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Modern Language Studies, ISSN: 0047-7729
Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing: A Saga of Identity Crisis
Faranak Kakanaeini*
Department of English, Payame Noor University, 19395-4697 Tehran, I.R. of Iran
Abstract
This paper attempts to examine the dilemma of white woman colonizer who oscillates between patriarchal colonial code meant
for women and their self-identity. The Grass Is Singing showcases myriad feministic issues like subjugation of women, male
hegemony, disagreement with feminine roles, women as sexual objects and fragmentation. Lessing highlights through her novel
the pathetic facet of female protagonist who is trapped in female roles which suggest them a conventional code of conduct,
shaped by colonial experience. Lessing by depicting her protagonist in a particular British colonial society artistically reveals her
identity is negotiated and constructed by the social and behavioral expectations, developed through her racial role as a white
woman colonizer and her gender role as a woman colonized in a patriarchal society. I will discuss how the intersection of gender,
class and race leads to Mary’s fragmentation and loss of identity and at the end dooms her to death because of the same sexual
and ideological factors, rooted in her family and culture.
Keywords: colonialism; disintegration; gender; identity; patriarchy; subjugation
1. Introduction
The most prolific of contemporary British writers and the recipient of more than twenty literary prizes and
awards, Doris May Tayler was born in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran) and grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe) until 1949, when she came to England with the youngest of her three children and with the manuscript of
her first novel, The Grass Is Singing. The novel was published in 1950, and gained its author immediate success.
Since then she has never ceased writing, producing a huge number of novels, short stories, personal narratives, plays,
and poems exploring on unprecedented variety of themes. The years spent in Africa influenced Lessing deeply, both
as a maturing woman and as a writer. She is, in Judith Gardiner’s words, “a colonial in exile”, whose work is
characterized by “a fruitful unsettledness that makes… [her both an] inheritor…and [an] antagonist…to
imperialism…. The English literary tradition is the reassuring heritage of a mother tongue, but it is also somewhat
alien” (Gardiner, 1989: 13). Lorna Sage calls Lessing “a demystifier, a critical observer of social process and
systems, an outsider who could see through to the inside, a radical realist” (1983: 24). Indeed, this can be seen as
Doris Lessing’s starting place as a writer, a place she later transforms and alters through long searches in the novels
that follow According to Ruth Whittaker, one of the readers of Lessing’s works, this novel is “an extraordinary first
novel in its assured treatment of its unusual subject matter… Doris Lessing questions the entire values of Rhodesian
white colonial society.” (1988:28).
Lessing explores the possibility of transgressive relationships between the “week links” (Bertelsen, 1985: 16)
among Southern African settlers and Africans. In other words, she establishes convergence zones, where very
* Corresponding author.
© 2016 The Authors. Published by European Science publishing Ltd.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of European Science publishing Ltd.
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dissimilar places and people (otherwise unlikely to interact) meet. In doing so, Lessing undermines, as Ann Stoler
puts it, the myth of a white bourgeois hegemony in Southern Rhodesia (1990:116), that “intensely race and classconscious colonial society” (Thorpe, 1978: 6). Viewed in both individual self-division and social absurdity, chaos is
first confronted as a result of the external world, and then recognized as a consequence upon inner reality. In each
case, violence, fragmentation, and self-division are indicative of a breakdown within the self, which is connected to
relationships and social institutions. This dialectical focus, based on the correspondence inner-outer reality, leads to
Lessing’s intent analysis of the relationship between the hero’s mind and the world. Lessing’s “profoundly
dialectical consciousness” (Rubenstein,1979: 9) or her “competing codes” (Draine,1980: xxii) have been central to
the interpretations of major Lessing critics.
The Grass Is Singing narrates the life events of Mary Turner shaped by colonial experience, in the Rhodesian
veld (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, and questions the entire values of the Rhodesian white colonial society.
Lessing spins an intricate tapestry, interweaving Mary’s life and struggle in a colonial world. In vivid details,
Lessing describes the effects of a society under colonization – a culture infested by the rigid infrastructure of
patriarchy – giving rise to gender and race discriminations. The author traces Mary’s psychological growth during
the numerous phases of her life – from an impoverished, unhappy childhood to her unnatural death at the hand of her
native houseboy and in the process politically exposes the futility and fragility of a patriarchal colonial system.
Lessing accurately portrays the havoc wreaked in a society under imperialism - hierarchy, racism and oppression.
Lessing begins the novel with the murder of Mary Turner. Sketching the reactions of the British members of the
society living in the district, Lessing offers an in-depth view of the flawed society Mary belonged to. Lessing, who is
well known for her active support and participation in women’s movements, imbues in the novel, a harsh criticism of
the patriarchal colonial system (and later the apartheid), which immobilized women, denying them an agency – their
right to economic independence and a construction of their own identity. Through the character of Mary Turner, the
protagonist, Lessing depicts the conservative society of Rhodesia – the elements of racial and gender prejudices that
constricted the spirit of Mary, suffocating her and leading her to her death.
2. Disagreement with Feminine Roles
The early sketch of Mary’s characterization entails a subjectivity negotiating between gender and class positions.
Mary’s early childhood is shaped under the influence of an oppressive father who wastes his money on drink while
his family is living in misery and poverty. Her mother, “a tall scrawny woman with angry unhealthy brilliant eyes”
who “made a confidante of Mary early…and used to cry over her sewing, while Mary comforted her miserably”, is
her first model of gender role: a passive and helpless woman, dominated by the overwhelming masculine patterns,
nonetheless the complying victim of poverty (Lessing, 1994: 33). Besides sharing the pains of poverty and living in
“a little house that was like a small wooden box on slits” and the 12-month-quarel of her parents over money, Mary
has been the witness of their sexuality and her mother’s body in the hands of a man who was simply not present for
her (Lessing, 1994:36). All her life, Mary tries to forget these memories but in fact she has just suppressed them
with the fear of sexuality which comes up later nightmarishly in her dreams. By seeing her mother as a feminine
victim of a miserable marriage, she internalizes a negative image of femininity in the form of sexual repression,
inheriting her mother’s arid feminism. In order to escape from this tragic repetition and after her mother’s death,
Mary finds a job as a secretary in the town at 16 and begins a lonely life. By dropping her father, she seems “in
some way to be avenging her mother’s sufferings” and to cut herself from her past (Lessing, 1994:35). Her last relief
comes after her father’s death that nothing remains to connect her with the past. Trying to forget her traumatic
memories, she remains a girl, choosing to live in a girls‟ club, wearing her hair in a little-girl fashion. Her childish
clothing and immature behavior especially before men are her defense mechanisms against her fear of sexuality
rooted in her childhood. She does not consider her shyness, immaturity and aloofness as weakness; as a matter of
fact, she is unconscious of them. But then a turning point comes in her life when she overhears her intimate friends
discussing her age and marriage. She is horrified to hear them commenting that there is “something missing
somewhere” (Lessing, 1994: 42) in her, just because she, not yet thirty, is still unwedded.
To be thirty and single in a white colonial society is almost a form of heresy. Her personal status becomes a
reason for anxiety, reinforced by her awareness that her peculiarities are subject to public scrutiny. She looks for a
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husband as a way out of her anxious state (although she is not aware of it), not realizing that her genuine “aversion
towards the personal things like love and passion” (Lessing, 1994:42) will foredoom the success of any intimate
relationship. In desperation, she marries the first man capable to offer her an acceptable way out – Dick Turner.
Dick’s motivation is equally inadequate. Lacking self-knowledge, he yearns for marriage in its romantically
idealized form, as a way of fulfilling a set of socially created expectations. Though identical in their emotional
flatness, Dick and Mary Turner only have their needs in common, while, emotionally, they are worlds apart. For
Lessing, emotional frigidity is the symptom of a problem with multiple causes, originating in the rigid general image
of the cultural roles of men and women, sexuality, and intimacy as well as in the individual’s thwarted emotional
life.
Loneliness is the only common point between the two, who have otherwise different pasts, different experiences
and different backgrounds. While Mary “loved the town, felt safe there” (Lessing, 1994:50), Dick dislikes the townculture. Being a farmer, he loves spending most of his time on his farm. After marriage also, Dick remains busy in
his farm work going in the morning, returning late in the evening and retiring to bed immediately after supper. The
sexual relationship of Mary and Dick also is not very satisfactory. Even sex does not bring them any closer; it rather
separates them. The narrator depicts this failure through Mary’s sexual identity and the clearly inadequate sexual
relationship between her and Dick: “women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship,
to immune themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without
having anything tangible to complain of. Mary did not have to learn this, because it was natural to her”. (Lessing,
1994:55)
Mary’s marriage not only proves her inability to transcend her gendered subjectivity, but also her inability to
escape from her class. She feels weak and disappointed as if “her father, from his grave, had sent out his will and
forced her back into the kind of life he had made her mother lead” (Lessing, 1994:54-5). She sees the inadequacy
and narrowness of her family’s life follow her in her marriage. The narrative links poverty and gender in analyzing
Mary’s new situation, which do not allow her to move beyond the codes of behavior. Poverty from which Mary has
always tried to escape tracks her in her ill-matched marriage. She despises Dick because he is a failure himself at
farming. She sees Dick as a loser, dreamer, a weak, “Jonah” as the other farmers call him for his bad luck. Dick
lacks that financial self-interest Mary needs to escape from the stinting poverty which she feels is destroying both of
them. In her argument with Dick over money concerns, she finds herself speaking in a new voice, as if taken from
her mother, “not the voice of Mary, the individual, but the voice of the suffering female…” (Lessing, 1994:79) She
has to spend all day inside a house without ceiling under the direct sun heat because Dick cannot afford to put up a
ceiling.
Roberta Rubenstein rightly observes that The Grass is Singing “concerns about social, economic and political
structures, with being female in a conventional man’s world” (1979: 17). Mary’s marriage condition is:
The women who marry Dick learn sooner or later that there are two things they can do: they can drive
themselves mad, tear themselves into pieces in storms of futile anger and rebellion; or they can hold
themselves tight and go bitter. Mary with the memory of her own mother recurring more and more
frequently, like an older, sardonic double of herself walking beside her, followed the course her
upbringing made inevitable. (Lessing 1950: 110)
The gulf between the two, however, keeps on widening and in their lonely home “they were stunned, unfulfilled
figures” (Sarvan, 1979: 537). Early in the novel the narrator says of Mary that “she was not playing her part”
(Lessing,1994:35). Mary’s social aloofness and resulting failure in acting the way she is expected demonstrate that
the gender roles are constructed. If these roles were natural, she would have played her part naturally. This woman
stereotype, however, does not correspond with her “self”. Following her decision, a great conflict arises concerning
“the gap between what one is and what one aspires to be” (King,1989: 10). Mary’s lost selfhood is a critical moment
for her because “her idea of herself was destroyed” and she cannot “recreate herself” (King,1989: 11). It is essential
to take into account the fact that she “split into two selves, the one who feels totally without power, and the other
whose power is ‘borrowed’ from the system which enforces her own oppression” (King,1989: 12).
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Marriage closes doors for any career as well. The woman who was once admired and loved by the society is
disqualified because of her sloppy appearance and unpolished manners after marriage. The situation there is the
same as in de Beauvoir’s Europe where “marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by society. It is still
true that most women are married, or have been, or plan to be, or suffer from not being” (de Beauvoir, 1989: 425).
At the beginning she seems to be a self-confident and emancipated young woman: “There was nothing to prevent
her living by herself, even running her own car, entertaining on a small scale. She could have become a person on
her own account. But this was against her instinct” (Lessing,1994: 38). Nonetheless, in the end her emancipation is
“eliminated” by the circumstances, which makes her inert. As Simone De Beauvoir states: “Economic evolution in
woman’s situation is in process of upsetting the institution of marriage” (1997: 445) – Mary, who has experienced
the freedom and luxury of self-dependence – has a harder time fitting into the paradigm of marriage.
3. Women as Sexual Objects
All of the a stereotypical perception of a woman in the Rhodesian colonial society is explained by Jean Pickering,
who presents her ideas of colonial society in her study of The Grass is Singing. According to her, there are three
main issues of class, race and gender. She explains the man – female relationship as follows:
Although the white settlers grew up in a class society, the class attitudes of the collective have simplified
into consideration of us, the Whites, and them, the Blacks. But there is another value system that
complicates the issue. In white settler society men outrank women even more than they do at “home” in
middle-class England. (1990, 19)
Similarly, Mill states that men naturally expect women to be devoted to them and moreover behave voluntarily as
their servants. Women’s task is to be subordinate completely to their men, women’s feelings and needs have no
importance (1869, 35). With marriage to a man, a woman becomes his property and the mission of woman’s life is
completed. All that used to be hers is suddenly man’s possession but nothing that belongs to the man could never
become woman’s possession (Mill, 1869: 74).
Generally, a woman in the colonial society is seen as an object, inseparable part of a man. She is considered a
man’s property. The men of native population are regarded as vicious, wild, cruel and sexually dangerous for the
white women (Walsh, 1983: 7). These assumptions steal the white women’s individuality and turn them into the
sexual objects that are in endangered position and require permanent protection. Walsh confirms in his statement
that whites put “all of those qualities and characteristics which it most fears and hates within itself” on the natives
creating therefore “a wholly negative cultural identity” (1983: 7). The colonial society, based on superior position of
white men is classified as the patriarchal one. According to Bell Hooks, patriarchy is defined as:
The political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and
everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the
weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence
(2004, 18).
Mohanty points out that the "assumption of women as an always already constituted group “a group that is
"powerless, exploited, sexually harassed, and so on “is remarkably similar to "sexist discourse" itself, a discourse
that labels women as "weak, emotional, having math anxiety, etc." (2003:259). Instead of assuming women's lack of
power and finding examples that prove it, feminists should look at specific circumstances, avoiding assumptions that
ignore class and ethnic identities: "Such simplistic formulations. . . reinforce binary divisions between men and
women"; that is, they reinforce the idea that "Men exploit, women are exploited" (Mohanty, 2003:265). The term
sexism is defined by Suzanne Pharr as “an enforced belief in male dominance and control” held by power and
control systems and that ultimately keep women subordinate to men (1998, 8). Another definition of sexism, similar
though, is provided by Audre Lorde in her essay in Overcoming sexism and racism as “the belief in the inherent
superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance” (1995: 19). She describes racism on the
same basis as sexism. It is defined as “the belief in the inherent superiority of one races over all others and thereby
the right to dominance” (1995: 19). These definitions explain the common background of sexism and racism.
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In The Grass Is Singing Mary does not “care for men”, and has “a profound distaste for sex”. (p.39) Her men
friends treat her “just like a good pal, with none of this silly sex business” (Lessing, 1994:40) because whenever she
thinks of home, she remembers “a wooden box shaken by passing trains”; whenever she thinks of marriage and
children, she remembers “her father coming home red-eyed and fuddled… or her mother’s face at her children’s
funeral”. (Lessing, 1994:39) So Mary’s sexuality or lack of it is developed through her encounters with the social
system of her family when both parents carry out the socially imposed roles on their children. Mary wants to forget
the burden of her past by ignoring her gender role as a woman in need of a protecting husband and her class as a
poor girl from a poor family in which the death of her siblings has meant fewer mouths to feed. But very soon, Mary
is brought face to face with “that impalpable but steel-strong pressure to get married” which her culture imposes on
all women. (Lessing, 1994: 40). Mary is forced to marriage; Dick’s first sight of May is in the cinema in “a shaft of
light fall from somewhere above” which seems to him as “the curve of a cheek and a sheaf of a fairish glinting hair.
The face … yearning upwards, ruddily gold in the queer greenish light” (Lessing,1994:46). When he sees Mary, he
cannot connect this ordinary girl in trousers with the image in his mind under the trick of light in the cinema. In his
own old-fashioned way of thinking, he does not consider the women in trousers as feminine at all, but very soon
begins to like this not very attractive girl who, he believes, can change to “a practical, adaptable, serene person who
would need only a few weeks on the farm to become what he wanted her to be.” (Lessing, 1994:50). Mary is chosen
as an object of Disk’s gaze, though a false one, and based on his masculine expectation of her to be whatever he
desires which recalls the old story of the sex-economic rules of patriarchal society at work which organize
femininity as an adaptation to men’s world. Mary is expected to marry and to play her gender role as “a practical,
adaptable and serene person” which refers to her unconscious internalization of her mother’s characteristics and in a
deeper sense, the internalization of the cultural norms. So Mary’s marriage entails broad cultural forces which insist
that women exist only in terms of marriage. Their marriage, not based on love or mutual understanding, is a mutual
exploitation and self-delusion in their use of the other to satisfy their own deficiency, and deceive themselves about
the other one’s nature. Mary’s feeling about their relation in weeding night is:
It was not so bad … when it was all over: not as bad as that. It meant nothing to her, nothing at all.
Expecting outrage and imposition, she was relieved to find she felt nothing. She was able maternally to
bestow the gift of herself on this humble stranger, and remain untouched. Women have an extraordinary
ability to withdraw from sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their
men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of. Mary did
not have to learn this, because it was natural to her, and because she had expected nothing in the first
place. (Lessing, 1994: 66-67)
Their relation was nothing to Mary, but she is only object of desire for Dick. Luce Irigaray expands on the
identity and worth of women as a group by examining the social roles imposed on them by men in society. She
argues that women are assigned labels relating to sexual pleasure which contain certain expectations that are geared
towards the fulfillment of male needs. In patriarchal societies, women are classed as objects; more specifically they
are categorized as objects of desire used to perform sexual labor (Irigaray, 1998: 809).
Even when Mary attempt to escape from the farm, as she cannot bear the life on the farm anymore, she returns to
the town, regardless of the consequences. To her great surprise she is not accepted by the local people who used to
be her friends. Bahlaq (2011:52) observes that “Mary’s life in town does not exist anymore. Her former boss has
refused her request for a job because she lost her charm and grace that she had possessed before her marriage.
Everything looks different.” Though Mary has been part of this work place, she realizes she is no longer welcome
by those she loved to associate with. They seclude her indirectly and the city that symbolizes true whiteness to her
rejects her such that she feels alienated from it.
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4. Mental Disintegration and Fragmentation
Mary Turner’s slow disintegration is meticulously developed, so that her helpless descent into chaos makes sense in
terms not only of her own personality, but also of the external world. Her fragmentation is a product of both private
emptiness and political realities, understood through sexual power relationships: male/female, race, class and
gender. The novel provides the social context within which it takes place, through its dramatization of the
dehumanization imposed on both races by the color bar. The Grass is Singing is built on two inseparable currents:
the tragic disintegration of Mary Turner’s personality on the one hand, and omnipresent racial tension on the other.
Some critics have deplored the fact that “Lessing’s passion against racial prejudice causes her to disrupt her main
concern with Mary’s mental disintegration”(Singleton, 1977: 82), but the two themes cannot be separated. In fact
their entwinement lays a cornerstone for all of Lessing’s early works, in which personal development is always
determined by the greater social framework.
Eva Hunter posits that The Grass is Singing “suggests that within the white community which sees itself as a
vanguard of civilization, the pressure on women to fulfill the role of moral guardians is particularly heavy”
(1989:141). According to Belinda Bozzoli, the “domestic sphere” is the starting point for a materialist South African
feminism. For poor white women, she explains, this is where they begin to work to establish themselves as part of
the “privileged white working class” (1983:161). Women, it was thought, were also more susceptible to “going
kaffir” than men. In the novel Moses serve as a threat to Mary’s sexual and cultural identity. She feels she must do
something to restore her pose; she asks Dick to dismiss this boy too but Dick, tired of the endless dismissing of the
servants because Mary could get along with none of them, insists that Moses should stay. Mary, little by little, loses
her balance with the knowledge of being alone with Moses in the house and becomes, in Ellen Brooks’ words, “prey
to violent emotions which she can neither understand nor control, stemming from deeply embedded psychological
repression” (1971:330). She feels “once of strong and irrational fear, a deep uneasiness, and even- though this she
did not know, would have died rather than acknowledge- of some dark attraction” (Lessing, 1994:154). When
Moses himself announces that he wants to leave, she breaks down to sob in front of him and begs him to stay. He
treats her hysterical behaviour with calm authority, “like a father commanding her” (Lessing, 1994:152). He makes
her drink water and lie down. There after there is a change in their relationship; Moses appears to be the
embodiment of her sexual fears and desires, her Shadow in Jungian terms, whose dark attraction weakens her
struggle against him as the ethic of her colonial culture demands of her. Mary is aware that her act of crying before
Moses has upset this colonial ethic because the power relation between them has been upset; she feels “helplessly in
his power” (Lessing,1994:154) and resigns her authority. Mary is sexually attracted to Moses who is culturally
unspeakable and even unthinkable, a taboo. She, who has always avoided emotional attachment, is now suffering the
pains and desire for an intimate relationship with Moses. She is both afraid of and fascinated by him. Her fear of
Moses is both fear of a black man, the unknown Africa in Conradian terms, and fear of the Dark Continent within,
her Shadow in Jungian terms, “a terrible dark fear” (Lessing, 1994:152). As Michael Thorpe notes, Moses intrudes
“not as a mere symbol of colour conflicts, but as the agent of a disruptive life force” and triggers Mary’s longrepressed emotions to act out her traditional female role, helpless and dependent on him (1978:12). In Mary’s mind,
Moses embodies the sexually masculine (his naked body is a memory always with her and she cannot forget) in
contrast to Dick whose “lean hands, coffee-burned by the sun” seems to her trembling and weak. She fears even to
look at Moses, “watching him covertly, not like a mistress watching a servant work, but with a fearful curiosity”
(Lessing, 1994:156); on the other hand, she is attracted by his strength, energy and grace. Moses‟ acts of kindness
and caring, and his desire to please Mary, for instance bringing her breakfast tray with “a handle less cup with
flowers in it” (Lessing, 1994:154) oversteps the unwritten law concerning the relationships between white and
black. Michael Thorpe remarks that: “since 1903 in Rhodesia, it has been a criminal offence for a black man and a
white woman to have sexual intercourse but no such law applies where a white man and a black woman are
involved.” (1978:12) .
The natural relationship between a dominant man and a subordinate woman in a patriarchal system becomes
problematic just because the man is black and the woman, white. This disturbs spirit de corpse, causing a tension in
colonial culture by blurring the line between “us” and “them”. In Mary and Moses’ progressive relationship, the
boundaries between “self and other” fluctuate, but more than that the patriarchal colonial status is put in danger.
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Mary sees herself in an irresistible and irrepressible situation which reverses the colonial hierarchies. By Mary’s
resigning her power to Moses, this is Moses who takes the role of powerful dominating over her and respectfully
forces her “now to treat him as a human being” (Lessing, 1994:156). In simple words, Mary is racially dominant but
psychologically and sexually is dominated by Moses, and this attraction implies her confrontation and breaking two
taboos: sexual and colonial. The first has been broken by making personal contact with Moses as a man and the
latter by violating the power relation between them. Mary, unconsciously, deconstructs the colonial doctrine of her
culture and becomes the matter of “a bitter contemptuous anger” from her white fellows. (Lessing, 1994:26) But the
white civilization, “fighting to defend itself”, does not let its profits slide down, and “cannot afford failures such as
the Turners’ failure”. Emphatically the narrator expresses that “the white civilization will never, never admit that a
white person, and most particularly, a white woman can have a human relationship, whether for good or for evil,
with a black man.” (Lessing, 1994:26) Katherine Fishburn comments on this colonial status quo that “rewards those
who conform to party line (Slatter) and punishes the one poor soul (Mary Turner) (1994:10).
In the process that
the closeness of black man with a white woman is revealed, Slatter, the epitome of the white patriarchal colonialism,
has to act now by driving the Turners away from this scene. He, who has always wanted to gain Disk’s farm,
suggests that he buys it and employs Dick as the manager, but first they must go away for a holiday. Slatter’s
attempt to get Mary off the farm by giving a good amount of money to Turners is not for love or even pity for Dick,
nor does he care for Mary. What matters is that Mary has threatened the existing order through her relationship with
Moses. The dictates of the first law of white south Africa, which is, you shalt not let your fellow white sink lower
than a certain point: because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are”(Lessing, 1994: 221).
The displacement of anxiety about the degeneration of her position as a colonizer and the life-long repression
which places her now in the position of a subordinate leads Mary into madness, isolation, frustration and
disintegration. Mary seems to project her frustration with her own situation onto the native population, as if the more
subjugated she is, the more she perpetuates her subjugation of others. Her anger against her servants is actually
anger against the limitations that have been set in place for her. She abuses her servants, taking advantage of white
privilege, conjuring in her mind, a dehumanized picture of the native. Her behavior towards them stems from the
colonial gaze: if they were not disciplined, they would steal, rape or murder. Simone de Beauvoir’s theory can offer
further insight into Mary’s intense racism. She writes that while men can transcend the hegemonic ideology, women
become more trapped in it as they do not have the means to create new ones: “she can offer no way of repopulating
the heaven; she rushes wildly to the defense of the old gods” (de Beauvoir, 1989: 601). Women do not have
sufficient power in society to lay the foundation for new ideologies. Sprague writes: “Her visceral rejection of
sexuality, marriage, and motherhood, her hatred of being female, is most fully and intensely projected upon black
women” (1987: 27). She hates them because she interprets their nakedness as sexuality, something that repulses her.
In a position as a victim Mary lacks agency to resist the status quo. Her madness and loss of control over her
action and especially over her speech and later her silence is due to her inability to express herself by the existing
discourses. Her silence is a symptom as well as an effect of the cultural neurosis; her vulnerability is that of the
colonial regime. Her experience which is difficult or even impossible to be articulated (as we see it is concealed and
distorted by the other whites) threatens her physical, emotional and spiritual integrity. She begins to behave “simply
as if she lives in a world of her own, where other people’s standards don’t count. She has forgotten what her own
people are like. But then, what is madness, but a refuge, a retreating from the world?” (Lessing, 1994: 187).
Consequently, her passivity, indifference, and apathy bring about her death: “Her mental and physical breakdown
can thus be seen as the result of the limitations imposed on this once independent and active woman, who ironically
married to be her own mistress” (King, 1989: 9). “she is unable to protect herself against pain and punishment
because she has been taught that resistance is useless- to be a woman is to be powerless, at least in relation to a
man”. (Hunter, 1989: 148) Her gender role makes her act the role of a sacrificial victim by permitting “the bush”Africa or Moses- to revenge the whole colonialism on her. Her readiness for self-sacrifice signifies her stereotype
gender role and lost identity. Her life and death show that she has been imprisoned in her culture’s image of womandependent, helpless, a sacrificial colonized. Mary’s subjectivity is a “subjected being” who “submits to the authority
of the social formation represented in ideology” which in her case is the ideology of colonialism (Belsey, 1985: 49).
Mary’s realization of her sterile situation is too late and has no other remedy but death. Her recognition is in her
8
Faranak Kakanaeini / Modern Language Studies, ISSN: 0047-7729(2017)101_109
death. Mary Turner’s death seems the only possible resolution of her conflicting impulses and also that of the white
colonialists to fulfill their missions and become heroes, and here it becomes obvious why the white community try
to keep silent in response to Mary’s death.
5. Conclusion
The novel shed light on how the patriarchal familial structure was adopted by colonization and politicized race,
culture and gender to achieve their desired effects. By relegating the race, culture and women, the colonizers
effectively refused them an agency- a voice through which they could articulate their identities and a sense of selfan exploitation that deemed them weak and easy prey to subjugation. Mary Turner is not able to grasp her own
identity because her identity is compounded by the overpowering colonial and gender narratives in which she is knit.
She desperately attempts to find a sense of self- an identity sans the influence of the colonial culture. Mary breaks
through the barriers of patriarchal and colonial culture through inevitable death which sets her free from all terms
and conditions that existed in her society.
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