An Ecofeminist Reading Of The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing (1919-) is a prominent and prolific British woman novelist in the 20th century. She is renowned for her large number of works with a great variety of topics and various forms and styles. Her fiction is deeply autobiographical, much of it emerging out of her own experiences in Africa. Her first novel The Grass Is Singing was published in 1950 and subsequently won her world fame and praise thereafter. The novel depicts the destructive exploitation of the land by the colonists and the tragic destiny of the blacks and women. This dissertation is an attempt to read this novel from the aspect of ecofeminism and to reveal its ecological meaning that scattered in the novel. It also reveals the author's profound reflection on the relationship between male and female, and the racial inequality.The essay consists of an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion.The introduction gives a brief summary of Doris Lessing and The Grass Is Singing's status in British literature, the basic contents of the novel, and the literature review of current studies on it. Furthermore, it also introduces the main points of ecofeminist theory. As a suggestive and open system, ecofeminism has close interconnection with other disciplines such as ecology, feminism and so on. Ecofeminism can be the key to harmony, sustainability, and diversity in the age of modern science and technology. Ecofeminism advocates mutual love, care and respect for each other and insists on abandoning the hypothesis that men are superior to women. It also highlights the importance of nature as well as the friendship and value of different races.Chapter One focuses on the relationship between men and nature. Ecofeminists advocate a biocentric worldview, respecting nature and all forms of life. They highlight the association of women with nature and earth, and hold that patriarchy is the root cause of men's oppression of nature. Nature is often raped, conquered and controlled by men. In the novel the rapacious white settlers came to South Africa with the intention of conquering everything in the colony. The representatives of these white settlers are Charlie Slatter and Dick Turner. Their exploitation and deforestation destroyed the local ecosystem beyond imagination and both of them received their deserved punishment from nature. Chapter Two analyzes the unbalanced male and female relationship in the novel. Ecofeminists regard the patriarchy is also the root cause of disharmonious relationship between men and women. In the male—dominated society, women, like nature, have always been in a submissive or even oppressed position. Mary is a typical tragic female destroyed by the patriarchal society.Chapter Three focuses on the relationship between different races. Ecofeminists hold that patriarchal ideology is not only the root cause of men's oppression over nature and women, it is also the conceptual root of racial inequality between the whites and the blacks. The white colonists drive the blacks out of their land and they treat the native blacks cruelly. The increasingly serious contradictions between the whites and the blacks were an important element that brought South Africa into a spiritual ecocrisis.On the basis of the three chapters we can conclude that the colonists'ruthless exploitation of the land brought serious ecological crisis to South Africa and the unbalanced male-female relationship as well as the racial inequality brought serious spiritual ecocrisis to South Africa. The tragedy of the British colonists has inspired us to reconsider our contemporary mode of thinking and living as well as to build a harmonious world with all the living things on the earth.