Perspectives on Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing: A Postcolonial Reading

Abstract

This paper presents and interprets the study of Doris Lessing's novel, The Grass is Singing (1950) with a theoretical support of the postcolonialism. It reflects a strong psychological study about a frustrated woman and her marital relationship with Dick Turner. Lessing paints a picture of Rhodesian society where she delineates how peasants and black people were treated by their white masters during that 1940s. It does not only focuses on political relationship between the white and the black but also explores phallogocentricism and failure of individuality. It also examines contact zone between Mary Turner, a white farmer's wife and her black African servant where two different cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other. It aims that Mary as the heroine of the novel grasping her own identity due to overpowering colonial rule which is explored by Lessing in the form of violence and brutality. It also presents cross-hatched intersection of gender, class and race along with failed marriage and sexual obsessions.