Action, Freedom, and Moral Courage Theme Analysis

Throughout The Golden Notebook, Anna Wulf’s central feeling is what Tommy describes as “paralysis of the will.” Anna is unable to write, love, or commit to politics, even though she knows what she wants and what she must do to achieve it. For Anna, thought and action are not merely disconnected; they are actually opposites: the more Anna reflects, the less she feels able to act, and when she does act, it is often out of impulsivity and convenience, based on others’ expectations for her rather than the principles in which she so strongly believes. Her search for freedom is in large part a struggle to define herself rather than letting predetermined roles, myths, and chance define her fate, and she finally succeeds through a series of epiphanies at the end of the book, during her madness, when she realizes the fundamental value of the “small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life.” This palpable moral courage—the drive to act on principles—is what allows Anna to heal, at once overcoming her romantic fixation on the past, sense of political disillusionment, and inability to write.

Anna’s paralysis stems largely from her sense that her ethical principles are unachievable; she repeatedly talks about her “moral exhaustion” or lack of “moral energy” and often feels as though her thinking is so developed that no action could ever live up to her political, romantic, or ethical vision for the world. After spending years obsessively reading newspapers, Anna tells Mrs Marks, her psychoanalyst, that “nothing I could write would seem to have any point at all” in comparison with the horrible events unfolding in the world. She feels that art has lost its meaning, and that action is the only thing that can heal the world. However, she also feels that she cannot act, as she lacks the power to change the capitalist division of labor, entrenched gender roles, and elitist art world that confine her life and work. Anna’s moral vision of an equal society is so distant from the reality she sees that she simply gives up.

As a result of her “moral exhaustion,” whenever Anna does take decisive actions in her life, she does so out of impulse and convenience, rather than out of commitment to her principles. In the black notebook, Anna reveals that she moved to Africa on a whim and chose to stay after leaving the farmer she had moved there to be with, simply because she could not think of anything better to do and even though she was the only member of her socialist group who could have legally moved back to London. When she decides to have a daughter with Willi Rodde (or Max Wulf, depending on the notebook), she does so only because he proposes it, and she thinks, “why not?” Anna fills the roles that are predetermined for her by her relationships, social status, and political affiliation. Later, she realizes that her entire life has been conditioned by role-play: she and Molly frequently comment on the way Party members and ex-Party members end up defending whatever their role dictates, and when her daughter Janet leaves for boarding school, Anna finds herself with nothing to do and nobody grounding her in what used to be her normal reality. But from the very start of the book, Anna agrees with Molly and Tommy that people like Richard (Molly’s ex-husband and Tommy’s father, a successful but brutish businessman) lose all sense of moral vision and turn entirely into their jobs; people fit themselves into roles and become examples of a type rather than the full, self-aware, morally-conscious people who would occupy a just society.

Near the end of the book, Anna develops the capacity for moral courage that allows her to achieve multiple kinds of freedom: the freedom from emotional dependence on men, the freedom from writer’s block, the freedom to publicly disagree with the Communist Party, and most of all the freedom to define her future. She goes to psychoanalysis in an attempt to address her creative block, and after years of discussing her deepest emotions, realizes that she has learned to feel but not become any morally better; this is because her analysis focused on interpreting her feelings through archetypes, universal stories that she feels deny her own creative agency and force her into yet another “role.” After this epiphany, she quits psychoanalysis and decides that it is time “I leave the safety of myth and Anna Wulf walks forward alone.” This is perhaps Anna’s first moment of moral courage, though she discovers many others in her relationship with Saul Green: she calls him out for his hostility and cruelty in a way she did with no man before him, and ultimately this leads them to the close, if codependent, relationship that in turn leads her to give up her four notebooks and combine them into the golden notebook. During a conversation with Saul, she realizes that “a free society dies or cannot be born” unless people have the “guts” to express political dissent, and during one of her dreams about him she sees that she has written the line about the “small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life.” Together, these realizations lead Anna to take her ultimate moral stand: writing and publishing her second novel, Free Women, in which she fictionalizes her internal conflict between courage and resignation through the character of Tommy, who repeatedly asks Anna about the relationship between their values and their actions and insists that it is cowardly, dishonest, and irresponsible of Anna to keep her notebooks private.

Lessing’s numerous portraits of well-intentioned but practically impotent people show that it is not enough to understand the world’s injustices and envision a better society; rather, people must sustain this kind of moral vision without losing themselves in fantasies of it and simultaneously develop a critical, realistic perspective on the world’s failures without becoming completely distraught. The Anna in the notebooks recovers from her initial paralysis and cycle of creative failure by learning to bridge her values and actions through moral courage. Meanwhile, the Anna from Free Women seems to start and end in the same place—with Molly in the flat, gossiping about their peers, and leaving to take care of Janet—but with the one crucial difference that, by the end, she has learned to act on her principles (by becoming a marriage counselor and teaching children) rather than trying to define herself by fulfilling established roles in the Communist Party or literary world.