The Inferior As Scapegoats In The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing,a great female writer after Virginia Woolf,presents in her works her concern for social issues and the scrutiny of a divided civilization.This thesis takes The Grass Is Singing as the object of study,which records the lived experience and mental state of the colonizers and the colonized,the rulers and the inferior,and discloses the hypocrisy of the white supremacy and the evil of colonialism.The thesis adopts Rene Girard's theory of Scapegoat,focusing on mimetic desire,mimetic crisis,scapegoat mechanism,and violence and salvation,to explore the inferior scapegoats represented by the heroin Mary Turner and the black Moses.Chapter One analyzes the individual's mimetic desires in The Grass Is Singing.According to Girard,subject's desire for the object derives from his imitation of the mediator,s,not spontaneously from the object itself.Imprisoned in the patriarchal institution,the heroine Mary desires for independence and power,desires inspired by her imitation of white men by means of being employed and dealing with the natives.While the native Moses,living at the bottom of the racial society,desires for identity construction,his desire derives from the imitation of white colonizers by using English and reestablishing masculinities.Chapter Two discusses the mimetic crisis and scapegoat mechanism in the novel.Halfway of his imitation,the subject will find that the model is an obstacle in his way of obtaining the object.Then the relationship between them becomes rivalrous,which will lead to a general malaise and mimetic crisis.Confronted with crisis and tension,the collective is prone to choose a scapegoat to pacify the tension.In the colonial society with declining masculinity,Mary is chosen as a scapegoat because of her madness and Moses for his being half-civilization.As the marginalized inferiors,they are deprived of voice,and their voicelessness is regarded as their confession of the collective accusation.Chapter Three examines the violence and salvation through the scapegoat mechanism.The silent judge of Mary's murder case by the white community is a representation of collective violence to the scapegoats,transferring evil to scapegoats by means of displaced investigation priority and telepathy-like reticent detestation.Mary's death brings salvation of white dignity and makes Tony realize the hypocrisy of white civilization.Moses's death implies a final success of the natives' resistance against colonialism.This thesis concludes that The Grass Is Singing is a text of persecution in accordance with Girard's classification.The inferior characters should not be simply labeled as tragic but should be thought of as innocent scapegoats sacrificed for social evils.Through a description of the persecution of the inferior scapegoats,Lessing discloses the indifference and hypocrisy of the white civilization.