The Grass is Singing

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The Grass Is Singing

Author	Doris Lessing
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Michael Joseph
Publication date	1950
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	N/A

The Grass Is Singing is the first novel, published in 1950, by British Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing. It takes place in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in southern Africa, during the late 1940s and deals with the racial politics between whites and blacks in that country (which was then a British Colony). The novel created a sensation when it was first published and became an instant success in Europe and the United States.

1 Plot summary
2 Title
3 Analysis and impact on literature
4 Adaptations
5 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Mary has a happy and satisfied life as a single white Rhodesian woman. She has a nice job, numerous friends, and values her independence. She decides she wants to get married.

The man she marries after a brief courtship with Dick Robinson(Mr Mike Welch) as a white farmer who has a drinking problem. She moves with him to his farm and supports the house, while Dick manages the labor of the farm. Dick and Mary are somewhat cold and distant from each other, but are committed to their marriage. Dick and Mary live together an apolitical life mired by poverty and lack of money. When Dick gets sick Mary takes over the management of the farm and rages at the incompetence of her husbands farm practice. To Mary the farm exists only to make money while Dick goes about the farming in a more childlish way.

Mary and Dick live a solitary life together. Because of their poverty Dick refuses to bear Mary a child. They do not attend social events, yet are a great topic of interest among their neighbors. Mary feels an intimate connection with the nature around her, though being in general rather unexplorative in nature.

Mary like most Rhodesian woman is overtly racist, believing that whites should be masters over the native blacks. Dick and Mary both often complain about the lack of work ethic among the natives that work on their farm. While Dick is rarely cruel to the slaves that work for them Mary is quite cruel. She treats herself as their mastur and superior. She shows contempt for the natives, and finds them disgusting and animal like. Mary is cross, queenly, and overtly hostile to the many house servants she has over the years. When Mary oversaw the farm lab she was much more repressive than Dick ever was. She works them harder, reduces their break time, and arbitrarily takes money from their pay. Her hatred of natives results in her whipping the face of a slave because he spoke to her in English asking her for water.

The slave she whipped comes to be a very important person in Marys life when he is taken to be a servant in the house and comes unable to replace with someone different. The native slave is named Moses. Mary does not feel fear of her servant Moses but rather large amounts of disgust, repugnance, and avoidance. Often Mary would do all she could to avoid having any social proximity with him.

After many years living on the farm together, the conditions of Dick and Mary are seen to be detoriarating. Mary often goes through depressing spells where she is exhausted of energy and motivation. In her frailty, Mary ends up relying more and more on Moses. As Mary becomes very weak she finds herself being even endeared towards Moses.

On a rare visit from their neighbor Slatter, Mary is seen being carelessly, unthoughtfully kind to Moses. This enrages Slatter. Slatter demands that Mary not to live with that slave as a house servant. Slatter sees himself as defending the values and integrity of the white community.

Slatter uses his charisma and influence to convince Dick to give up ownership of his farm and go on a vacation with his wife. This vacation is to be a sort of convalesence for them. Dick spends his last month on his farm with Tony, who has been hired by Slatter to take over the running of the farm.Tony has good will but and is very superficially cultured, he finds himself having to adapt himself to the racism of the white community.One day Tony sees Moses dressing Mary and is assured Mary and Dick are both quite remorseful and sad about having to give up their life on the farm.

Not wanting to leave the farm Mary talks to Moses and asks her to kill her, to end her life at a certain time on a following day. Which Moses then does. He kills her then waits calmly on an anthill for the native police to come and arrest him.

[edit] Title

The title of this novel is lifted from a line in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This phrase is found on lines 354 and 386 of the poem in the section What the Thunder Said. It is one of the more jubilant and reviving images used in this section dealing with destruction's power over growth.

[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.^{[citation needed]} Written in a relentless but devastatingly powerful prose,^{[citation needed]} 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.

[edit] Adaptations

The book was adapted into a movie in 1981 by a Swedish company. Filmed in Zambia, the film stars John Thaw, Karen Black and John Kani in the lead roles. It is also known under the titles Gräset Sjunger (Swedish) and Killing Heat.