A Study On Alienation In The Grass Is Singing From The Perspective Of Spatial Criticism

British contemporary female writer Doris Lessing is regarded as one of the most important writers after the Second World War by the critics because of her unique artistic styles. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. Depending on her first literary work The Grass Is Singing, she shot to fame. Since its publication, the novel has attracted a great deal of attention from the scholars both at home and abroad. They have made the researches of the novel from various perspectives, such as theme study, character study and so on, and this thesis analyzes the novel from the perspective of spatial theory to explore the cultural phenomenon and characters’ alienation.The French socialist Henry Lefebvre is one of the pioneers of spatial theory. He put forward the social space in his work The Production of Space in 1953. He pointed out social space was produced by spatial practice, representations of space and representational spaces, on the contrary social space affected the behaviors and personal consciousness. This thesis attempts to utilize social spatial theory to analyze The Grass Is Singing, in order to explore the effects on the personal fates by the alienated social ideology and alienated interpersonal relationships in social space and the alienated family relationship in family space and self-alienation in psychological space.In the first place, it analyzes the alienation of three characters Mary, Dick and Moses that represent different classes and sexes from the aspect of social space. Through the analysis, it reveals the conflicts between the poor white and the rich white, the oppression and exploitation of the black in the South Africa and the oppression of women in the patriarchal society. In such kind of social space, the relationships between the rich white and the poor white, between the men and the women, between the white and the black were alienated which twisted the people’s personalities. Family space belongs to social space. In patriarchal society, family space is the main activity space of women. In the second place, this thesis finds out the alienated issues of original family in Mary Turner’s childhood family space. Then it explores the alienation in Mary’s maidenhood family space. At last, it analyzes the alienation in the family space after marriage. It shows the effects on Mary’s personality and fate through the three diverse family spaces during her whole lifetime. At last, the personal psychological space is alienated under the impacts of both social space and family space. Due to the influence of alienation which comes from three different spaces, the psychological spaces of the three representative characters in the novel, Mary, Dick and Moses, collapsed. At last, the lives of the three characters ended up in tragedy.From the spatial analysis of alienation’s effects on human’s fate in The Grass Is Singing, readers can see Doris Lessing’s consideration about the relation between space and fate, her deep concerns over humans’ living status and her criticism on racial discrimination. In the rapid development of modern time, the significance of harmonious space can arouse readers’ reflections on their own situations.