Love and Sex Theme Analysis

While Anna Wulf’s rich internal life and deep understanding of the way patriarchy conditions her world have given Lessing’s novel a canonical place among classics of Western feminist literature, some readers also note the brutal irony of Anna and Molly’s situation: while they are perfectly capable of supporting themselves without men, they nevertheless long to get married; they seek love and define themselves by their quest for it, even while men treat them as disposable sexual objects. And they fully understand this paradox. While Lessing focuses on Anna and Molly’s search for satisfying romance, she does not reinforce or defend the traditional picture of women as emotional love-seekers destined to define themselves through men; rather, she shows how love can play a central role in everyone’s personal, emotional, and collective development, but men are trained to turn away from it by putting sex before love and rejecting the kind of healthy relationships, founded on genuine equality and vulnerability, that can spur personal growth, satisfy the need for understanding and companionship, and heal people’s wounds.

Women’s quest for love in the novel is not abstract or fantastical, but rather grounded in their particular needs and experiences—no man sweeps a woman off their feet in this book. In the yellow notebook, Anna argues that love can lead to “spontaneous creative faith,” or “the power to create through naivety.” In other words, by immersing themselves in relationships, people can become radically open to future possibilities. Anna presents love as a means for personal development, which may explain why she often falls out of “love” with men she is initially drawn to, while she grows to love Michael and Saul Green, whom she did not originally find attractive. There exists a tension between lust and love, between attraction for the sake of self-gratification and attraction for the sake of mutual growth. Yet many of the book’s men see love as simply about pleasure or security, rather than as an enduring commitment to this shared sense of personal development. In his relationship with Anna’s alter ego Ella, for example, Paul Tanner can only see two kinds of relationships, neither of which involves genuine love: his marital relationship, which creates security and respectability, and his extramarital relationship, which is about pleasure. He cannot imagine combining them both, which is why he abruptly leaves Ella without so much as a formal breakup.

Paul’s case is representative, for this novel’s men are generally emotionally frigid: they substitute sex for love and are uncomfortable with equal relationships with women. Men repeatedly tell Anna (and Ella) she is lucky to be single, which really means that they are lucky to be able to have sex with her without having to love or commit to her. These men value Anna only insofar as they can “claim” her as a conquest; they want to own her, not take her seriously as an equal, and certainly not open up emotionally to her. In fact, Paul uses “love” as an excuse for cheating on Ella, claiming that “if you love a woman sleeping with another woman means nothing.” Of course, not only does he not love Ella, but he is also talking about how little sleeping with her means when he already has a wife whom he loves (but still treats horribly).

Men’s disproportionate focus on sex doesn’t mean that women don’t care about physical intimacy. Anna, for instance, suggests that the quality of sex reflects the emotional connection underlying a relationship, especially for women, and has Ella chart her relationship with Paul by tracking her orgasms. Meanwhile, Anna recognizes that she does not truly care about Willi (or Max, as he is known in other notebooks) precisely because they never have sex. Yet, when she sleeps with the brutish and sexually inexperienced American surgeon Cy Maitland, Ella learns to distinguish between the previous sex she has had and “giving pleasure,” taking an active or passive role; while “giving pleasure” to Cy is empowering, Ella knows it will never satisfy her. She later realizes that she need not have her sexuality “contain[ed]” by men; instead of offering men sex in exchange for love, she can use it to pursue her freedom and test out different relationships, just like men do with her. Her friend Julia (a fictionalized version of Molly Jacobs) insists that, contrary to popular belief, men cannot simply get aroused with anyone—sex is not merely mechanical for them, but they do repress and avoid its emotional implications. Men’s attitude toward sex (and especially affairs), Ella and Julia realize, is driven fundamentally by their fear of attachment.

Ultimately, the relationship that saves Anna from her loneliness and creative block—her brief fling with Saul Green—is remarkable because she finds him as emotionally invested in her as she is in him, even if it takes him a long time to admit it and this investment manifests in radically different ways. At first, Saul mirrors other men’s attitudes, trying to maintain power over Anna: he sleeps with other women constantly and literally runs away when she points out his behavior. Yet he and Anna eventually become mutually dependent and vulnerable, to the point that their identities begin to merge and their personalities become indistinguishable in the golden notebook, which they both seem to write. Although Anna suffers from Saul’s instability more than he does from hers, he eventually feels immense guilt about his infidelity and even claims that Anna is imprisoning him, just as she sees so many men imprison their wives and mistresses. After mutually tormenting one another for a few weeks, Anna and Saul reach a point of relative equality by the end of the book, symbolized by their one-for-one exchange of their next novels’ first lines: they both recognize that they have grown close enough to one another to gain a new understanding of themselves, and that it is therefore time for them to move on and overcome their creative blocks. This love, the novel suggests, promises to break Saul’s pattern of abuse toward women, Anna’s pattern of unfulfilling relationships, and both their patterns of creative impotence. Ultimately, Anna’s great achievement is not a stable, long-term relationship but rather merely the “spontaneous creative faith” she had lost so long ago: the ability to write and overcome her emotional dependence on Michael. While Lessing’s characters often approach romance through their own needs and anxieties, when they do find serious love, they manage to heal themselves in a way they could not have done alone: by finding, as Tommy puts it, “just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me.”