The Golden Notebook

Mrs. Marks, the psychoanalyst, is both a symbol of Anna’s subconscious and a motif representing the pervasiveness of Freudian analysis in Anna’s social environment. On the one hand, she serves as a constant reminder of Anna’s fragmented self, her inability to form a cohesive identity that will allow her to write again. On the other hand, she is representative of the many “isms” which litter the 20th century: communism, fascism, Freudianism (it is no accident that her name is Mrs. Marks—as in Karl Marx). These are ideologies that no longer serve to alleviate the pain of the 20th century, riven by war, exile, and alienation. It is telling that Anna ends her sessions with Mrs. Marks by the time she reaches the liberation of the golden notebook, wherein her identity becomes integrated.

The nickname that Anna and Molly give their analyst, Mother Sugar, also speaks to a kind of infantilizing presence; Mrs. Marks, or Mother Sugar, is akin to the sugar teats given to infants in order to soothe their cries. She applies definitions to the alienation that both Anna and Molly feel, as “free women” in a newly emerging era: “That they were both ‘insecure’ and ‘unrooted,’ words which dated from the era of Mother Sugar, they both freely acknowledged” (10).