Reds & Whites

"'Oh go on,' said Molly, as she disappeared with her white bowl of red fruit."--
Ostensibly a simple sentence. So what makes me want to read into the chroma-collision here? Is it because Women in Love conditioned me to over-analyze color dichotomies? Almost definitely. But even so, I think there's real insight to be gained by thinking about how descriptions of color operate in The Golden Notebook. So far, red and white feature prominently in several of the (somewhat rare) sensory descriptions. Considering that Anna's specifically red notebook is given over to her reflections about communism (which makes sense in relation to the Red Army), it seems safe to assume that Lessing employs redness, in part, as a symbol for communism. It is not a leap then, to equate whiteness with the White Army (anti-communist/imperialist forces who fought the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War), and by extension, the consumerist system Anna can't quite seem to escape.

One passage in particular seems to benefit from this interpretive lens. The first, on pg. 13, which reads: "'With strawberries, wine, obviously,' said Anna greedily; and moved the spoon about among the fruit, feeling its soft resistance, and the slipperiness of the cream under a gritty crust of sugar. Molly swiftly filled glasses with wine and set them on the white sill. The sunlight crystallized beside each glass on the white paint...the two women sat...looking at the colours of the fruit in the bright bowls and at the red wine. [italics are mine]" There's a lot to unpack here. Strawberries and wine, both red, are luxuries. We get the sense that the Anna's former comrades are the sort of "high-living lefts" (56) for whom communism is fashionable, a luxury of the intellectual who can afford to spend all day talking about the workers' plight at Party meetings and book-discussions. We might also associate the intoxicating quality of wine with the "thoughtlessness" (56) of black-notebook-Anna's political idealism. Yet the strawberries are drenched in white cream and contained within white bowls. The wine is juxtaposed against the white sill. Just as Anna and Molly find themselves unwillingly complicit in a society of conspicuous consumption, reds are surrounded and adulterated by whites.