The concept of the free women and sex in Doris Lessing's the golden notebook

الملخص EN

There is no doubt that having sex is one of the instinctive, biological and sensual practices of mankind, masculine and feminine and that one feels the sexual desire due to an outside stirring effect.

A woman or a man has to achieve control over this desire otherwise s/he would be controlled by it.

If it controls one of them, s/he will have no decision or belief and will move as the machine according to the other's desire specially if their relationship is out of the marriage institution.

The research deals with Doris Lessing's novel, The Golden Notebook (1962).

Lessing's The Golden Notebook is about the many sexual and extra-marital relationships that the two sexually free and divorced women make with men.

They are the novel's heroines, Anna Wulf whose marriage is a failure and is a mother to a girl called Janet, and her friend, Molly Jacobs, an actress who also fails in her marriage and has a son called Tommy.

The research points to the physiological motives behind their relationships with men and how important they are to them.

It also makes clear how severe the impact of such relationships on their children, Janet and Tommy and how Anna herself suffers from disintegrated identity that she sometimes acts as a mother to Janet and as a lover to the man she shares him bed.

The research sheds light on Anna's and Molly's sense of guilt towards their children in addition to their sense of loneliness, emotional coldness, abandonment, and the physiological state they go through after their partners' departure.

The research also discusses the meaning of freedom and shows if these two women are really free.

In writing her novel, The Golden Notebook, Lessing follows the post modernistic style.

The novel's heroine narrates her experience in her five symbolic notebooks: the black, which talks about her horrible past experience that haunted her in Africa where she felt desperate because of the conflict between the white and the black who are badly treated by the former; the red, which is about her experience in the British Communist Party that she leaves after realizing that it is a lie; the yellow, which talks about her sensual and emotional experience that she reflects through her alter ego, Ella; the blue, which is about her writing diary that records her memories, dreams, and emotional life; the golden, which is the last one and through which she tries to collect all her experience in one notebook so that she can get a unified identity.

This notebook ends with a conversation between her and a manuscript writer called Saul Green who helps her by giving her the first sentence to her inner short novel, Free Women that opens Lessing's novel and whose sections separates the five notebooks.