Split Behind The Dilemma

The Grass is Singing is Doris Lessing’s first novel taken Africa as background.It receives wide attention as soon as it is published for its vivid and overalldescription of colonial life. Through a meticulous depiction of Mary Turner’s livingbackground and personality development, Lessing presents us a clear view of thecolonial life, thus revealing the brutal oppression of colonization and the living crisisof the white settlers. Under the guidance of Marx’s dialectic view and Fromm’s viewabout personality development, this thesis is proposed to analyze the essential reasonbehind Mary’s living background (external cause) and her psychological growth anddevelopment (inner cause), thus achieving the conclusion: only when a person isdeveloping in accordance with the society and the external world, can he achieve thebalance and sanity between his personality development and the external world.Otherwise, he will suffer from the disaster of spirit chaos and split.The paper consists of three chapters. Chapter one gives an introduction to theliving environment of the heroine, Mary Turner and analyzes Mary’s confused andfrustrating situation under the pressure of impoverishment and racial discrimination.Chapter two is proposed to reveal the inner cause of Mary’s tragedy and conductspsychoanalysis on Mary based on her traumatic childhood, unhappy marital life andcontradictory relationship with Moses thus pointing out that a false social character isthe remote cause of Mary’s twisted psychological development and spiritual split.Chapter three focuses on the combined action of the indifferent social context andfalse self system. It deprives Mary’s self-knowledge of pushes her to spiritual splitand schizophrenia and final destroy.The conclusion part proposes that human beings are the output of certain socialsystem and ideology, thus only when individual psychological development goes accordant with the social circumstances he lives in without loss of self-knowledgecan he achieve integrate personality development.