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Form Versus Chaos Essay

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Form Versus Chaos

We are all acute schizophrenics. Consider Anna in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: Anna as mother, Anna as activist, Anna as writer, and Anna as lover combine to produce an Anna more complete than each individual element. Alone, each component breaks down the entirity of Anna, in a process of self-alienation. We, too, are an amalgamation of our experiences and multiple personalities, yet to deny any part of ourselves, even the fragments, is to deny our entire being. Seduced by anarchy in a world where “everything’s cracking up,” we must find our own truth, a balance between our fragmentation and the totality of our existence (1).

As in Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper,” an inert, threatening madness lurks …show more content…

The self is dwarfed by the imposition of an alter-reality—it is the constant self-reflective cogito imposed on us by the Other that alienates us from thetic self-consciousness. Imprisoned in the Other’s gaze, I am the product of not only my own experiences, but also of my fellow man’s, each of us responsible for all humanity—we are “half victim and half accomplice, like everybody else” (Sartre DH 184).
The Other not only imposes an arbitrary judgment on each character, but also reduces the private consciousness. Lessing suggests in her essay, “A Small Personal Voice,“ that “there is a terrible gap between the public and the private conscience, and that until we bridge it we will never be safe from the murderous madman or the anonymous technician” (10). The ideal, a harmony between the collective conscience and the inner self, is to not lose personal freedom under the of society. The opposite occurs in Sartre’s play “No Exit”—each character is partially illusioned from specific reality, in other words, his or her private conscience, as the collective conscience closes upon the individual. It is similar to what George Hounslow recognizes as “the gap between what I believe

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