The Grass Is Singing
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| Author | Doris Lessing |
|---|---|
| Publisher | |
| Released | 1950 |
The Grass is Singing is a book by Doris Lessing published in 1950.
[edit] Synopsis
A notable analysis of the colonial experience, it tells the story of a lonely and desiccated Rhodesian white woman, Mary, who marries a white farmer working in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Dick Turner, after a perfunctory courtship. Brutalised and emotionally empty due to an unhappy upbringing, Mary is wholly unsuited to marriage and the hardships that go with working on a small farm in the veldt. As her relationship with the decent and gentle, but fundamentally weak, Dick deteriorates and the fortunes of the farm decline due to Dick's incompetence, she veers from an almost hysterical racism to an illicit and ultimately destructive sexual relationship with one of the black Rhodesian farm workers.
[edit] Analysis and Impact on Literature
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. Written in a relentless but devastatingly powerful prose, 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. The novel is peppered with passages of startling and shocking honesty about the fault-lines in the white psyche.
