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‘She hasn’t asked you to do anything about it,’ said Willi.
‘But that isn’t the point.’ George sank his face on his flat palms, and I saw the wetness creep between his fingers. ‘It’s eating me up,’ he said. ‘I’ve known about it this last year and it’s driving me crazy.’
‘Which isn’t going to help matters much,’ said Willi, and George dropped his hands sharply, showing his tear-smeared face, and looked at him.
‘Anna?’ appealed George, looking at me. I was in the most extraordinary tumult of emotion. First, I was jealous of the woman. Last night I had been wishing I was her, but it was an impersonal emotion. Now I knew who it was, and I was astounded to find I was hating George and condemning him - just as I had resented him last night when he made me feel guilty. And then, and this was worse, I was surprised to find I resented the fact the woman was black. I had imagined myself free of any such emotion, but it seemed I was not, and I was ashamed and angry - with myself, and with George. But it was more than that. Being so young, twenty-three or four, I suffered, like so many ‘emancipated’ girls, from a terror of being trapped and tamed by domesticity. George’s house, where he and his wife were trapped without hope of release, save through the deaths of four old people, represented to me the ultimate horror. It frightened me so that I even had nightmares about it. And yet - this man, George, the trapped one, the man who had put that unfortunate woman, his wife, in a cage, also represented for me, and I knew it, a powerful sexuality from which I fled inwardly, but then inevitably turned towards. I knew by instinct that if I went to bed with George I’d learn a sexuality that I hadn’t come anywhere near yet. And with all these attitudes and emotions conflicting in me, I still liked him, indeed loved him, quite simply, as a human being. I sat there on the verandah, unable to speak for a while, knowing that my face was flushed and my hands trembling. And I listened to the music and the singing from the big room up the hill and I felt as if George were excluding me by the pressure of his unhappiness from something unbelievably sweet and lovely. At that time it seemed I spent half my life believing I was being excluded from this beautiful thing; and yet I knew with my intelligence that it was nonsense - that Maryrose, for instance, envied me because she believed Willi and I had everything she wanted - she believed we were two people who loved each other.
Willi had been looking at me, and now he said: ‘Anna is shocked because the woman is black.’
‘That’s part of it,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised that I do feel like that though.’
‘I’m surprised you admit it,’ said Willi, coldly, and his spectacles flashed.
‘I’m surprised you don’t,’ said George to Willi. ‘Come off it. You’re such a bloody hypocrite.’ And Willi lifted his grammars and set them ready on his knee.
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About
The Golden Notebook is a collaboration between if:book London and Apt.
Principal funding by Arts Council England.
HarperCollins, the publisher of The Golden Notebook, digitized the book for us and generously gave permission to reproduce it here in its entirety at no cost.
Additional support from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and New York University
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Laura Kipnis November 17th, 2008 at 4:13 am
Anna is frequently surprised by her emotions and responses to things, especially by the way that her private responses lag behind both her politics and her intellect; surprised by her hatreds and resentments, especially by her own sexuality. Sexuality refuses to conform to “emancipation.”
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Nona Willis Aronowitz November 20th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Yes, this is true of Anna’s sexuality but also more strikingly of her attitudes about race. She “resented the fact that the woman was black” and then felt “ashamed and angry” because she had “imagined [her]self free of any such emotion.” This to me speaks a truism not only of Anna but how racism works and is perpetuated. Taboo race thoughts produce shame and guilt in progressive people who would like to think they are above prejudice. It was true then and it’s true now.
So yes, Anna is surprised at her own hatred. But I think Lessing is making a comment generally about how personal bias and colonial tradition can permeate politically radical culture beyond anyone’s comfort level. Willi says he is surprised Anna admits to being “shocked” (to use a euphemism). This shows us, if anything, Anna’s self-awareness and lack of denial–her ability to be explicitly angry at her private feelings.
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Naomi Alderman November 19th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
“I knew by instinct that if I went to bed with George I’d learn a sexuality that I hadn’t come anywhere near yet.”
I have been chewing this sentence over and over trying to decide what I think of it. Is Lessing telling me something interesting and true about sexuality? My current feeling is, I’m afraid, that she’s not. It reads more like a line from a Mills & Boon (US translation: Harlequin Romance) or James Bond. “She knew if she went to bed with him, she’d learn things she’d never dreamed of” etc etc.
Why does Anna not think she would have anything to teach George? Because she and Willi aren’t having sex? Or because she perceives sex as an area in which a man is supposed to demonstrate that he has more ‘knowledge’ than a woman - either technical, or in terms of instinct and raw desire as seems to be the case with George?
I’d be really glad for someone to tell me another way to think about this line, but at the moment I’m rolling my eyes at it and considering it - like Anna’s attitude toward homosexuality - as a (rare) sign of the book’s age.
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Lenelle Moïse November 25th, 2008 at 1:36 am
Dare I suggest that Anna’s “instinct” that George’s sexuality is so intensely beyond her own is related to the fact that he chooses black lovers? In the Western world, blackness has always been stereotypically yoked to hypersexuality and–even in females–hypermasculinity. After all, in this passage, Anna admits her racism (which she genteelly calls resentment). Her fear of/desire for George seems to reflect her fear of/desire for Africa. George exploits/indulges in Africa sexually while Anna and the Colony Crew exploit/indulge in Africa as mere tourists. Her comrades righteously sound off about “the color line” and fantasize about teaching African workers how to revolt against it but, at this point in the novel, they don’t seem to engage with the Africans around them in any real, intimate, human way. In contrast, via his illicit, ongoing relationship with Marie (and subsequent siring of her biracial child), George gets closer to blackness than any of them dare. His “forbidden love” is corrupted by power, guilt and hypocrisy but there is an undeniably human exchange between George and Marie: basic, consensual sex.
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Naomi Alderman November 25th, 2008 at 5:17 am
Lenelle, I’m sure you’re right; thank you for making this point. It occurs to me also that Marie is almost invisible in the narrative. You’ve pointed out that we don’t know what she looks like. We don’t, I think, see her interact with anyone in the novel, even her husband or George. It’s interesting; Lessing/Anna makes a point of seeming fearless in portraying the hypocrisies and ugliness of her group of characters. But she doesn’t even give Marie a single scene, a few lines of dialogue. (Unless I’ve missed something….) What does she get out of the relationship with George? How does she feel about her husband? Or about Mrs Boothby? Thank you so much for pointing this out: the more I think about it the more I find the absence of Marie really disconcerting, a hole at the heart of the book.
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Harriet Rubin November 20th, 2008 at 3:38 am
This line–Anna’s belief that a romp with George could teach her something uncanny–also stopped me in my tracks. It is desperately symptomatic of how lost Anna is at this stage in the novel and her own notebook journey. She also believes there is a better politics, not just a better form of sex.
Why do women keep believing that there is a superior knowledge, and that men have it? I once went to one of the great men of my profession, literally sat at his feet while he stood to speak, and he farted in my ear. I think Lessing is being ironic in this statement about George, but Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal, is an entire novel built on the “truth” of this statement.
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Laura Kipnis November 20th, 2008 at 5:52 am
I’m not really sure she’s being ironic. I think she’s a believer in heterosexual sex and women’s desire for men in a deep way–on the one hand her women desire freedom but they desire men, and are flummoxed by their desire for men, and can’t be free because they’re completely unclear about what they want from men. They’re ironic ABOUT men as a way of diminishing (or trying to) the hold men have over them, and the potential for injury, but it doesn’t work to lessen the attachment.
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