What Picture of Social Life Do You Get in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing?

Picture of Social Life in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing

Doris Lessing, a Nobel laureate and a great British novelist grew up in South Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe and had a first-hand experience of apartheid system on the continent. In her first book, The Grass is Singing, she established herself as a superb psychologist of a female psyche and a social critic. The novel deals with a strange, foreboding universe of the 1940s colonial Rhodesia which is composed of miles of expanding bush country, sparsely populated by white farmer owners and black farm laborers. The land suffers from colonial exploitation, racial conflicts, poverty and ignorance. There is silent contempt between the races. The white masters have their contempt for their servant’s lazy barbaric ways and the black servants for their master’s brutality, cruelty and oppression that depress the reader very much.

 

The Grass is Singing is a bleak and terrifying analysis of a failed marriage, the febrile neurosis of white sexuality and the fear of black power and energy that Lessing saw as underlying the white colonial experience of Africa. The novel’s treatment of the tragic decline of Mary and Dick Turner’s fortunes becomes a metaphor for the whole white presence in Africa. It is a serious study of the moral collapse of a woman and this moral degeneration comes to represent the fall of white rule in Africa as well as an exploration of that seeming eternal quarrel of dividers-race, nationality, gender and class.

The opening chapter of this novel reaches further into the future than any later chapter. We are introduced to Tony Marston, a young Englishman who has been in Rhodesia for only three weeks. Working with Dick, he is shocked at the sinister casual racism of the white Rhodesian. ‘His ideas of right’, fostered in Britain, ‘were upset’. He is assured time and again, though, that once he gets to know the country al little more, he will ‘get used to our ideas about the natives’. And so he does.

However, on analysis we find two particular threads to this book. One is psychological- it looks at the mental suffering of a human being pushed to the limits of his/her ability, particularly when without friends with whom to share problems. The other thread is racism. Mary has been brought up to despise native Africans and her constant proximity to the servants puts her in a real dilemma.

Thus, The Grass is Singing is a critical portrayal of a decadent society where the moral degeneracy grows proportionately with the level of misery its proponents are experiencing.