FEMALE DEVELOPMENT IN DORIS LESSING’S TWO MAJOR
NOVELS
by
Ye Meiling
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Professor Li Weiping
Shanghai International Studies University
December 2008
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Li
Weiping, who has constantly inspired me, patiently guided me and indefatigably instructed
me from the drafting of the outline to the completion of this thesis. Without his invaluable
advice and help this thesis would be impossible.
I am also indebted to all the teachers that have instructed me during my study at
Shanghai International Studies University for their inspiring lectures and precious advice.
My thanks also go to my fellow students and friends who have always provided me
with kindly encouragement and generous assistance.
Abstract
Doris May Taylor Lessing (1919.10.22— ) is a prominent and prolific contemporary
British woman writer. During her long writing career she has produced a large number of
works covering a great variety of topics in various forms and styles. Her works which
include novels, short stories, poetry, drama and autobiography have explored such themes
as racism, Marxism, colonialism, feminism and mysticism and demonstrated such forms
and narrative techniques as realism, tragedy, parable and science fiction. Her works have
inspired and influenced numerous writers and readers alike and received wide and
consistent acclaim from the critical community. From the very beginning of her career,
Lessing’s works have been concerned with women’s issues. As she has always been
interested in spiritual growth women’s search for self identity and seeking self-fulfillment
is the crucial theme in her work. The present thesis aims to study her two major novels—
The Grass Is Singing and The Diary of a Good Neighbour from the perspective of female
development.
This paper is divided into four parts. The first part is an introduction which, after a
brief survey of Doris Lessing and her work, mainly states the purpose, task and
significance of the present study. The first chapter elaborates upon Mary’s foiled
development by examining her twisted growth in childhood, her thwarted escape from
marriage and her withdrawal into madness and final death. The second chapter probes into
Jane’s deferred development by analyzing the progress of her transformation from
emotional disengagement to self-discovery and self-deliverance and finally to spiritual
consummation. The narrative techniques and other forms of artistic presentation adopted in
The Grass Is Singing and The Diary of a Good Neighbour are also respectively expounded
in the second and third chapter. The last part is a conclusion which ends the paper with a
summary of all the analyses and arguments of the previous two chapters.
Key words: Doris Lessing; Bildungsroman; spiritual development; maturity; The Grass Is
Singing; The Diary of a Good Neighbour
摘要
多丽丝·莱辛是当今英国文坛上的一位杰出而多产的女作家。在她漫长的写作生
涯中，莱辛创作了大量主题多样，体裁、风格各异的作品。这些作品种类繁多，包括
长篇小说、短篇小说、诗歌、戏剧以及自传；内容丰富，涉及种族主义、马克思主义、殖
民主义、女性主义和神秘主义；形式多样，有现实主义、悲剧、寓言和科幻小说。她的
作品启迪、影响了无数的作家和读者，并且得到评论界广泛和一致的好评。莱辛自始
至终关注女性主题。同时，她一直对精神成长这一主题表现出了浓厚的兴趣。女性自
我身份的寻求和自我价值的实现一直是她作品的一个关键主题。本文旨在从女性成长
主题的角度来研究她的两部主要小说—《青草在歌唱》和《一个好邻居的日记》。
论文分四个部分来进行论证。首先是序言部分，在简单介绍多丽丝·莱辛及其作
品后，主要陈述本研究的目的、任务和意义。第一章通过对《青草在歌唱》的女主人公
玛丽噩梦般的童年，压抑的婚姻以及后来的精神崩溃和死亡的分析和论述揭示了她
在种族主义和男权至上的社会制度的双重压迫下曲折而压抑的成长历程。第二章探索
了《一个好邻居的日记》的女主人公简由精神隔离状态向自我发现和自我拯救转变以
及最终实现精神成长的后发成长历程。另外，莱辛在这两部作品中的叙述技巧以及其
他艺术表现手法在第一、二章中也分别作了详述。最后一部分是结论，总结了前面两
章的分析和论点。
关键词：多丽丝·莱辛；成长小说；精神成长；成熟；《青草在歌唱》；《一个好邻居
的日记》
Contents
Acknowledgements..........................................................................................ii
Abstract...........................................................................................................iii
摘要..................................................................................................................iv
Contents............................................................................................................v
Introduction....................................................................................................vi
Chapter One Mary’s Foiled Development in The Grass Is Singing........xiv
2.1 Twisted Growth in Childhood.....................................................................................xv
2.2 Thwarted Escape from Marriage..............................................................................xvii
2.3 Withdrawal into Madness and Death.........................................................................xix
2.4 Artistic Presentation of Mary’s Development .........................................................xxii
Chapter Two Jane’s Deferred Development in The Diary of a Good
Neighbour.................................................................................................xxviii
3.1 Jane’s Emotional Disengagement............................................................................xxix
3.2 Jane’s Self-Discovery and Self-Deliverance...........................................................xxxi
3.3 Jane’s Spiritual Consummation.............................................................................xxxiv
3.4 Narrative Techniques.............................................................................................xxxvi
Conclusion.................................................................................................xxxix
Bibliography................................................................................................xliii
Introduction
Doris May Taylor Lessing (1919.10.22— ) is one of the most powerful and brilliant
contemporary novelists. Since her first novel The Grass Is Singing was published in 1950
Lessing has written twenty-odd novels, eleven volumes of short stories, six works of
nonfiction, six plays, a volume of poetry and two volumes of autobiographies. In her long
writing career she has traveled from realism through postmodernism, fantasy and science
fiction and then back to realism. In her writing Lessing has demonstrated “a great variety
of narrative techniques and forms, including tragedy, socialist realism, Bildungsroman,
modernist perspectivism, parody, allegory, quest romance, parable, legend and science
fiction saga” (Draine, 1983: Ⅺ). For her extraordinary achievements in literature Lessing
has won various prizes and awards: Somerset Maugham Award in 1954, Booker Prize in
1971, Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1981, Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S.
Foundation Shakespeare Prize in 1982, W. H. Smith Literary Award in 1986, Palermo Prize
in 1987, James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography and Los Angeles Times Book
Prize in 1995, Prince of Austrias Prize in Literature and David Cohen British Literary Prize
in 2001, S. T. Dupont Golden PEN Award in 2002, and Nobel Prize in literature in 2007.
Lessing and her work have tremendously inspired and influenced a lot of writers.
Margaret Drabble describes Lessing as a “touchstone”;A Ellen Brooks praises Lessing’s
portrayal of women as “the most thorough and accurate of any in literature.”B Lisa Alther
reveals, “I could never have started writing novels without having read Doris Lessing’s
books.”C
Lessing’s reputation has also been anchored by the academic community. Her status
as a major literary figure has been confirmed by the formation of a Doris Lessing Society
and by the Modern Language Association, which in December 1984 devoted two sessions
to her work. Her short stories are regularly selected in anthologies and dozen of studies on
Lessing and her works have appeared in recent years. Courses on Lessing’s works have
been introduced into university curriculums.
Lessing’s work has embraced such topics as racism, communism, feminism, Marxism,
psychology and mysticism. She has explored a wide range of important ideas, ideologies
and social issues of the twentieth century. Wide as her interests are the overriding and
recurring concern in Lessing’s works is spiritual growth, especially women’s spiritual
growth. Women’s search for identity is the crucial theme in her work (Whittaker, 1988: 9).
Her Children of Violence series ranks among outstanding samples of female
Bildungsroman (Jost, 1989: 107).D She herself also announced the last book of this series
The Four-Gated City a Bildungsroman: “This book is what the Germans call a
Bildungsroman. We don’t have a word for it. This kind of novel has been out of fashion for
some time. This does not mean that there is anything wrong with this kind of novel” (FGC,
A
Dee Preussner, “Talking with Margaret Drabble,” Modern Fiction Studies 25, no. 4 (1989-90): 568.
Ellen W. Brooks, “The Image of Women in Lessing’s Golden Notebook,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 11
(1973), 101.
C
In conversation with Carey Kaplan and Ellen Cronan Rose, eds. Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival (Athens, Ohio:
Ohio University Press, 1988), 6.
D
François Jost, “Variations of a Species: The ‘Bildungsroman’,” qtd. in Mullane, et al. Ed. Nineteenth-Century Literature
Criticism, Vol. 20 (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989), 107.
B
615). In this five-volume quintet Lessing sketches the totality of Martha Quest’s
progressing from childhood to maturity. Margaret Moan Rowe asserts that The Grass Is
Singing is “a Bildungsroman, a maturation novel albeit a limited one” (Rowe, 1994: 14).
Actually, most of her works can be read as Bildingsromane (Greene, 1994: 27). Lessing
has in her work created heroines who struggle for self-identity and self-fulfillment in a
male-dominated society.
The present thesis is to study the theme of female development in Lessing’s two major
novels— The Grass Is Singing and The Diary of a Good Neighbour from the perspective of
female Bildungsroman. Technically these two novels might not be called Bildungsroman.
Nonetheless they are certainly about female development. Development “emerged as a
dominant idea in relation to Enlightment confidence in human perfectibility, to Romantic
views of childhood as prelude to creative manhood, and to the nineteenth-century general
preoccupation with historicity” (Fraiman, 1993: ⅸ). Literature, especially the novel,
offers the form to present these ideological contexts. Thus arose a distinctive genre, the
Bildungsroman. Bildungsroman as a literature genre originated in the eighteenth-century
Germany. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship) is generally regarded as the prototype of the genre. The classical
Bildungsroman deals with the psychological growth of a central protagonist from
ignorance and innocence to wisdom and maturity. It traces the progressive journey of a
central protagonist who enters life at a happy dawn, looks for kindred souls, meets
friendship and love, but now has to struggle with the hard realities of the world and thus
matures through manifold experiences, finds himself, and reaches certainty about his task
in the world (Argyle, 2002: 26). Born in the specific historical circumstances when peace
and order was the top priority and education and self-discipline became overwhelmingly
urgent and important in the then divided Germany the Bildungsroman genre is highly
didactic. It assumes the possibility of individual achievement and social integration. It
stresses the hero’s self-cultivation, that is, interior motivation. The hero reaches the goal—
wisdom and maturity, specifically a suitable vocation and role in society, through his own
conscious effort. The path towards such a goal may be strenuous and thorny. However, the
hero’s success in obtaining it is assured. He will in the end bridle his impulses and passions
to integrate himself and his desires into the social milieu and achieves his Bildung
(formation) by finding a suitable vocation and role in the society. Thus the optimistic tone
in the traditional Bildungsroman is unmistakable.
In 1824 Thomas Carlyle translated Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre into English
as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and then in 1865 it was reprinted in America and
reviewed by the then young Henry James: “It might almost be called a treatise on moral
economy—a work intended to show how the experience of life may least be wasted, and
best be turned to account. This fact gives it a seriousness which is almost sublime” (James,
1984: 947-948). Since then Bildungsroman has taken root and flourished in the two
countries and of course, has undergone a great variety of expansions and variations due to
the shift of social and historical circumstances. Coming to modern times Bildungsroman
has deviated further away from the traditional Bildungsroman. Pessimism has gained
momentum both in tone and ending. The hero in modern Bildungsroman is often shown to
be confronted with irreconcilable clashes with an inimical milieu which culminate in his
disillusionments, rebellion, withdrawal or even suicide (Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch,
and Elizabeth Langland, 1983: 8). Thus the modern Bildungsroman is less optimistic in
tone and ending compared with the happy ending of the hero’s accommodation into the
society in the traditional one.
Female Bildungsroman is another variation of the traditional Bildungsroman. While
the classical Bildungsroman focuses on the progressive development of a central male
protagonist the female Bildungsroman revolves around the spiritual growth of a female
one. Because of the gender difference female Bildungsroman both complies with and
departs from the traditional male Bildungsroman. Female Bildungsroman also centers
around the heroine’s development towards maturity and traces her progress towards selfrealization and self-fulfillment. However, the female Bildungsheld takes a quite different
developmental journey towards maturity from her male counterpart and heads for a
different destination.
Adventure or travel is a very important element in the male Bildungsroman. It is
through the experiences he gains on the road that the hero achieves self-recognition and
accomplishes his apprenticeship to life. However, mobility is very difficult, if not
impossible, for women since women’s place is supposed to be at home, at home only. In a
patriarchal society women are allotted the role of the dependent and subordinate. In female
Bildungsroman heroines are either subjected to the confinement of domestic life or to
struggling against all the social conventions to find freedom and independence.
Sexual adventures are also included and considered indispensable in the experiences
the hero has to go through before he accomplishes his apprenticeship. Sex plays a very
important role in the male protagonist’s progress towards maturation. Delineating the
Bildungsroman plot Jerome Buckley particularly refers to “at least two love affairs or
sexual encounters, one debasing, one exalting” as the hero’s “direct experience of urban
life” (Buckley, 1974: 17). However, to the female Bildungsheld sex is something to be
avoided and dreaded. One love affair, no matter how exalting it is, is enough to drive the
heroine out of society (Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, 1983: 8).
Female Bildungsromane also have different endings from those of the traditional male
ones. In contrast to the hero’s happy and successful ending of accommodation to the
society the heroine usually has to turn to inner concentration which might lead to death. “In
the nineteenth-century female Bildungsroman, the young woman protagonist often dies—
physical or spiritual” (Stimpson, 1983: 192).A Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill
on the Moss drowns; Lyndall in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm chooses to
die instead of marrying a man she cannot respect; in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out
Rachel Vinrace retreats to the territory of inner growth that opens into death.
Then in the twentieth century with women’s increased sense of freedom and demand
for independence the scope of women’s activity was tremendously enlarged. Women left
their prescribed domestic sphere at home to come out onto the stage of the public life.
Living in a world more responsive to their needs women began to take up activities and
adventures which had been allowed only to men. Under these historical circumstances with
women’s experience approaching that of the traditional male Bildungsheld women’s needs,
A
Catharine R. Stimpsom, “Doris Lessing and the Parables of Growth,” qtd. in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female
Development, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hanover: University Press of New England,
1983), 192.
potential and capability for spiritual and intellectual growth find voluble expression in a
variety of fictions (Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, 1983: 13).
However, the myth of female formation has been most eloquently voiced in the novels
delineating a woman protagonist’s inner struggle and search for individuality and
integration in a fragmented universe after her awakening to her personality shaped by a
culturally determined, self-sacrificing and self-effacing existence (Jost, 1989: 107).A
The Grass Is Singing (1950), Lessing’s first novel, was an immediate success and
acclaimed as one of the outstanding novels by a post-war English writers. Since its
publication it has been reviewed from various perspectives: racism, Marxism, colonialism,
humanism, feminism and psychological analysis. Lorna Sage observes that this novel was
influenced by the social realism that was the dominant mode in London at that time and it
“is about a historical and psychological stalemate: repression meshed with oppression”
(Sage, 1983: 27). However, Michael Thorpe argues that it is more than racism and
Lessing’s “deeper concern, already evident in the compassionate handling of her first
novel, [is] with the human problem” (Thorpe, 1973: 11). And Ruth Whittaker contends that
this novel resists any single interpretation. He holds that the themes of this novel “include
the relationship between dominant and dominated races, the taboos which operate and the
methods by which the status quo is maintained” and in it can be found all the topics from
colonialism, politics, and feminism to a fascination with the unconscious revealed in
dreams and madness (Whittaker, 1988: 21-22).
The Grass Is Singing is Lessing’s first novel written in the realistic style while The
Diary of a Good Neighbour is the first novel she wrote after returning to realism. The
Diary of a Good Neighbour was first published in 1983 under the pseudonym of Jane
Somers and then republished jointly with If the Old Could as The Diaries of Jane Somers
under Lessing’s own name in 1984. Although after Lessing’s revelation of her true identity
as the author of The Diary of a Good Neighbour the sales of the novel soared up it has
been comparatively neglected. The sporadic critical attention it has received invariably
focuses on doubling strategy, psychology, mother-daughter relationship and the issue of
aging. For example, Virginia Tiger contends that Maudie is Jane’s decaying double and
A
François Jost, “Variations of a Species: The ‘Bildungsroman’,” qtd. in Mullane, et al. Ed. Nineteenth-Century Literature
Criticism, Vol. 20 (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989), 107.
Lessing’s doubling strategy is the “wedge through which the realm of spirit can be
introduced” (Tiger, 2000: 9). Probing the heroine’s psychology, Gayle Green argues that in
order to atone for her intentional alienation and withdrawal from her biological mother
Jane develops a surrogate mother-daughter relationship with Maudie. Through looking
after and identifying with the old and sick woman Jane ventures into areas of feeling that
expand her bounded and defended self (Green, 1994: 195). Lisa Tyler analyzes the novel
from the perspective of mother-daughter relationship. According to her, Lessing subverts
the traditional heterosexual relationship romance plot with the Demeter myth. This Greek
myth suggests the rich possibilities of mother-daughter relationship which is extraordinary
for women and remains powerful for both mothers and daughters long after the daughter
reaches womanhood (Tyler, 1994: 74). And some critics approach this novel by focusing
on the theme of aging. Sarah Sceats holds that Jane derives her enlightenment, from her
“gradual apprehension of the importance not only of caring, but of the passion revealed in
an old woman’s appetite. […] The hunger, the pleasure, the nostalgia are manifestations of
an appetite for life itself” (Sceats, 2000: 148)
These two novels—The Grass Is Singing and The Diary of a Good Neighbour might
not be Bildungsromane in the strict sense. However, as Françious Jost contends, “Our
times have produced authentic Bildungsromane, but not all their settings, problems, and
characters fit the frame designed and defined by the German master. The feminine
Bildungsroman, in particular, provides for a new matrix which, nevertheless, remains a
retouched replica of the Goethean mold” (Jost, 1989: 108).A After all, every person’s
development is a different story varying in class, history and gender. Therefore, it is
inevitable that there are variations within the genre. The elements of development in these
two novels are also unmistakable. They are written in different times and social
circumstances and have different settings and endings. However, both heroines, Mary and
Jane, pursue and undergo a kind of progressive development though with different results.
The present thesis attempts to explore the theme of female development in these two
novels from the perspective of female Bildungsroman.
This paper is divided into four parts. The first part is an introduction which, after a
brief survey of Doris Lessing and her work, mainly states the purpose, task and
significance of the present study. The first chapter elaborates upon Mary’s foiled
development by examining her twisted growth in childhood, her thwarted escape from
marriage and her withdrawal into madness and final death. The second chapter probes into
Jane’s deferred development by analyzing the progress of her transformation from
emotional disengagement to self-discovery and self-deliverance and finally to spiritual
consummation. The narrative techniques and other forms of artistic presentation adopted in
The Grass Is Singing and The Diary of a Good Neighbour are also respectively expounded
in the second and third chapter. The last part is a conclusion which ends the paper with a
summary of all the analyses and arguments of the previous two chapters.
Bildungsroman has gone through a lot of expansions and variations over the centuries
to remain dynamic. So has female Bildungsroman. It is the texts like The Grass Is Singing
and The Diary of a Good Neighbour that inject new life into this genre with their own
unique features. And these two novels may be interpreted from various perspectives. This
thesis approaches these two novels from the light of female Bildungsroman in the hope of
A
François Jost, “Variations of a Species: The ‘Bildungsroman’,” qtd. in Mullane, et al. Nineteenth-Century Literature
Criticism, Vol. 20 (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989), 108.
shedding some new light on the study of Doris Lessing and her works.
Chapter One Mary’s Foiled Development in The Grass Is
Singing
The Grass Is Singing, Lessing’s first novel, was written before she left Rhodesia and
published in 1950, one year after she moved to London. Set in South Africa it depicts a
white outpost in a remote British colony and tells the story of a white woman being
murdered by a black servant. It has been seen by many critics about the issue of racial
discrimination. But certainly it is more than that. Even Lessing herself in the preface to
African Stories declares, “When my first novel, The Grass Is Singing, came out, there were
few novels about Africa. That book, and my second one […] were described by reviewers
as about the colour problem…which is not how I see, or saw, them” (Lessing, 1965: 5).
Racism is but one of the many themes of the novel. Tracing Mary Turner’s developmental
journey from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and then to her madness and
death it is also a female “Bildungsroman, a maturation novel albeit a limited one” (Rowe,
1994: 14). From her traumatic girlhood to her forced marriage and finally to her mental
breakdown and murder Mary’s development has been twisted and thwarted. All her life
Mary struggles for freedom and autonomy and strives for self-fulfillment, only to be
forestalled and frustrated by the collective will, or the social conventions, of the patriarchal
colonial community. Therefore, it is also a story of “a woman’s failed attempt to battle with
the colonial society” (Rowe, 1994: 14). Mary runs away from home to town to seek
independence, tries her best to resist wifehood and then when the attempt fails remedies
her failed marriage with all means. However, the collaboration of racism and patriarchy
thwarts all her attempts to escape the subordinate and dependent role designated her by the
patriarchal society. Eventually she has to resort to mental breakdown to escape the cruel
reality and ends up in self-intended death.
2.1 Twisted Growth in Childhood
Mary’s personality is shaped by the twisted growth in her nightmarish childhood.
Throughout her adult life she tries to repress the memory of her traumatic childhood
experience which, however, haunts her all the time in the form of dreams. Mary has a very
unhappy childhood. She was born into a white working class family in a white outpost in
the South Africa. The surrounding environment in the outlying countryside is extremely
stifling and restrictive. Geographically cut off from the outside world Mary only has the
store in the neighborhood as the center of her life. “[…] the store is the real center of her
life” (GIS, 29). Her family is isolated from the black working masses by race and from the
white middle class by financial conditions. Her father is a shiftless railway station clerk
who seeks solace in drinking while her mother is “[a] tall, scrawny woman with angry,
unhealthy brilliant eyes” who is embittered by the struggle for sheer economic survival
(GIS, 30).
“And then, as well as being the focus of the district, and the source of her father’s
drunkenness, the store was the powerful, implacable place that sent in bills at the end of
the month. They could never be fully paid: her mother was always appealing to the
owner for just another month’s grace. Her father and mother fought over these bills
twelve times a year. They never quarreled over anything but money…” (GIS, 31)
Thus grown up in such an impoverished family devoid of love Mary becomes emotionally
blocked. Her disgust at her father’s drunkenness and dismay at her mother’s bitterness
make her unable to share any intimacy with anybody in her later adult life.
Cooped up in such a loveless family and repressive environment Mary longs for
change and flight from home. Mary’s desire for change and movement is a sign of identity
development which is a typical stage of development during adolescence. According to
Lawrence Steinberg, universally all adolescents in every society go through the biological,
cognitive and social changes which constitute fundamental formation of adolescents
(Steinberg, 1993: 19). These changes entail some kind of movement, literal or mental. That
is, it might be a literal journey from the countryside to the city or a mental travel to a
higher moral or emotional ground. Nevertheless, the aim of the journey is to form identity
(Thornburg, 1982: 537). Identity which depends on the past and determines the future is
rooted in childhood and serves as a base from which to meet later life tasks. Identity
formation is a long and gradual process and includes the adolescent’s interpretation of his
or her early childhood identification with important individuals in life (Adams, 1983: 184).
A lot of adolescents run away from home to avoid something they refuse or do not know
how to deal with. Unhappy with the surrounding environment they run away to “avoid
abusive and insensitive people. Some are merely seeking escape; others are in search of
Utopia” (Thornburg, 1982: 329). Mary’s concept of identity is formed in witnessing the
unhappiness and misery of her embittered mother which she attributes to her father’s
shiftlessness. “She [her mother] made a confidante of Mary early. She used to cry over her
sewing while Mary comforted her miserably, longing to get away, but feeling important
too, and hating her father” (GIS, 30).
Travel or adventure is also a very important element in Bildungsroman. It is through
moving around that Goethe’s Wilhelm outgrows his follies and foibles and consummates
his apprenticeship to life. Jerome H. Buckley in his plot outline of the male Bildungsroman
includes leaving home for city as an important stage in the hero’s development. The hero
usually “at a quite early age, leaves the repressive atmosphere at home […] to make his
way independently in the city” (Buckley 1974: 17). Susanne Howe also claims, “Going
somewhere is the thing. […] After all [….] no one can learn much of anything at home”
(Howe, 1930: 1).
Mary makes a similar journey from home to town. She runs away because she wants