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My stockings are slightly splashed; I must remember to change them tonight; Michael notices this sort of detail. Now, sitting on the bus, I feel the dull drag at my lower belly. Not bad at all. Good, if this first pang is slight, then it will all be over in a couple of days. Why am I so ungrateful when I suffer so little compared to other women? — Molly, for instance, groaning and complaining in enjoyable suffering for five or six days. I find my mind is on the practical treadmill again, the things I have to do today, this time in connection with the office. Simultaneously I am worrying about this business of being conscious of everything so as to write it down, particularly in connection with my having a period. Because, whereas to me, the fact I am having a period is no more than an entrance into an emotional state, recurring regularly, that is of no particular importance; I know that as soon as I write the word ‘blood’, it will be giving a wrong emphasis, and even to me when I come to read what I’ve written. And so I begin to doubt the value of a day’s recording before I’ve started to record it. I am thinking, I realize, about a major problem of literary style, of tact. For instance, when James Joyce described his man in the act of defecating, it was a shock, shocking. Though it was his intention to rob words of their power to shock. And I read recently in some review, a man said he would be revolted by the description of a woman defecating. I resented this; because of course, what he meant was, he would not like to have that romantic image, a woman, made less romantic. But he was right, for all that. I realize it’s not basically a literary problem at all. For instance, when Molly says to me, with her loud jolly laugh: I’ve got the curse; I have instantly to suppress distaste, even though we are both women; and I begin to be conscious of the possibility of bad smells. Thinking of my reaction to Molly, I forget about my problems of being truthful in writing (which is being truthful about oneself) and I begin to worry: Am I smelling? It is the only smell I know of that I dislike. I don’t mind my own immediate lavatory smells; I like the smell of sex, of sweat, of skin, or hair. But the faintly dubious, essentially stale smell of menstrual blood, I hate. And resent. It is a smell that I feel as strange even to me, an imposition from outside. Not from me. Yet for two days I have to deal with this thing from outside — a bad smell, emanating from me. I realize that all these thoughts would not have been in my head at all had I not set myself to be conscious. A period is something I deal with, without thinking about it particularly, or rather I think of it with a part of my mind that deals with routine problems. It is the same part of my mind that deals with the problem of routine cleanliness. But the idea that I will have to write it down is changing the balance, destroying the truth; so I shut the thoughts of my period out of my mind; making, however, a mental note that as soon as I get to the office I must go to the washroom to make sure there is no smell.
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Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
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2 Comments
Philippa Levine December 1st, 2008 at 10:21 am
I have to think that Lessing was doing something pretty radical in 1962, with this surprisingly lengthy disquisition on menstrual blood and “lavatory smells”. I’m guessing that such material would not have been common then.
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Laura Kipnis December 6th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I thought on reading this how interesting it was that she’s situating her disquisition on menstrual blood in relation to Joyce on defecation–as if she’s announcing the scale of her literary ambitions: to imprint herself on menstruation, or more broadly, the entirety of female experience. Which is every ambitious writer’s secret ambition, I suppose, to imprint yourself on a subject–as Lessing indeed did. And not by accident; you can read a level of calculation in the formal experimentations of the book (and the meta-commentary on the experimentations), which makes the Joyce reference here all the more interesting.
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The Golden Notebook is a collaboration between if:book London and Apt.
Principal funding by Arts Council England.
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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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