从渴求到追求：《金色笔记》的生态女性主义英语解读
本文是一篇英语论文，本文以生态女性主义为视角，对《金色笔记》中的
女性从渴求人类与自然平等、性别平等到自我身份重构和追求万物和谐的
心路历程进行分析，揭示出莱辛的生态女性主义意识，进而引出其对人与
自然、男性与女性冲突的深层次思考，呈现出其对矛盾根源和实现人与自
然，促进男性与女性关系和谐的独特视角。
1 Introduction
Doris Lessing and The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing (1919-2013) is recognized as the greatest English
writer of the postwar period, with her masterpiece, The
Golden Notebook, as her best-loved and most influential work.
Doris Lessing had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for
Literature several times and awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2007.
Doris Lessing was born on October 22, 1919 in Iran. Her parents
were from Britain. At the age of five, she, together with
her parents, moved to Rhodesia, Africa. She lived in the poor
family for nearly 20 years. She dropped out of school at the age
of 15 and studied at home. Lessing started to work at the age of
16. She was active in the left-wing political movement against
colonialism when she was young.
Doris Lessing is a productive female writer. Her first book The
Grass Is Singing was published in 1950, which marked the
starting of Lessing’s career as a writer. It’s also this book
that made Doris Lessing well-known in literature field
overnight. This book reveals racial oppression and racial
conflicts in colonial Africa through the story of a black male
servant killing a white female host. Her other works include The
Cleft, Walking in the Shade, The Children of Violence, Love,
Again and The Fifth Child except The Golden Notebook and The
Grass Is Singing. The themes of Lessing’s works range
from political topics, feminism, to environmentalism. Lessing
was so famous in the literature circle that many of her works
were translated into many languages, such as Chinese, French,
German, Russian, and Polish.
The Golden Notebook is the representative work of Doris
Lessing. It’s quite different from the traditional
fiction in the form and narrating style. This book consists of
five colored notebooks, which are black, red, yellow, blue and
golden. The four notebooks whose entries separate the five
“Free Women” sections are written during a seven-year period
beginning in 1950 and ending in early 1957. The black notebook
looks back on Anna’s sojourn in Africa during World
War II, Frontiers of War, a novel she wrote about this
time, and her encounter with the literary establishment. The red
notebook is a journal of Anna’s membership in the British
Communist Party. In the later yellow, blue and golden notebooks,
the novel moves from historical realism to modernist
interiority with its focus on Anna as a writer who
analyzes sexual and emotional relationship of women and men.
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Literature Review of The Golden Notebook
Since its publication in 1962, The Golden Notebook has received
vast amounts of literary criticism from a great variety of
perspectives at home and abroad.
Studies Abroad
With a great number of readers and followers, Doris Lessing is
deemed as one of the most famous writers of the day. However, it
took a long time for The Golden Notebook to become a masterpiece
and get known by readers. There are doubts and disputes about
this book since its publication in early period. The study of
The Golden Notebook started in the 1960s in the western academic
circle, and witnessed a boom from the 1970s to the 1990s. It
continues to draw academic attention nowadays for it documents
women’s crisis of identity and the worsening environmental
situation.
Artistic technique study and theme study are two main
categories of the research of The Golden Notebook in the
upsurge period.
The theme study of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
centers on the perspectives of psychology, religion and
feminism.
Many scholars analyze this book from the perspective of
feminism, which is the hottest focus of the research
orientation. Some critics deem this novel as a representative
work of feminism. Margaret Drabble, a British novelist,
praises The Golden Notebook as “document in the
history of women’s liberation”.Elaine Showalter, an
American feminist, hails The Golden Notebook as “the
work of essential feminist implications.”
The feminist analysis of The Golden Notebook often
connects with the theme of freedom, which includes two
aspects: one is the concern over women’s living predicament and
social status, the other is the contradiction and connection
between individualism and communism. Ellen Morgan stresses
that patriarchal value and traditional social orders lead to
women’s alienation and psychological breakdown in the thesis
Alienation of the Woman Writer in The Golden
Budhos analyzes the writer’s resistance
against social and psychological enclosure and the
implication of the title “Free Women” in the thesis
The Theme of Enclosure in Selected Works of Doris
Moan Rowe points out in her book Doris
Lessing that Doris Lessing describes the predicament of
a woman writer through the breakdown of the female
character in The Golden Notebook. There are also some
critics insisting that the theme of The Golden Notebook
mainly falls in the art and representation of reality.
John L. Carey insists that Anna’s use of naming experiences is
a way of differentiating art and reality. Jean Pickering holds
that Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook conveys the essence of
art and the life experience in a very complicated way in her
work Understanding Doris Lessing.
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2 Women’s Craving for Nature
Kinship between Women and Nature
Assimilating the essence of both feminism and ecology,
ecofeminism assumes “a close affinity, kinship or
biological correspondence of women to nature, and divine
immanence.”
In this sense, women have been identified with nature, and
women and nature have both been seen as objects to be
dominated by men. As a great masterpiece penetrated with
ecofeminist theology, The Golden Notebook is a novel
mixed with diary and short stories replete with minute
details revealing women’s thoughts and concerns about nature.
Naturalized Women
In The Golden Notebook, Anna fancied herself to be a flower in
a bottle. A bird’s coos were used to describe Molly’s voice.
Such multiple references to kinship of women with nature
suggest Lessing’s nostalgia for her life experiences in
Africa, from which the prototypes of her naturalized woman
images in The Golden Notebook are created. In describing the
central Africa in the black notebook, Doris Lessing draws on
her own experience of living in Southern Rhodesia from five
years old until she migrated to Britain.
Doris Lessing was brought up in Zimbabwe, a southern
African country, from which she draws endless inspiration
for her literary creation. Just as Lessing said in her African
Stories, “I believe that the chief gift from Africa to writers,
white or black, is the continent itself... Africa gives you the
knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures,
in a large landscape.”
Her happy childhood is totally immersed in the African
landscape, so she develops a strong relationship with its
natural environment. Just like in My Mother’s Life, she
gives a vivid account of the countryside, expressing her inborn
love for nature.
“It is still a wilderness that my parents were taking on. Not
one acre had been cleared for planting... It is virgin bush...
Every kind of animal lived there: sable, eland... All
day birds shrilled and cooed and hammered and chattered.”
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Men’s Abuse of Nature and Nature’s Revenge
In the light of ecofeminism, in the male-dominated patriarchal
society, nature is under domination and utilization of human
beings. Nature has been degraded to the position of a resource
reservoir which satisfies the needs of human beings. According
to a number of the ecofeminist contributors like Loris Gruen
and Marti Kheel, “there exist a parallel between men’s
exploitation of women and human beings’ domination of animals.
Abuse of Nature
In The Golden Notebook, especially in the part of the black
notebook, the narrative of men killing animals can be
omnipresent in the novel. When Mr. Boothby “fancied a pigeon
pie”,④ he would just take out a gun to the small vlei down
there to shoot some. Sadly enough, this random attitude clearly
shows that humans depreciate and neglect nature. Birds mean
nothing but food that only satisfies their insatiable appetite.
Intriguingly, the deliberate deployment of “pigeon” by Doris
Lessing makes a special hint to readers. Unlike other birds or
animals, the pigeon is the symbol of peace, which should be
cherished by all peace-loving humans. It is a great pity that
men are ignorant of this and even take pigeons as only an
ingredient source for their meat pie.
When they went hunting, Paul bloodily shot pigeons with his
rifle in the kopjes. “Pigeon cooed on. It was visible, a
small… bird... Paul took up the rifle, aimed and shot. The bird
fell, turning over and over with loose wings, and hit earth with
a thud we could hear...”① Paul and Jimmy’s destroying nature
can be clearly seen from the above description. Pigeons were
shot and fell on the ground, and the sound of hitting earth can
be heard by around people, which reveals the bloodiness and
cruelty of men abusing nature. What’s more, when Paul asked
Mrs. Boothby how many pigeons will do, Mrs. Boothby answered
that “There’s not much use with less than six, but if you can
get enough I can make pigeon pie for you as well. It’d make a
change…” Jimmy said: “Six will be enough, because none of us
will eat this pie…”② Seen in this light, six pigeons clearly
outnumbered the reasonable needs for this group of people making
pigeon pie. Jimmy said six would be enough and he wanted to stop
the hunting. However, Paul didn’t think so, and he answered
directly “I shall certainly eat of it, and so will you. Do you
really imagine that when that toothsome pie… is set before you,
that you will remember the tender songs of these birds so
brutally cut short by the crack of doom?”③ Pigeons are
merely meat for Paul, and he devalues animals’ meaning for men.
He didn’t stop hunting even when the pigeons are already
enough to satisfy the normal needs for these people. He
abused nature without a sense of regret. In the eyes of Paul,
man is the dominator of nature and nature only serves for man’s
appetite.
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3 女性对男性的渴求 ............................... 16
对父爱的渴求 ................................ 16
父爱的缺失 ............................. 16
渴求的破灭 ........................ 17
4 女性超越自我的追求................................. 24
自我身份的追求 ............................ 24
日记作为身份重构的手段 ......................... 24
自我身份的重构 ........................ 26
5 总结 ..................... 30
4 Women’s Pursuing Self-transcendence
Pursuit of Self-identity
As a woman writer in the patriarchal society, Anna writes her
fiction for a living and keeps a diary for recording her past
and daily events. One effect of the patriarchal domination in
language is the silencing of the other, which is evidenced by
the film company’s request of adapting her fiction, Frontiers
of War for production. So in some sense, the dominated
patriarchal language has unavoidably penetrated the
feminine writing. However, admittedly there exists a virgin land
of diaries, in which women can listen to their own voices and
pursue their self. According to H. Porter Abbott, Anna keeps
diary as a “therapeutic quest for self-discovery”.
Diary Writing as a Means of Pursuit
In terms of the form of novel, The Golden Notebook is based on
the constant interplay between the diary entries and the novel
entitled “Free Woman”. Seen in this light, the diary entries
in The Golden Notebook comprise the bulk of the four notebooks
and the “Free Woman” Section, which Anna finally produces out
of the diary material as well. Her diaries, organized and
written in distinguishable colored notebooks, correspond to a
different part of her life respectively. In the
“envelope” of the five “Free Women” section, Anna Wulf
attempts to compartmentalize her experiences:
“I keep four notebooks, a black notebook, which is to do with
Anna Wulf the writer; a red notebook, concerned with politics; a
yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience;
and a blue notebook which tries to be a diary.”
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5 Conclusion
reference(omitted)
