![]() Mary is fragmented between contradictory statuses: on ne hand she longs to be a subject of her life. ![]() ![]() I attempt to show how Lessing portrays Marys subjectivity as shaped and entangles within the ideological triangle of class, gender and race and how the same sexual and ideological factors, rooted in family and culture, causes failure in Man/ s achieving her own sense of selt and dooms her to death. ![]() On the surface, it seems a psychological and personal portrayal of a female protagonist from childhood to death but seen as a whole, it is the political exposure of the futility and fragility of the patriarchal and colonial society upon which the masculinity of mperialism has sustained itself _ The whole nouel can be seen as Marys struggle towards individuation to preserve her authenticiry and sense of self hut it fails because of the psychological and the political forces which furnish her little insight and threaten to crush her. Lessing wrote two books, one of them at long-hand after returning home to the tamm The other one, in which she made tun otthe white culture, was mannered, This helped her to write about the White culture in Southern Rhodesia in The Grass Is Singing’.Īccording to Ruth Whittaker, one of the readers of Lessings works, his nmvel is “an extraordinary first novel in its assured treatment of its unusual subject Doris Lessing questions the entire values of the Rhodesian white colonial sociem” The nouel reflects its authors disapproval ot sexual and political prejudices and colonialism in The Southern African setting through The life Of Mary Turner and a fatal relationship with their black servant. The author has given the reader a place, an event and a social problem all before her narrative begins. She wants to establish an end point in order to examine the extremely flawed society in which it occurs. It begins with a brief newspaper clipping, suggesting the murder of Mary Turner under the headline ‘Murder Mysrerfl However, it certainly is not a murder mystery as we are told the suspect has confessed the crime and there is no serious effort to nravel the crime. The author chooses to start this novel by the end. Yet, all these houses had men-servants and the White mistresses spoke to them in high, harassed, angry voice. In African culture, for women to tell a man What to do was impossible. It as said that the white mistresses didn’t know how to treat their servants and obviously it was a sex thing. She had treated him like a friend and then started treating him like a servant. It was a violation of the uuhit2 behavior _ But she didn’t behave like a v/mite mistress. example, there was a lady gossiped about in her neighborhood that she allowed her cook-boy to button up the back of her dress and brush her hair. However, Doris knew perfectly well Why he had committed this crime because of her upbringing. none knows vehy and he is waiting to be hanged. She read a newspaper cutting about a white mistress murdered by her black cook. Lessing has written many novels, short stories and tales, drama, poetry and comics of which novels like The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook are the most popular and her xwrks continue to be reprinted Lessing realized that she had quite an amazing life but didn’t know how to attack it when she started riting a book. She is a great female British writer and in October 2007, became the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in its 106-year history, and its Oldest recipient ever. Doris Lessing was born Doris May Tayler in Persia (now Iran) on October 22, 1919. Similar sequences are presented in the book. a civilized, Edwardian life among savages but her father did not, and the thousand-odd acres of bush he had bought failed to yield the promised wealth. In 1925, lured by the promise of getting rich through mai72 farming, the family moved to rhe British colony in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Doris’s mother adapted to the rough life in the settlement, energetically trying to reproduce What was, in her view. 80th of her parents were British: her father, who had been crippled in World War I, was a clerk in the Imperial Bank of Persia her mother had been a nurse. The and, the characters, the farming are all vividly described. The background, location of this story is set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in South Atria which has been drawn from Doris Lessing’s own childhood spent there, Her first hand knowledge Of living on a farm in South Africa shines through in this book. After her body is found, we are taken back to her younger days and slowly discover what happened to her. The story focuses on Mary Turner, the wife of a farmer, who is found murdered on the porch of her home. A Post-colonial Analysis Of Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing The Grass Is Singing, first published in 1950, was an international success.
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