A Divided Self—a Laingian Study Of Mary Turner In The Grass Is Singing

British writer Doris Lessing wrote novels covering a wide range of themes, among which mental breakdown is a frequently recurrent one. Mary Turner, the protagonist of The Grass Is Singing experiences a process of mental breakdown that echoes the existential psychological theory of schizophrenia introduced by R. D. Laing, a distinguished modern psychiatrist and psychologist.Liang points out that people live in the world and contact with others, and thus share the same existential status of "Being-in-the-world", which exerts great influence on the mental development of the individuals. Mary Turner's status of "Being-in-the-world" left her huge negative influence in the process of her mental development. Specifically, when Mary was young, her disharmonious family environment frustrated her; when she entered the society, she was judged by the conventional opinion on marriage; and when she got married, she still suffered from the unhappy marriage.In the novel, since her childhood, Mary had suffered from what Laing called "ontological insecurity". Mary's sense of insecurity was derived from lacking of parental love and was further fortified by her misplaced sense of "home".Laing remarks that an individual with "ontological insecurity" experiences three forms of anxieties:the anxiety of engulfment, the anxiety of depersonalization and petrification and the anxiety of implosion, a process Mary fit in well. Mary first encountered the anxiety of engulfment. Born to an irresponsible drunk father and a complaining mother, Mary had a bitter childhood. In order not to be engulfed by the distress family environment, Mary launched a defensive mechanism, in which her self was split into "false self" and "inner self". While she retained the "false self" till her thirties, her "inner self" had been submerged into phantasy. The split was intensified when she encountered the anxiety of petrification and depersonalization caused by the fear of losing one's subjectivity. To preserve her subjectivity, Mary petrified herself into "Mary of sixteen", the happiest time of her life despite of her growing age, and meanwhile depersonalized others, especially men, into objects. This method enabled Mary to dress and behave as if she was still sixteen and at the same time get along well with people around her. However, when she overheard friends'gossiping on her not getting married at such an old age, she felt "hollow" inside because her repressed "inner self" has deprived her of the ability to face the reality. The reality became implosive to her. At this point, Mary experienced the anxiety of implosion. To overcome the anxiety and to cater for the social convention, Mary plunged into marriage with Dick Turner, but the marriage did not save Mary from the anxiety. In the opposite, the inability of Dick and the impossibility of having a child threw Mary, for another time, into the anxiety of implosion, which pushed her to the edge of mental breakdown.Mary could have been saved by her black houseboy Moses who brought aliveness to her life. Mary was attracted by the male power on Moses and felt the fatherly love she failed to have in her childhood. However, by submitting to the collective code, Mary gave up her chance to achieve integration and arrived at mental breakdown.Mary's mental breakdown was as much her own responsibility as the result of the society. The internal cause of her tragedy is the split between her phantasies and the reality, echoing Laing's idea on the internal cause of schizophrenia. As a little girl, Mary phantasized England, a place she had never been to as her home and denied her real home; when stepping into her thirties, she phantasized herself being sixteen and rejected her real age; after getting married, she phantasized she could make a strong man out of her husband but failed. The constant split between Mary's phantasies and the reality triggered and aggravated her self-split, which eventually brought about Mary's mental breakdown. Family and society were two major external factors in the development of schizophrenia for Laing, which were also the external causes of Mary's tragedy. The unhappy family environment left Mary a deep scar in her heart, and triggered her lifetime self split. Entering the society, Mary was fettered by the strict collective code. When Mary found her remedy to achieve integration in a black houseboy Moses, she was forced to choose between collective code and personal feelings. Mary chose to identify with the collective and consequently gave up her chance to be integrated. Moreover, Mary was also a victim of the self-centered community she was in. When Mary was murdered, all the community members kept silent for fear the true story behind the murder would bring disgrace and humiliation to the community.Therefore, this thesis is a study of Mary Turner's process of mental breakdown and its causes from R.D. Laing's theory of schizophrenia. First, Mary's mental breakdown (or the "divided self' in R.D. Laing's theory) is a result of her ontological insecurity, an insecure existential state followed by three forms of anxieties:engulfment, petrification and personalization and implosion; second, Mary's mental breakdown is caused, echoing R. D. Laing's interpretation of the cause of schizophrenia, by internal factor—the split between her phantasies and the reality and external factors like family and society.