From Oppression To Harmony: Analysis Of The Grass Is Singing From The Perspective Of Eco-Feminism

As one of the most distinguished and prolific female writers in Britain, Doris May Lessing has received many distinguished rewards including the Nobel Prize in 2007. Her first work, The Grass Is Singing, published in 1950, takes the colonial South Africa in 1940 s as the background, which describes the white colonists’ extreme destruction to the natural environment in South Africa and displays the miserable fate of women, the blacks, and the poor whites under the oppressions.Various studies have been focused on this novel, including the archetypal interpretation of Mary’s tragedy, the studies on the writing strategies of the novel, and reading the novel from the points of the psychology, feminism, colonialism and ecofeminism. However, previous eco-feminists only focus on the oppressions of nature and women. They neglect the studies on the oppressions of race and class, and the interrelation of oppressions of nature, women, the black and the poor. This paper tends to find the interconnection among the four kinds of oppressions based on the theory of ecofeminism. The analysis covers the four kinds of oppressions respectively reflected in The Grass Is Singing at first, their resistances to the patriarchal ideology and finally their joint wishes of establishing the harmony among nature, women, the black and the poor, and eradicating four kinds of oppressions in South Africa. Through the detailed analysis of the novel with the ecofeminism, the writer of this thesis finds the core of the concord between ecofeminism and the ideas reflected in the novel. Generally speaking, it not only reveals the author’s profound reflection on the interconnection of nature, women, colored people and the poor, but also the deep concern about building a harmonious society only when such four kinds of oppressions are got rid of completely under the patriarchy.