514
PARTISAN REVIEW
generous-very much like her made-in-Hollywood descendant, Char–
lotte Douglas in Joan Didion's
A Book of Common Prayer.
(That
book , by the way, is a brilliantly gifted lalter-day
Casablanca.)
But she
is connected to nothing and nobody and this is not because, as would
be the case in an Iris Murdoch story, she lives in a civilization that
offers no anchorage but because she is herself incapable of genuine
emotional connection. Today the women's movement is beginning to
focus on J ean Rhys as a diagnostician of femal e masochism, and there
is a sense in which this is not an entirely wrong reading: her lady is
indeed a masochist. But to read Miss Rhys in this way is to commit her
to
a literary and social program that there is no reason
to
think is hers;
it is like labelling someone a proletarian novelist because there is a
working-class character in her books. Jean Rhys's dazed heroine was
conceived only to serve her author's frightening vision of emotional
isolateness .
More warrantedly a text of women 's liberation , indeed a primary
one, is of course Doris Lessing's
The Golden Notebook .
Yet here too
there is a certain anomaly in taking as a guide to female freedom a book
whose ultimate conclusion, as I read it, is that th e special probl em of
what it means to be a woman is an insoluble one. Like Iris Murdoch ,
like Colette, like even Jean Rhys, the author of
The Golden Notebook
is an earth-dwell er. Unlike the writers of sensibility, she does not
inhabit that heavenly abode of femal e self-love in whi ch one counts
how many more, and more acute, nerve-ends women have than men.
She does tirelessly inves tigate and ca talog the actual social and emo–
tional bonds that shackle women.
It
is testimony to Mrs . Less ing's
intelligence that she nevertheless knows with D. H. Lawrence- or at
leas t knew when she wrote
The Golden Notebook-that
all freedom
sought for its own sake is a mere "raltling of chains"; as Lawrence
added, "always was."
It
is possible, however-and this idea comes
to
us
on ly as we read Mrs. Lessing's more recent novel ,
Summer Before the
Dark-that in an important sense the intelli gence of
The Golden
Notebook
is cultural: that is, the difference between that novel ,
published in 1962, and
Summer Before the Dark,
publish ed in 1973,
may well be that the cu lture in which the earli er book was wrilten was
more intelligent about women than is our more recent culture and that ,
in consequence, Mrs. Lessing had a more trustworthy self-imagination
available to her in the earli er work. For instan ce, in 1962 it is not
required of Anna, Mrs. Lessing's protagonist of
Th e Golden Notebook,
that she regard men either as h er enemy or, what eventually adds up to
much the same thing, her sexual masters. Mrs. Lessing can let Anna say
