A Study Of Alienation In The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing (1919-) is regarded as one of the most important female novelists in the twentieth century and she won Noble Prizes for literature at the age of87in2007. The Grass Is Singing finished in1950, is Lessing’s first novel. This paper will analyze this novel’s alienation by ways of Erich Fromm’s theory concerning alienation and illustrate people’s alienation for escaping from insignificance and loneliness in the colony.Fromm focuses on the relationship between individual and society. He believes that man is born with insignificance which increases with man’s growing individuality and an insane society will aggravate man’s powerlessness which will force man to abandon himself and succumb himself to the outside authority. As a result, he will be absolutely alienated. Fromm introduces Freud’s human drive and Max’s labor alienation and advances that social conditions have a decisive impact on social character. Moreover he emphasizes man’s dynamic and man’s alienated psychological mechanisms when individual character can not comply with social conditions and social character. Accordingly, this paper firstly analyzes the alienation of social conditions in Southern Rhodesia:the white community’s superiority, the colonial economy and its patriarchal family, which jointly lead to the exploitative social character; then it demonstrates individual’s alienation in order to obtain mental security by succumbing himself to the authority. The white community’s ecstasy for the superiority, Charlie Slatter’s ecstasy for material success and the Turners’confusion with marriage display their psychological mechanisms such as automaton conformity, destructiveness and authoritarianism respectively. However, their escape doesn’t bring tranquil soul for them but in turn aggravates their own alienation and alienation of the society.This paper comes to the conclusion that human nature’s alienation is an unavoidable tragedy in an alienated society. It further points that the human beings’ absolute alienation will in turn lead to the society’s devastation and warns that only to satisfy man’s psychology and potential ability can a society develop in a health way.