Fettered In The Prison Of Otherness-an Analysis Of Mary’s Tragedy In The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing, the2007Nobel Prize winner for literature, is one of the mostoutstanding and productive writers in the twentieth century. The Grass is Singing isher first important novel. The novel tells a tragic story about the white woman MaryTurner in the colonial South Africa. It starts with her murder by the black nativeMoses and then exposes in flashback Mary’s life experiences from her bitterchildhood to her suffering marriage.This thesis will probe into the Otherness of the novel to analyze the socialreasons in race and gender that account for Mary’s tragic death from the post-colonialand feminist perspectives. Edward Said’s conceptions of Otherness in Orientalism andSimon de Beauvoir’s discussion of the woman Other are employed in the thesis.Michel Foucault’s disciplinary power theory is also applied as theoretical support.Apart from the introduction and the conclusion, the main body of the thesis canbe divided into three parts. Chapter Two explores Mary’s identification with theOccident Self, which alienates her away from Moses due to her racist prejudices andher fear of the native’s destroying capabilities on the mysterious African land. ChapterThree analyzes Mary’s emotional and sexual repression as the woman Other withinthe patriarchal cultures of the settler’s community. Mary’s deep repression makes ithard for her to resist the attraction of the caring and masculine Moses. In ChapterFour, the paper deals with Mary’s struggle between her Occident Self and her naturalself desires, which leads to her mental disintegration and invites her final tragic death.