A Lacanian Interpretation Of Mary’s Psychological Dilemma In The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in2007, is the eleventh winner of the women writers. As one of the most outstanding women writers of Britain, her novels confirm the historic changes taken place since the post WW II, from the exploration on the living status under colonial high-handed policies to the researches on the growth or collapse of the communist belief. Just as her brilliant and colorful life, her novels reflect the real "face" of an era.Jacques Lacan is regarded as the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud. He puts forward the famous theories of the Mirror Stage and the Subject. The Mirror Stage is the foundation of his Subject Theory, which controls the original formation of people’s personality, while the Subject is not an entity but a systematic relationship, being a kind of symbolic construction and grammaticalized structure. As to the Subject Theory, people has to process three orders for the personality development:the Imaginary Order, the Symbolic Order and the Real Order. Lacan clarifies the processes of the occurrence, the development and the alienated of the subject used the discourse of the Oedipus Complex.The thesis consists of three parts. The first part is Introduction, introducing the relevant information such as Lessing and her The Grass Is Singing, Freud theory and Lacan’s theory. The second part is the body, including four chapters. Chapter One talks about Mary’s psychological development in the Mirror Stage, including the shadow of the childhood, the delight of the narcissism and the identity of the self. Chapter Two discusses Mary’s psychological development in the Imaginary Stage from the deception of the illusion, the frustration of the reality, and the desire of the "other". The most important features of this order are imagination and fantasy. Mary has a strong illusion and an unrealistic fantasy on herself and her husband at the beginning of her marriage, but when all the dreams are shattered, she has to follow the registrations of the "Other", undergoing the symbolic castration, establishing the subject of herself and returning to her mother’s way. At this time Mary’s mental development has entered into the Symbolic Order, which is the content of the third Chapter, being composed of the name of the Father, the castration of the desire, and the establishment of the subject. Chapter Four explores Mary in the Real Stage from three aspects: the implication of the dream, the choice of the desire and the split of the subject. It can be said that although Mary’s tragic fate and psychological dilemma have some connection with her inadequate personality, the fatal power pushes her into tragedy is the irreconcilable contradiction between the desire of the imaginary world and that of the symbolic world. Furthermore, Mary’s tragedy is the tragedy of the poor white women in the South Africa at that time.