Feminist Agency in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook: A Poststructuralist Approach

Abstract

Doris Lessing's literary gamut is seen as an arty site of social making and personal undertaking, a contesting endeavor to demystify the psychocultural contestations of the feminine and feminity. Lessing's thought-provoking novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), narrates her view of womanhood, gender, and female positionality. Building upon poststructuralist theories, particularly those of Butler, Foucault and Derrida, this article aims to investigate the concept of female agency and positionality through emphasizing the fluidity and multiplicity of female identity as a discursively agential power. The novel's polyphonic articulation of womanhood, metanarrative texture of representation and narratological structure, destabilize traditional notions of autonomous feminist subjectivity and highlight a discursively performative rather than normative agency of the female characters. The protagonist's fragmented self reflects an operational socio-political milieu that shapes her sense of agency, and reveals that feminist agency in the novel is realized through a constructed series of discursive resistances and encounters, rather than through a unified or normalized feminist self-entity. The five-notebooks narrative structure of the novel symbolically corresponds to the polyphonic female agency. The "Free Woman" captioning strategy serves as a significant trope of the conscious re-gendering of women collective act, and a narrativized motif of their deconstructed subjectivity