Resistance to Gender Identity in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook

Abstract

Gender identity is defined as social and cultural conception of an individual as a male or a female. This concept is associated with certain gender roles and behaviour in patriarchal societies that want to develop power hierarchy between men and women. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook came into existence as a feminist fiction that bewildered common readers’ mind with its description about free women who were trapped in gender identity like other traditional women of Britain but slowly they resisted their femininity by acquiring social, political and economic equality with men and enjoying divorce and sexual liberty.