The Analysis Of Mary's Tragedy In The Grass Is Singing From The Perspective Of Spatial Criticism

Doris Lessing is the representative of British contemporary women writers in20^th century.Her excellent works have always received widespread academic attention and discussion domestically and overseas.The Grass is Singing is her first novel published in 1950.The novel immediately becomes a hot hit and ranks Lessing among the most gifted English writers of the time.Through depicting Mary's miserable destiny,The Grass is Singing reveals distortion and collapse of humanity under social oppression.This thesis employs Henry Lefebvre's spatial triad theory to probe into influence of social space to character's destiny,revealing the root of Mary's tragedy.This thesis mainly consists of three parts.Chapter One employs representations of space to analyze social factors that contributes to Mary's tragedy.The hierarchical ideology revealed in store divides the black and white people in social classes.The closed racialist social space prevents Mary as a white woman from seeking spiritual sustenance in Moses as a black man.Through the policy of spatial homogenization,the white rulers regard money as the only criterion to measure the value of farms,which results in Mary's unhappy marriage with Dick.Meanwhile,capitalism deprives Dick's ownership of farm through spatial competition,destroying the sole material guarantee that Mary depends on.Store as the major symbol of gender order segregates male and female into different spatial dimensions.Mary is encouraged as well as restrained in the male dominated domestic space to endure gender repression.Chapter Two combines relative theories of representational space to examine Mary's repressed and concealed spatial need,manifesting the gloomy destiny of white women as heterogeneous power under spatial oppression of colonialism.The colonial space of Southern Africa excludes the white people of lower social class,confines women's subjective development and conducts omniscient monitor mechanism of racial discrimination,which represent Mary's distinctive spatial experience of extreme fear,silence and numbness towards store,farm and house.Chapter three applies spatial practice to explore the interior factors of Mary's death.Spatial practice is the only method to meet people's spatial needs.Mary expects oppressive power society to solve her living plight.She stagnates in girlish space,abandons independent space and improperly positions her identity in interracial love,which collectively contribute to her doomed fate.With the three above chapters,the thesis draws the conclusion that the root of Mary's tragedy lies in the exploitation and obliteration of colonial space to heterogeneous culture.As one of the members of heterogeneous group,Mary doesn't face up to her marginalized identity in white community and actively construct differential space.Therefore,she couldn't cast off manipulation of dominant power and acquire spatial freedom and emancipation.