The Golden Notebook

The concern over Tommy—as well as his final, desperate act—symbolizes something amiss in the wider world. When Molly is first looking for him, she says to Anna, “I’m terrified, Anna. Something awful is happening” (259). This comes on the heels of the previous section, wherein Anna pastes newspaper clippings about all the atrocities of the modern world in her blue notebook. While the scenes are separate—Free Women is a novel within the novel, written by the Anna who also keeps the notebooks—they are, at the same time, inseparable, as a part of the larger novel, The Golden Notebook. When Tommy comes into Anna’s rooms, he peruses the notebooks which the reader of The Golden Notebook has just examined. Thus, there is a continuity between the world in which Anna records contemporary events of the 1950s and the world in which Anna is the protagonist of a novel.

Before the discussion turns directly to the notebooks, Tommy says to Anna that “I’m suffering from a paralysis of the will” (262). The phrase—which he says he plucked out of “one of the madness books” (262)—reverberates throughout the novel. Anna herself is suffering from writer’s block, whether she wants to admit it to her therapist or not. Ella, in The Shadow of the Third, is also strangely passive in the face of her married lover’s inability to commit. She allows herself to be happy by not thinking about the future. Everyone appears to be trapped in patterns that no longer serve them well.

When Tommy questions Anna about the notebooks, she is unable to explain with much clarity as to why she feels the need to keep four separate notebooks. She tells him that keeping one notebook “would be such a—scramble. Such a mess” (266). Tommy’s response, “Why shouldn’t it be a mess?” (266), reveals a kind of innocent wisdom. While Anna tries to keep the chaos of the world, of her own identity, at bay, Tommy recognizes that chaos is inherent to living—though this is what drives him to attempt suicide. He cannot reconcile the brutality of the world, the amorality of events with any sense of hope for the future. Anna, for all her disintegration, still believes in her bruised ideals, that one can dream for a better world.

Marion functions as a counterpoint to Anna. While Anna is dissatisfied with her life, she is not trapped as Marion is. At first, though, she pushes back against Marion’s suggestion that she is free: “Marion, I’d like to be married. I don’t like living like this” (279). Yet, just a few paragraphs later, after listening to Marion’s small-minded conventionality, Anna reverses course: “She thought: It might be a strain, living as I do, but at least I don’t live with people like Marion and Richard” (279). There is a cost to her freedom, which is loneliness, but it is better than settling for the conventional marriage. Marion is trapped in her role as the long-suffering wife, while Anna is busily working on how to foster her own, unconventional identity.

The telephone at the beginning of the second part of Free Women goes off like an alarm, foreshadowing the final telephone ring with the news of Tommy’s suicide attempt. First, “the telephone rang once and then stopped” (281). Shortly thereafter, “the telephone rang again and kept on ringing” (281). The klaxon call of the phone is reminiscent of the air raid sirens that regularly sounded in London during the war, warning citizens to hunker underground. There is a short warning ring, followed by an insistent urgency, announcing that catastrophe is imminent.