A Study Of The Tragic Characters In The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing(1919-), one of the most important contemporary British writers, isalso called a great female writer after Virginia Woolf. She is not only of long lifespan,but also of productive writing career. During her long writing career, she has beenchanging different writing styles. But there is a thing kept unchanged which is herconstant concern for society. British literature tradition, especially twenty century’srealism tradition and writing techniques, is her life-long creating base. The Grass isSinging is such a novel written in Lessing’s early life reflecting realistic subject inSouth Africa.The Grass is Singing tells a story of a woman named Mary who can not find theright position under the double shackles’ oppression of both western colonization andmale-domination. She is dominated by her husband at home and pushed aside by thewhite society because she is a woman. As a result, her inside world gradually losesbalance and becomes insane. Besides, the novel describes a humanistic black namedMoses who seeks for his identity. Though his action fails in the end, his subversionpotential foretells the collapse of European colonization. Furthermore, the noveldepicts different classes struggling fiercely inside the white society. The rich whitesare the superiors who exploit the poor whites, which reflects the coming ending ofcolonization. The whole novel conveys Lessing’s deeply concern about the whitewoman’s living predicament under the colonization, sympathy for oppressed SouthAfricans and strongly condemning for European colonization.The thesis holds that all the characters in The Grass is Singing are tragic people.In order to reveal the social causes of the characters’ tragic fortune more deeply andexactly, the thesis tries to analyze three types of character—the female, the black andthe colonizer—with different literature criticism of feminism, post-colonialism andnew-historicism respectively. After analyzing the characters’ tragic fortune, the thesisfinds the following discoveries: firstly, as an example of female, Mary could not liveon her own will in male-dominated society. Before she is married, she does not havethe right to live alone. Married, she loses the right to take a job as an independent person. She becomes her husband’s possession and can not have her own ideas.Mary’s death caused by Moses is not only her personal tragedy but a tragedy of thewhole society. Secondly, Moses, an example of the black, is no longer the host inSouth Africa which has become the colony of the white. They have to be the whitecolonizers’ cheap labor forces and be exploited badly by them. The whitesdiscriminate the blacks. But in The Grass is Singing, the black has a brilliantname--Moses who is the Savior in Western culture. Moses bears Lessing’s sympathyand hope for the black. Moses has such characteristics of kindness, tenderness,cultivation and dignity what most blacks are lack of. Using the Savior Moses in Sijieas the black’s name in the novel conveys Lessing’s attitude towards the black race.She objects race discrimination and thinks the black’s resisting the colonizer to beright. Thirdly, as a white woman, Lessing does not speak for the white colonizer.Inside the white colonizer, there are no solidarity, cooperation, friendship andharmony which are the indispensable elements for a promising country among thewhite. The dominating class of the white makes use of the dominated class andstruggle for their own interests at the cost of other classes’ life. Besides such obviousfailed colonizers as the Dicks and Tonys, the Charlies who seem to be winners in thenovel are also real failed colonizers. After Charlie’s cattle have eaten all the grass onDick’s farm, where does he find more lands for his expand reproduction? So theCharlies are real tragic characters as well.