A Study Of The Grass Is Singing From The Perspective Of Feminist Narratology

Doris Lessing is a famous English female writer with the representative work of GoldenNotebook. She is known as the greatest female writer after Virginia Woolf and the winner ofthe Nobel Prize in literature in2007. Her style of works has unique and varied characteristicswith deep thoughts. Most of Lessing’s works are defined as feminine literature, but herunique style and incisive language make her be different from other sensitive feminineliterature. The publication of Doris Lessing’s first novel raises her to fame. Her early worksexpose her sympathy on the miserable life of the local black people and contempt towardsracism, which leads Rhodesia and the South African government to put her on the list ofunwelcome person. In The Grass Is Singing, Doris Lessing depicts the living condition offemale in colonized society in detail.This thesis analyses Doris Lessing’s her first novel The Grass Is Singing from theperspective of Feminist Narratology represented by Susan Sniader Lanser. It introduces theorigin and development of feminist narratology theory and the features of the classicalnarratology and feminism criticism to figure out the characteristics of feminist narratology.This paper integrates Doris Lessing’s feminist views and narrative space, etc to analyze thenovel in terms of mainly narrative voice and narrative perspective. Besides, it utilizes thefree indirect speech and indirect interior monologue initiated by feminist narratology todepict the narrator’s voice and authorial voice of female and male characters’ in detail.Moreover, the awakening of female self-consciousness in The Grass Is Singing has beenembodied.This thesis takes advantage of Genette’s classification of three kinds of focalization andstarts from the narrative perspective to discuss the application of omniscient narrativefocalization and characters’ limited focalization. It combines Lessing’s flexible techniques ofnarrative perspectives shift to explore the variation of narrative space and narrator’srecessive comments in the novel. Meanwhile, the identity construction process of femalecharacter and the analysis of female fate have been presented to readers through Lessing’sfeminist narrative focalization. By means of the above two aspects on the analysis of The Grass Is Singing, the thesis makesa conclusion on Doris Lessing’s sympathy on the black people’s miserable life in colonizedsociety and the admiration on female’s effort to pursue the awakening of self-consciousnessand the self-identity. Lessing advocates females to retain a bisexual harmonious relationshipin the society and be independent economically and mentally. It also presents Lessing’s hopeof establishing a country without the difference of race and gender. On the whole, the thesisdiscusses how Doris Lessing builds her narrative authority and the narrative characteristicsin the novel The Grass Is Singing from the perspective of Feminist Narratology in terms ofnarrative voice and narrative perspective and so on. Sequentially draw a conclusion ofLessing’s narrative characteristics which is the integration of ingenious narrative techniquesand collision of ideas. The novel has reflected the awakening of female consciousness inpatriarchal society to all the readers.