exemplifies how even avowed leftists reproduce gender hierarchies that relegate women to irrelevance.

Paul observes that race, and not class, will be the basis of anticolonial revolt, which shows the limits of the group’s Marxist theory and also shows that they would become the targets of such a revolt. In other words, Paul recognizes that the socialists’ moral project is practically impossible and even self-defeating.

Paul and the other socialists recognize how Mrs Boothby embodies clichés of British colonial racism, but not how they do, too: they spend their days in military training, their free time interacting only with white people, and spend their weekends relaxing by celebrating at a hotel full of British settlers. Stanley offers Ted something of a surrogate relationship, and June Boothby is clearly a foil for Anna and Maryrose’s own romantic dissatisfaction.

Although Maryrose’s appearance leads the men to patronize her, in fact she is clearly the most self-aware and honest of the group—she recognizes how losing her brother scarred her and constrained her future relationships, even if it remains ambiguous whether her relationship with her brother was literally or just metaphorically incestuous. Unlike virtually everyone else, she does not let Paul get away with his jokes, but calls him out on them—while they both recognize the tragedy of their situation in Africa, Paul mocks it while Maryrose confronts it seriously.

Passionate, humble, and sincere, George embodies a sort of masculinity just as attractive as Paul’s but opposite (and much more genuinely socialist) in character. He represents Anna and Maryrose’s grave mistake: their failure to pursue genuine love in the moment, largely out of fear and instinctual attraction to “bad” men. In this passage, Anna again confronts writing’s failure to fully capture reality: she can instinctively tell the “good” from the “bad” but cannot translate this into literary language or justify her instinct.

Anna finds herself caught between the certainties of experience and the fragility of language: even though each person seems to have a distinct, inalienable essence, all attempts to capture or describe personality inevitably fall short. However, literature must still attempt to express personality, knowing it will fail—of course, this is also Lessing’s dilemma in trying to depict Anna Wulf from five different angles (Free Women and the four notebooks).

As Paul and Ted divert the conversation to humor, they reveal not only everyone’s lack of faith in the politics they claim to believe but also their lack of commitment to the future of British Africa, which they expect to leave very soon. Politics is more a way to pass time than a genuine commitment, which is further proven by Johnnie and Stanley’s presence in the group.

Anna, George, and Jimmy all have minor breakdowns in parallel: Anna sees the contrast between Willi’s mechanical attitude toward sex and George’s genuine passion; Jimmy, for the first of many times, drinks himself into a stupor because he loves Paul and fears dying in the war; George realizes that the people he thought of as political mentors did not truly care about politics. All confront the limits of their reality, which completely fails to meet their expectations.

Paul’s turns his joke about the Boothby’s cook into a reality, even though he is clearly more interested in stirring trouble than actually starting a “revolution” in the Hotel. Although Anna recognizes Paul’s insincerity and general misanthropy, she still appreciates his willingness to act, in contrast with Willi and perhaps even George.

Although the party’s atmosphere is celebratory, Anna focuses on the romantic tensions it brings out in the guests, who all begin to think about their identities in terms of whom they are capable of loving. This becomes a refrain in the book: people understand themselves through the mirror of their lovers and romantic frustrations, which sometimes reflect people’s true selves more faithfully than self-reflection can.

George, much like Anna, needs love in order to feel whole—his words conceal his intentions, which are nevertheless clear, just as Anna sees language and her writing as revealing reality despite their failures to faithfully portray it. Unlike George, Paul and Willi are clearly malicious, with no interest in other people and no empathy for George’s predicament—if love is selfish for Paul and Willi, for George it involves a genuine (if sometimes self-sacrificing) commitment to another person’s well-being, even if it is possessive for all of them.

It becomes increasingly clear that George needs women’s love to alleviate his miserable home life; nevertheless, he nobly sustains his family out of obligation: the others are materially wealthy but morally impoverished, while George’s material poverty is actually a result of his developed sense of morality. His class status and moral feeling also make him the only one with sincere political feelings.

Willi still cannot connect the big picture of inequality to the daily experiences of people’s lives; he is only selfless in the abstract, but never in his personal relationships. Because of his scarce capacity for empathy, he cannot understand why George might feel responsible for his own son. Willi is dominated by the intellect, George by passion—yet Anna seems to be suggesting that the latter is what genuinely leads to action, and that political courage requires a combination of the two.

Maryrose has George’s depth of feeling, but lacks his sense of obligation to act. If Willi offers political insight without passion and Maryrose loses her passion because of her insight, George struggles against the contradiction between the two: his optimism and his knowledge that revolution is impossible. Maryrose seems to feel that being with George would mean dishonoring her brother, and she and Anna are both unsettled to feel that George could genuinely love three women in a way Paul and Willi could not love any. Finally, by abruptly mentioning suicide, Anna shows a deep recognition of George’s moral crisis and hints at her own.

In retrospect, Anna troublingly realizes that her intense feelings were completely meaningless—nothing that happened in Africa could truly affect her in the long run, and yet (perhaps because it was so inconsequential) her time in Africa was the happiest phase of her life. Like Marion, Mrs Lattimer has a typically miserable relationship with her husband, and her inability to escape it illustrates the pitfalls of marriage, in which love seems to inevitably erode. Her affair with Stanley offers her an escape, a sort of freedom—this is a curious foil to the rest of the infidelity in this book, which inevitably involves men cheating on their wives (not the other way around).

Mrs Lattimer and Stanley’s relationship begins to look incestuous, much like Maryrose’s love for her brother—their love is based on their mutual need for someone to play certain roles in their life, rather than genuine feeling. Anna recognizes that memory and writing distort the truth of experience by recounting it retrospectively and giving disproportionate weight to particular moments that may not have been significant at the time. This also calls into question whether experience or memory is closer to the “truth”—a question that Anna later realizes cannot be resolved. As her faith in writing gradually erodes, she manages to keep going by keeping her notebooks separate.

Ted and George continue to pursue their authentic feelings while the rest of the group parodies them, revealing their refusal to be honest about their own emotions and commitments. For instance, while Paul does take something of a stand against colonial racism, he is clearly motivated more by the chance to shock and disrupt than a legitimate desire for social equality. Ted’s feelings for Stanley, although not sexual, are still based on a kind of possessive commitment that he realizes Stanley cannot reciprocate.

Anna’s suggests that her bland relationship with Willi keeps the group together by holding the true relationships they want at bay. In fact, this desire for transgressive love—to dissolve the stale, existing romantic order—was the main reason for the group’s existence in the first place. Mrs Boothby is clearly invested in sustaining the strict racial order of colonial Africa, in which Jackson’s position as a servant is as far as the native black population can possibly advance—her tragedy is that nobody appreciated her endless work to sustain the Mashopi Hotel, which reflects the general predicament of domestic work in this novel.

George feels a sense of obligation, not jealousy or resentment, toward the man married to his lover. The reader already knows that a crisis is brewing, and the tension between Anna and Willi is a sign of their relationship’s coming disintegration.

Again, Mrs Boothby is the messenger of prejudice even though she is a pitiable and, at heart, selfless character; Anna seems to chalk her racism and homophobia up to ingrained prejudice or stupidity in the colonies, but fails to realize the true danger it poses (only George does). Most of all, Mrs Boothby seems to be jealous about the love and goodwill that Paul and Jackson, Jimmy and Paul, and even George and June show one another. Meanwhile, Mrs Boothby’s labor and sincerity are never appreciated, so her resentment takes over—like so many invisible housewives in this book.

Mrs Boothby’s two prejudices converge, and again she blames Jackson for everything. This entirely uproots his life: the least powerful and malicious person at the hotel suffers horrible consequences for the socialists’ behavior, securing the opposition between their thought and their actions. It seems clear that they should not be the ones to enforce a revolution of any sort in Africa. While the rest of the socialists stay silent, George, of all people, is the only one with the decency and empathy to try and change Mrs Boothby’s mind.

Willi, again, does not seem to recognize the glaring injustice in front of him, and rather prefers to ensure that people maintain their clear-minded revolutionary vision even though everyone seems to know the revolution will never happen (at least, with their participation). With this show of Willi’s inhumanity and conservatism, Anna makes the crucial decision that dissolves their relationship, eloping with Paul instead—her happiness is a symptom of the drive to dissolution she wrote about before turning to this lengthy story.

The cave paintings point to the kind of mythical, perhaps primitive art that Mrs Marks and Anna later discuss as a sign of universal human experience, much as Anna wondered a few pages before whether the visual arts could capture human wholeness and personality in a way that writing cannot. Mr Lattimer’s abuse of his wife foreshadows Willi’s attitude toward Anna—his anger at potentially losing her is the only thing that drives him to pay her any attention; whereas Anna and Paul had sex because of their love, Willi has sex with Anan in order to prove a love that does not exist.

By the end of their time at the Mashopi, the socialists have only created further injustice, sending Jackson back to the poverty in which most black Africans are forced to live. The group dissolves, and they all live out tragedies consummate with their personalities: Paul dies in a mockery of war, Jimmy’s anxieties dominate him but prove false, Ted sacrifices himself for the only person who does not appreciate him, and George heroically fights to do what little good he can, given his life’s already tragic circumstances.

The book’s setting and plot are clearly grafted from Anna’s experience at the Mashopi Hotel and the relationships between George and Marie and Anna and Paul, but the very act of distorting the truth to pursue “infinite possibility” is precisely the thrill in writing for Anna.

Anna’s perception of her own past and writing transforms from moment to moment; she is neither a stable writer nor a stable critic of her own writing.

The color red is a straightforward and common symbol for communism; the red notebook’s subject matter seems much more clearly defined.

Unlike more dogmatic communists like Willi or fashionable ones like Paul and Jimmy, Anna and Molly seem to agree with the Party’s goals but not its methods, butAnna and Molly recognize that their decisions to join the Communist Party are more a result of personal convenience and reactions to other events in their life than straightforward political stances; Anna recoils from the literary world’s privileged cloister and admires Molly’s passion during her organizing projects, which contrasts with her own confinement to her thoughts and reluctance to act.

In fact, the decision to formally join the party — like Anna’s decision to move to Africa—was more of an accident than an intentional move, whether for personal or political purposes; there seems to be no clear line between communist sympathizer and card-carrying party member, except for what it signals to other people. Anna and Molly did not join in a state of frenzied excitement; they were disillusioned with the Party from the beginning.

Anna realizes that people’s political beliefs hinge as much on context and relationships as on independent thought or ideology; yet she feels that others’ membership in the party (but not hers) leads them into a dogmatic perspective that prevents them from thinking freely about what might be good for the world.

Briggs was demonized by capitalists for his insistence on taking a moral stand but by the communists for a sheer misnomer; yet the Party seems more interested in defending itself than actually pursuing justice, its stated goal. In the background is the question of how to at once act and think for justice: Bill is suspicious of intellectuals because he sees their commitment to truth as paralyzing their activism and threatening their loyalty, but Anna is suspicious of the Party precisely because it refuses free thought.

Again, Anna hints at the notebooks’ failure to capture the range of her experience and bias toward exceptional thoughts, away from the mundane.

Michael looks for an explanation of his friends’ hangings that allows him to maintain loyalty to them as well as the Party. He ends up with a explanation reminiscent of Willi’s beliefs: his friends could have been obstacles to the revolution despite their best intentions and efforts. While this seems like a long shot, it is also precisely what was wrong with the African socialists’ politics and recalls Paul’s insistence that a true mass uprising would also be directed against them. Anna, too realizes (despite her full awareness of the Party’s dogmatism) that she can more easily side with it than criticize it, even on the exact same grounds; she cannot help but feel the double-standard.

Anna realizes that her sense of responsibility is divided between the crimes committed by her ideology and the crimes committed by her country. Again, her uncertainty revolves around how to balance ideas and reality.

Anna seems to understand that she could not have remained in the Party based on concrete evidence alone; she needed a story for herself, the myth that unadulterated socialism remained on the horizon but was impossible for her to perceive directly, in order to maintain her faith in the form of socialism she desires. Anna and Molly both waver about their commitment to politics, but this shared commitment also separates them from each other.

In John’s mind, the Party allows people to continue believing in justice, contrary to reality—this gives a false sense of wholeness but in reality amplifies the gap between thought and action. Michael is a psychiatrist, which is curious given Anna’s psychological wavering and the breakdown he creates in her.

Suddenly, Michael’s affiliation sets him on the outs of the party, even though he tried to justify his friends’ executions to himself. East Berlin has the air of authoritarianism, not the egalitarianism that communism is supposed to achieve; Michael’s old acquaintances seem bitter that he comes from a capitalist place, reducing him to a characteristic he cannot choose and ignoring his personal commitments and beliefs.

Anna and Molly recognize the evils Stalin perpetrated but also worry about the instability that his death will inevitably bring their ideology; without Stalin, they now have to confront the contradiction between their affiliation and their values.

While the joke at the end of the meeting successfully diffuses the Party members’ tension, it leaves unanswered the question of whether the Party can or should actually affect politics; when they confront their growing powerlessness, the Party members retreat from caring about politics. Anna recognizes that the overwhelming dissatisfaction that women like Marion and Mrs Boothby feel is an extraordinarily common problem, grounded in married women’s relegation to and isolation in the home. Because women are so isolated, they do not recognize that their predicament is shared.

The fact that everyone seems to be “writing a novel” demonstrates the Party’s bias toward idealism and imagination above realistic action, which contributes to Anna’s disillusionment but also challenges her to justify whether her own writing is more likely to help people grasp reality or flee from it.    Jean’s work in the party extends her sense of domestic obligations, but her complete selflessness ends up preventing her from self-regulating, or consolidating herself into order.

Julia, Ella, and Michael are clearly fictionalized versions of Molly, Anna, and Janet, respectively. Just as Anna transformed her experiences in Africa into Frontiers of War, she seems to be translating her experiences in Free Women into fiction—although the reality of what is fact and fiction later turns out to be far more complicated. The cryptic title The Shadow of the Third expresses this relationship between Anna and her fictional characters: she is in the “shadow” of her novel, whose characters are “shadows” of her reality.

Anna’s analysis of Ella’s romantic difficulties is much more direct and astute than her perspective on her own in Free Women, which attests to the fact that she uses her fiction to explore her emotions in a private medium more thoroughly than she can with Molly. Ella and Julia’s inability to have “conventional emotional reactions”—like Anna and Molly’s ability to dismiss and easily move past their mistakes—both prevents men from controlling them and alienates them from men.

Ella’s work at the women’s magazine, like Anna’s canvassing for the Communist Party, reveals to her the private misery of so many women confined by gender roles and their unfulfilling relationships with men. Ella’s uncertainty about the party, like the notion that suicide might not be an impulsive mistake but rather an unrealized life plan, suggests that people cannot transparently understand their own desires; rather, the appearance of a coherent life (as for miserable housewives) might in fact point to people’s underlying brokenness and inability to reconcile their desires with their actions.

The analogy between Ella’s party and her protagonist’s suicide becomes evident. Despite how much Anna contemplates what it means to act on principles, both Ella and her protagonist undertake pivotal actions in their lives—actions that express their principles—by realizing those principles in the moment rather than reflecting on them beforehand. Just as Ella cannot mention the novel to Julia, Anna is likely projecting her thoughts of suicide into her novel because she knows she cannot

Ella sees Londoners’ identical houses as proof that they are “ruled by fear and ignorance,” and so cannot live deliberate or principled lives; yet she does not see herself as living the same way, despite her evident fear before the party and ignorance about her motives for going, Mrs West’s feelings toward Ella reflect dominant gender roles: she seems to think Ella works only because she cannot find a husband, and that her ability to take care of a man and children would be the measure of her value.

The very people charged with helping women resolve their misery see their jobs as hopeless—this implies that this misery has a structural cause, but Dr West laughs at the prospect of structural change. Patricia Brent is proof of the problem: her conservative political beliefs contradict her reverence for Ella, which are based precisely on Ella’s view of the cultural climate she favors.

From the moment Ella meets Paul, Anna foregrounds the eventual tragedy of their relationship. Of course, she takes Paul and George’s names from her own past in the black notebook; in reality, they represent Michael and Willi (or Max), respectively, in Anna’s life. This also demonstrates how Anna’s attempts to partition her life and mind into separate notebooks inevitably fails. Yet, whereas George and Paul both offered Anna genuine love in the black notebook, the characters named George and Paul both spurn Ella here, which suggests that Anna is writing in part to overcome her sense of lost love (just as Ella uses her feelings about Paul to overcome her sense that George was a mistake).

Ella feels caught in a double-bind: she must help the women who write letters, but cannot. This sense of futility, of course, parallels her (and Anna, Julia, and Molly’s) disillusionment with political work, which they feel is the only way to resolve the problems they see yet far outside their control. Ella and Paul’s professions offer competing visions of neurosis: whereas Ella sees the social and cultural causes behind the woman’s dissatisfaction, as a psychiatrist, Paul’s job is to treat it as a mental disorder; yet Dr West seems not to take psychological problems very seriously at all.

Suddenly, Paul’s interest in Ella transforms her perception of London as a whole, turning it from a dreary collection of identical houses into something full of life and possibility; this suggests love’s capacity to reshape people’s relationships to the world in addition to just other people. Instead of defining herself by her dissatisfaction in the present, Ella discusses her past and (like London for her) also gains a new depth for Paul and the reader. Yet she remains unwilling to discuss her writing, the most concrete proof of what she hides under the surface.

Ella does not admit her interest in Paul—but it is unclear whether this comes from her own inability to admit that something good came from the party or her distrust of Julia’s reaction or motives.

Although Ella is usually quite cerebral, she clearly falls in love through her senses and impulses: Paul’s voice (as opposed to his actual words) and the visceral feeling of freedom in the countryside, which recalls Anna’s fixation on the notion of freedom through dissolution in the black notebook, are what change her mind about the budding relationship.

Although, at Dr West’s party the night before, Ella insisted she was working class, it becomes clear that she is not (she is working class in the Marxist sense of the division between workers and property owners, but in practice, she isn’t working class like Paul is). Anna clearly recognizes that her (and Ella’s) distance from hardship allows them to view class and society in more abstract terms than someone like Paul, who spent much of his life fighting to overcome poverty but also feels a sense of gratitude to capitalism for his own success. 

The subtext here is that Paul misinterprets Ella’s desire to get away from people—and, by implication, the sense of suffocation she feels around them—as a shameless sexual advance and seems to think her apparent promiscuity must have something to do with her relationship to her father. Ironically, of course, Ella is not simply using Paul for sex but is rather falling genuinely in love with him, and her father’s apparent lack of love for her has nothing at all to do with it—she appears to feel just as indifferent toward him as he does toward her. 

Ella and Paul both refuse to take responsibility for initiating sex, yet she also plays into his fears by lying about the last time she had sex in order to hide her own feelings. (She also appears to be denying her residual feelings for George.) Paul’s attitude toward Ella clearly relies on double standards: he resents her claim to have slept with another man (whom she presumably did not love) even though he is still married to a woman he does not love.

Of course, although Ella accuses Paul of not understanding her, she clearly cannot consciously admit her feelings for him—which he, on the other hand, does recognize. However, Ella does point out his apparently inhumanity—as a psychiatrist, he seems more interested in decoding her than emotionally connecting with her. At the coffee shop, Paul’s discussion of his patients clearly parallels Ella’s feelings about the women to whom she writes letters. They both inherit the helplessness of the people they are supposed to be helping; they wish they could save people but recognize that they themselves need saving.

Paul and Ella’s intense and rapidly escalating affair gives the reader an oblique view of what Anna’s relationship with Michael must have looked like; the affairs seem to capture all the intimacy of marriage without any of its commitment or security. Paul’s insistence that Ella should stay unmarried reveals that he has little interest in pursuing this commitment, but also cannot realize Ella’s need for it; he sees her as a “free woman” in the sense that he can use her freely for his enjoyment. And Ella loves Paul for what, in her own depression, she lacks most: energy.

Ella’s reactions to Paul continue to completely dominate her feelings; she cannot square his refusal to commit to her with the knowledge that he is already married, and therefore perfectly capable of commitment.

Patricia’s jaded but outwardly optimistic attitude toward men reflects her sense of injury and resignation, which Ella and Anna are afraid of falling into; Ella sleeps with the editor in order to test her commitment to Paul and realizes that she is, indeed, in love with him. She conceives of her brief relationship with the editor, it seems, as equivalent to Paul’s relationship with his wife.

Of course, Ella does not consider the possibility that Paul means to say that Ella means nothing to him because he loves his wife. Their seemingly transparent communication hides their fundamentally different expectations for their relationship and their parallel assumptions that the other person shares those expectations.

Paul’s inability, or refusal, to take a paternal role in relation to Ella’s son again shows his refusal to commit to their relationship—he is using her to flee from familial obligation, not to pursue a new family in parallel. Ella feels torn between Paul and Michael, unwilling to subject her son to a false father figure.

Anna feels caught between the roles of writer and reader because she is translating her own life—in which the story of her affair has long been resolved—into fiction. Her analysis of heterosexual relationships suggests that the failures of communication and commitment she has explored in the black and yellow notebooks translate into the imbalanced gender dynamic that forces women into a submissive, emotionally reactive role. However, she sees potential in the naivety of that role, and her analysis recalls her attitude toward dissolution. Both involve loss and potential: naivety means the loss of intellect and maturity, but it also engenders a radically open, curious orientation toward the world. Anna’s insistence that Ella cannot recover her naivety is, of course, a way of writing about her own creative block (her inability to write a second novel). Love seems to offer Anna a means to restore this sense of naivety, which could allow her to create.

Anna’s above commentary appears to have been inspired by her discomfort at writing about Ella and Paul’s happiest moments, which would have meant painfully remembering her own with Michael. Instead of exploring this happiness, Anna immediately announces the relationship’s end, as though it were inevitable and sudden.

Paul seems livid that Ella might make something of herself independently of his control; he expects to possess her without making any commitment at all to her. Like Richard, Paul mocks the notion of women’s freedom from men only because it threatens his ability to treat women however he likes. And so he forces Ella to proclaim that she wants commitment only so that he can ensure that their breakup is entirely up to him. Again, his double standard shows that, despite his profession as a psychiatrist, he has a remarkable lack of empathy.

Anna seems to see an essential, irreconcilable difference between the way men and women perceive sex; the notion that sex is better with less analysis suggests that language degrades experience and points to the thrill in “naivety.”

Of course, despite her insistence that sex is better when left unanalyzed, Anna decides to analyze it anyway. Paul’s belief that there are no vaginal orgasms reflects the limits of “the most perceptive and intelligent [men]”—who think that their beliefs and instruments are the ultimate test of reality, and that they can define the female experience better than women themselves. Anna is torn between her emotions and body, which hold a kind of unconscious knowledge that her mind continues to resist, and her impulse to believe whatever is most convenient in the moment.

Paul denies the existence of the female orgasm with Ella but agrees that it exists when he talks to Stephanie, which shows that he is entirely willing to believe whatever is most convenient for him to persuade women to sleep with him (but never get too close). Clearly, he views Stephanie the same way he views Ella—but, since it is too hard for her to believe this, she remains stuck in naivety and insists that he must love her above all other women.

Paul’s attitude toward Ella is completely contradictory.On the one hand, he clearly wants her to prove his influence on, or even ownership over, her by changing her appearance and mannerisms. Yet he is also leaving for Nigeria in part because of the danger of becoming too committed to her. He ultimately resents Ella for not becoming his fantasy, even as he insists she is too attached to him and eager to please him.

Paul and his wife’s separate beds suggest that their sex life is uninspired, and the giant photo of Paul indicates that he considers the home his domain, even though his wife is clearly the one who maintains it (as proven by her copies of Women at Home magazine). Instead, the copies of Ella’s magazine are the only trace of Paul’s wife, which suggests that she is probably much like the miserable and bored housewives Anna met during her canvassing and also forces Ella to empathize with the woman injured by her affair with Paul.

Anna points to the conflict of values that lies at the heart of her identity as a “free woman”—the experiential, personal value of pleasure and love against the social values of security and respectability.  It seems increasingly clear that it is an all-or-nothing choice: all the characters in this book end up in loveless marriages or short-lived flings. Paul only values Ella because of circular logic: she has previously turned down security and respectability in her life, so he does not take her seriously and denies her the secure, respectable relationship she actually wants. Ella becomes a victim of the way others interpret her past, just as Anna feels defined by her past after publishing Frontiers of War.

Paul never truly breaks up with Ella; he appears unable to tell her directly that or why he is leaving, and his dishonesty and secrecy are clearly the most difficult part of the breakup for Ella, who remains unable to fathom the possibility that Paul values her as little as he does Stephanie. Dr West, too, never imagines what Paul’s mistress (whom he probably knows to be Ella) might feel or desire; as doctors, they both seem to completely lack empathy for women they consider disposable.

Ella comes to understand the cyclical pattern in Paul’s mistreatment and dismissal of women, a pattern shared by most of the other men in this book. Dr West expresses his loyalty to Paul above Ella; her switch from grief to fury reflects her realization that she was deceived as well as undervalued, as though Paul did not believe her intelligent enough to realize what he was doing to her.

Ella’s creeping sense of madness comes from the conflict between her conscious desires and her emotional instincts, but she recognizes that this same conflict creates the pure thrill of being in love. In leaving his wife behind in London, Paul adds insult to injury—it is not merely that he preferred his wife to Ella, but that he was not willing to commit to anyone at all.

Anna’s reflections on the limits of literary form helps explain the structure of the novel, which attempts to capture life as it is lived through a fragmented, almost cinematic form. And her commentary about film becomes incredibly important at the end of the novel, when she starts to relive her past through film rather than literature.

Anna comments on the yellow notebook’s function: to cope with reality by fictionalizing it. She announces her belief that the blue notebook will be more faithful to reality than the others—but it remains to be seen whether it actually is.

This entry returns to the subject matter and cast of characters from Free Women, although it is set years before that frame story. It shows that Tommy’s moral conflicts with his parents are long-standing—he feels both forced to choose between his parents and forced to maintain relationships with each of them. While he ends up aligning with his mother’s beliefs while speaking out against them, it is unclear whether his decision not to join the military was really an act of political courage or an act of personal cowardice.

Anna clearly sees that her decision to have Janet was borne of the same impulsivity and arbitrariness as Tommy’s decision to become a conscientious objector. Curiously, her relationship with Max is clearly the same relationship with Willi she described in the black notebook—which is strange because the blue and black notebooks both purport to be recounting truth rather than fiction.

Anna’s central problem is that she cannot act because she cannot feel. Able to see both sides of an issue, she feels unable to choose principles on which to act, which explains why she and her characters so often fall into their decisions out of impulse or convenience. Her lack of certainty is connected to her loss of naivety, which she recounted through Ella’s story in the yellow notebook.

Anna’s inability to feel has two primary symptoms: her creative and romantic blocks. At the same time, she seems to believe that her dreams hold unconscious knowledge about her feelings that she cannot access in waking life.

Anna’s dual blocks—art and romance—become the focus of her sessions with Mrs Marks. She feels stuck in a cycle of failure: as the same experiences and symbols recur, they begin to lose their meaning. Mrs Marks seems to suspect her dream about Janet is really about art because it reflects her lack of feeling when she builds something out of the blocks with Janet. Anna’s unprompted insistence that she doesn’t care about art is, paradoxically, the clearest proof that her inability to write continues to weigh on her.

Anna’s feeling of false art points to the layers of contradictory meaning and stories in her own accounts—none of them tell the whole truth, and so in a sense they are all false art. Yet Anna seeks the whole truth through her dreams, where the raw material of her life seems to be flowing—indeed, dreams and the novel itself take a “crude, unfinished, raw, tentative” form unlike the packaged, ostensibly coherent form of art. And since the dreams feel like “false art,” it seems that, whether she is awake or asleep, Anna’s energy all goes into false art. She begins to realize that all “valuable” art is false art, that polished art is still more false, and that any art which pretends to be more than “caricature, illustration, parody” is in fact deceptive. 

Mrs Marks seems to control Anna’s dreams: when she insists they stop, they do, which suggests that these dreams are not purely the product of Anna’s creative energy (as she just argued) but also that psychoanalysis offers Anna a way to transform her unconscious thinking, as it is intended to do. Just like Paul does to Ella, Michael secures Anna’s commitment by insisting on ambiguity, alternatingly declaring his commitment and indifference. Anna’s emotional life seems governed less by her “inability to feel” than by her wild mood swings and inability to reconcile the opposite feelings that overtake her.

Again, Anna’s relationship with Michael is split, and Mrs Marks’s suggestion that Anna dream seems intended to help her reconcile her split parts by finding a means to integrate them in her unconscious.

Anna writes out of the impulse to resolve her contradictory feelings—pleasure in pain—which is the same reason she goes to psychoanalysis (where she realizes that the thing she feels most strongly is a fear of feeling). She guards her writing intensely: she is unable to bring it into psychoanalysis, even though she brings her psychoanalysis into writing. She feels robbed, like she did by those who sought to use her novel Frontiers of War for a movie rather than remaining faithful to her authorial intent.

In fact, Mrs Marks’s comment freezes Anna’s writing rather than unfreezing it—when her blue notebook becomes public and threatens to escape her control (like Frontiers of War), Anna shuts it down. This fact reveals as much about the underlying fears that prevent Anna from writing another novel as her psychoanalysis sessions do. In fact, she replaces her private thoughts with the most public information of all—international news—and the reader loses all sense of how this news affected her private life.

Anna seems to be “withdraw[ing]” from psychoanalysis because it has already filled its purpose for her: Mrs Marks enters her dreams as a protective figure, and this dream about “the anarchic principle” becomes very significant later in the novel, where it figures as the dream about “joy in spite.”

While Anna has in fact started writing again, she carefully keeps this a secret from Mrs Marks and prefers to instead focus on her years of collecting newspaper clippings. While fixating on the news helped Anna look beyond her perspective, global problems also became personal for her, and she lost the ability to address her underlying creative block. Indeed, her newspaper collecting is probably symptomatic of this deeper creative sterility.

Anna feels paralyzed by the world’s disorder: since her writing cannot solve global problems or prove more significant than them, she feels it is meaningless. In fact, even though she just claimed that the newspapers “keep things in proportion,” they lead her to think on a global scale and forget about herself as an individual. Yet this journal entry’s existence proves that Anna has started writing again, even if it is unclear what motivated her.

The relationship between Anna’s dreams and her waking life seems to have switched: now she feels in reality what she knows but cannot feel in her dreams, which proves that psychoanalysis has successfully taught her to feel again. Of course, what she is afraid to say is that it taught her to write again, and she cannot bear to return to psychoanalysis precisely because Mrs Marks violates the integrity of her art by telling her what to write.

This dream represents Anna’s deepest fears about her art. Her horror at receiving money reflects her fear of “selling out”—not only by compromising her work’s integrity but also by participating in the capitalist racket that sees art only as a commodity for sale. She fears that she has already done this by losing control over the reception of her first novel Frontiers of War (as represented by her characters becoming her buyers here). The pain that produced her art is a delightful opportunity for the entertainment industry to profit, and the crocodile crying diamonds could be a metaphor for either how her fictional expression of emotions creates something beautiful or how the world has eagerly decided that art she considers dishonest is immensely valuable.

By deciding not to respond, Mrs Marks actually lets Anna maintain ownership over her dream and its interpretation—even though the psychoanalyst is already buried inside her unconscious. Outside, Anna’s reflection indicates that she may again be ready to write, even if she recognizes that her art may not be taken as seriously as she wants.