On The Golden Notebook From The Perspective Of Deconstruction

Doris Lessing, a famous contemporary woman writer, is called the “Englishliterature of the evergreen tree”. Since the publication of her first book The Grass isSinging in1950, she began her half-century writing career. During this period, shewrote ceaselessly. She published more than50different works, including novels, shortstories, poems, drama, autobiography, etc. These works have various themes andstyles. Published in1962, The Golden Notebook has laid the status and prestige forLessing in the contemporary literature. After years of controversy, this epic in the endis listed as a classic of English literature in the20thcentury, and has been a milestoneof the modern western literature. With this work, Lessing won the2007Nobel Prizefor literature.The creation of The Golden Notebook mostly comes from Lessing’s experiences inAfrica and Britain. The book has no traditional plot. In this book, she breaks thebondage of traditional novel structure and applies a disordered form to reflect thedisordered contents, in order to reveal the heroin Anna’s life from different angles andstrength the theme of the novel effectively. The whole book starts from a novelettecalled “Free Woman” which is divided into five parts, about Anna and her friendMolly’s life and career. There are a series of notebooks between each two parts, theseare, the black notebook, the red notebook, the yellow notebook and the blue notebook;and these four notebooks are presented in this sequence for four times in all. Beforethe last part of “Free Woman”, the golden notebook is inserted. In one word, theunique structure of The Golden Notebook which is more fragmental and impressivehas a strong influence on the content, and make readers have a deep comprehension ofthe work.Because Lessing has experienced two migrations in her life, both Africa andBritain provided a good material for Lessing’s creation. Moreover the confliction andthe fusion of the two cultures have contributed to Lessing’s multicultural writingstyles, and the rights of marginalized groups such as the colored people, the elderly and women would always get great attention in her works.This paper will take Deconstruction as the theoretical support, and then attemptto deconstruct three oppositions in The Golden Notebook one by one. While it isworth noting that deconstruction is just means, the real purpose is to break down theso-called binary oppositions, subvert the hierarchy and the absolute center, thusrevealing the theme of harmonious coexistence. According to Derrida’sDeconstruction, we know the world has no absolute “right and wrong”,“good andevil”,“positive and negative”,“loyalty and betrayal”, etc, because an accidentaltransposition can distort truth. In fact, the world is a whole which is made up of allkinds of chaos. The thinking mode of binary opposition cannot be appropriate tointerpret the reality; instead, multipolar thinking can break through the solid barrier ofthe traditional values. The Golden Notebook is filled with Lessing’s ideology ofharmonious coexistence. She advocates human beings should respect differences anddiversities. People need to treat difference with an equal and tolerant view, with adialectical way of thinking. Only in this way, can we get a more harmonious society.The paper is divided into five parts. The first part is introduction, which is a briefintroduction about Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, literature review, researchmethod and the structure of this thesis. In chapter one, it mainly talks about thedeconstruction of male and female and some character’s emotional entanglements willbe explored here; in chapter two, it analyzes “black notebook” in order to deconstructthe white-centrism; in chapter three, it deconstructs the binary opposition of presenceand absence. In conclusion, it points out Lessing’s contribution to literature and thesignificance of the theory of Deconstruction in analyzing Lessing’s works. In brief,Doris Lessing spreads her thoughts of deconstruction of centrism through her worksof all periods, and expresses her expectation that human people will treat differentcultures equally and harmoniously in the free democratic society.