Uzbekistan state university of world languages faculty of translation

III.CONCLUSION
Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, and The Four-Gated City trace in detail the growth and development of Martha Quest, an autobiographical character who, unlike Mary Turner, is intensely interested in knowing herself and making sense of the world. Together these novels make up the Children of Violence series. The first four are set in Africa, while The Four-Gated City, which nearly equals in length the preceding four, is set in London and traces Martha Quest’s life from her arrival there around 1949 to the late 1990’s. The novels set in Africa are categorized as social realism, while The Four-Gated City moves beyond that to discuss what are often considered paranormal capacities, and the work concludes after some unspecified disaster has destroyed much of life on earth. The futurist world Lessing depicts here is neither entirely utopian nor dystopian, and despite forces beyond the control of the individual, Martha Quest and some of the other inhabitants of the postcatastrophic world epitomize the continuing need for individual responsibility and commitment to a more harmonious world.
Martha Quest, as her surname suggests, is a quintessential Lessing heroine, always examining the human condition and searching for a higher consciousness to change herself and her world. The characterization is detailed and frank, including descriptions of Martha’s sexual relationships and, in A Proper Marriage, a lengthy and explicit description of childbirth. Yet Martha’s perceptions and innermost thoughts also provide a historical overview of an entire era and a challenge to the status quo. Central to all Martha’s struggles is her determination to grow and to envision a freer and more responsible world.

The Children of Violence Series

Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, and The Four-Gated City trace in detail the growth and development of Martha Quest, an autobiographical character who, unlike Mary Turner, is intensely interested in knowing herself and making sense of the world. Together these novels make up the Children of Violence series. The first four are set in Africa, while The Four-Gated City, which nearly equals in length the preceding four, is set in London and traces Martha Quest’s life from her arrival there around 1949 to the late 1990’s. The novels set in Africa are categorized as social realism, while The Four-Gated City moves beyond that to discuss what are often considered paranormal capacities, and the work concludes after some unspecified disaster has destroyed much of life on earth. The futurist world Lessing depicts here is neither entirely utopian nor dystopian, and despite forces beyond the control of the individual, Martha Quest and some of the other inhabitants of the postcatastrophic world epitomize the continuing need for individual responsibility and commitment to a more harmonious world.
Martha Quest, as her surname suggests, is a quintessential Lessing heroine, always examining the human condition and searching for a higher consciousness to change herself and her world. The characterization is detailed and frank, including descriptions of Martha’s sexual relationships and, in A Proper Marriage, a lengthy and explicit description of childbirth. Yet Martha’s perceptions and innermost thoughts also provide a historical overview of an entire era and a challenge to the status quo. Central to all Martha’s struggles is her determination to grow and to envision a freer and more responsible world.

The Golden Notebook

It is good to note that Lessing interrupted the writing of the Children of Violence series to work on The Golden Notebook, published in 1962 and generally acknowledged as her most impressive and influential novel. “The two women were alone in the London flat,” begins the long novel, and from this simple statement Lessing creates a fascinating portrait of the modern world. The protagonist is Anna Wulf, a writer who says that she is suffering from writer’s block after a successful first novel about racial problems in Africa. Anna’s friend Molly is a divorced mother trying to make a life for herself. Through them Lessing perceptively examines the problems of the intelligent and disillusioned modern woman. Anna tries to create order out of chaos by keeping a diary, which she divides into four notebooks: a black notebook recounting her experiences as a young woman in Africa; a red notebook for her Communist and political activities; a yellow notebook, which includes her fictional attempts to understand herself, including the creation of an autobiographical character named Ella, who is also writing a novel; and a blue notebook to record the factual details of her daily life and her relationships with men. Sections of these notebooks are repeated sequentially four times and are finally superseded by another notebook, the golden one of the novel’s title, in which Anna attempts to integrate these compartmentalized and often-conflicting aspects of her life. In the golden notebook section, influenced by the mental breakdown of one of her lovers, Saul Green, Anna goes through layers of madness in herself and questions the idea of reality itself.
The shape of this pivotal metafictional novel is further complicated by sections called “Free Women,” which open and close the book as well as separate the repeated sections of the black, red, yellow, and blue notebooks. The five “Free Women” sections together form a conventional novel about sixty thousand words long. Although it deals with the same characters and events recounted in the various notebook sections, it does so in a reductive and more structured way. It is as though the “Free Women” novel were what Anna is able to produce to end her writer’s block, but a novel that shows that fiction is unable to capture the intricacies and complexities of actual existence. Since the sections of this conventional novel frame and appear throughout the larger work, the contrasts and variations with the notebook sections make The Golden Notebook as a whole a complex structural and stylistic achievement. While The Golden Notebook elaborates Lessing’s attitudes toward racism, sexism, and the interconnections between the personal and the political, it also shows the development of Lessing’s thinking to include the benefits of the irrational and the necessity of exploring areas beyond the layers of social pretense and conventionality. These areas are further addressed in The Four-Gated City and in three subsequent novels, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer Before the Dark, and The Memoirs of a Survivor. Each of these novels breaks from traditional versions of realism and insists upon a wider definition of the possible.