文学论文.docx

1、文学论文An Analysis of Mary in The Grass Is Singing1 IntroductionDoris Lessing is a creative writer who is full of imagination. She was born in 1919 in Persia, moving as a child with her family to southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. It is the continent of South Africa that breeds her and gives her the life

2、 accumulation and creative inspiration. She is one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of the second half of the twentieth century and writes a lot of works on a wide variety of themes, especially on women problems. In 2007, Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Lessi

3、ng is one of the few writers who have the courage to uphold the principle of equality between the male and female, and she has given the impulse to a number of other women writers. In Lessings novel, The Grass Is Singing is her first novel which exerts great influence on the modern literature. It ha

4、s been the focus of critical attention since its appearance. It is a high-tension story of a womans tragic life. The tragedy of the heroine Mary Turner covers layers of meanings and implications. This paper first traces how the female protagonist turns from a happy single woman to an unhappy wife wi

5、th nothing to do at home, and then to a hysteria virago and at last to a helpless and empty spirit. It focuses on the tragic image of Mary Turner in order to disclose clearly the nature of Marys twisted humanity and her spiritual frustration. 2 Brief Introduction of The Grass Is SingingThe Grass Is

6、Singing shows the appalling nature of the South African society which imposes its dogma and suffocates individual life, forcing people to succumb to the collective at the expense of their individual fulfillment. 2.1 The social background of the novelThe Grass Is Singing examines unbridgeable racial

7、conflict in colonial South Africa through the eyes of a white farmers wife and her black servant. This novel is about the destruction of a pair of white African colonials, Dick and Mary Turner, by social and economic forces. The story happened in The Grass Is Singing is set in Southern Africa in 193

8、0s. In the year of 1930 the range of African protest in Southern Rhodesia was impressive. As in the American West or Australasia, frontier myths, settler myths, were adapted to fit the circumstances of the country. In the colonial experience, myths replace history which contains inconvenient facts,

9、such as the Great Zimbabwe ruins of an earlier culture. They are cultivated, for example, in order to justify the while takeover of Africa, and to maintain the whites assumption of their superiority to the black populations.The Africans were put into native reserves. The Native Reserves of Rhodesia,

10、 like those of South Africa, surrounded by the poorest soil, the least water, the worst of everything, from roads to shops. It is almost impossible to convey to people in Britain what a Native Reserve is like. The nearest to it is perhaps Dartmoor, imagined hot and arid. On it are scattered groups o

11、f mud and grass huts, and a store, which is a brick room selling cloth goods and the cheapest of groceries. There are no good roads, telephones, cinemas, facilities for sport or recreation. Into these deserts, completely cut off from modern life, are forcibly people whose way of life before the whit

12、e man came was as wide, variegated, full of potential, as Africa itself. The white people began to occupy the land by force as soon as they arrived in the country. They now have taken more than half of it, are always taking more and more. Settlers imported class differences from home and intensified

13、 those class differences by wedding them to violent racial prejudices. And the Africans on the Native Reservesthe real exiles in the narrative of colonizationwere virtually invisible to the settlers, a fact of colonial life that would form the dramatic basis of Lessings first novelThe Grass Is Singi

14、ng.Furthermore, sexual relations between the races were a powerful challenge to their separateness; here, a double standard prevailed, miscegenation between white men and black women is shown to be tolerated, although not generally approved. Sexual relations between white women and black men were un

15、thinkable, although if brought to the conscious consideration of white society. 2.2 The plot of the novelThe Grass Is Singing is Mrs Lessings first novel. She gives up her secretarial job to write it, and she takes the manuscript to England with her in 1949.The novel is set in Africa, and in the fir

16、st chapter we learn that a white woman, Mary Turner, has been murdered by her black servant. We are then shown, in an extended flashback, her courtship and marriage. She escapes from a childhood of misery and poverty to work happily in the town. In her thirties she marries a lonely farmer, Dick, who

17、 takes her to live on a remote farm in the bush. Mary is sexually cold and socially reserved, and her marriage is bitterly unhappy. The only intimate relationship she has in her life is with the black servant. The conflict within her, the alternating love and hate toward Negro, the frightening aware

18、ness that she possesses the one emotion her society most violently condemns, leads to her murder. She is destroyed by her inability to reconcile a human emotion with her own deep commitment to the rigid line her society maintains berween white and black. Moses, the black servant who gains a subtle p

19、sychological dominance over her. When he sees the relationship threatened, he murders her. 2.3 The theme of the novelAs one of the most celebrated and distinguished writers of the second half of the twentieth century, Doris Lessing has written a lot of works on a wide variety of themes. Her first no

20、vel The Grass Is Singing, has been the focus of critical attention since its appearance. It is a high-tension story of a womans tragic life. The tragedy embodied in the heroine Mary Turner covers layers of meanings and implications. The novel traces how the female protagonist turns from a happy sing

21、le woman to an unhappy wife with nothing to do at home, and then to a hysteria virago and at last to a helpless and empty spirit. It reveals Moses motive of murder by analyzing his multiple relationships with Mary. Moses act of murder covers layers of meanings: it is a blacks victory over a white, a

22、 mans conquer of a woman, above all, it is the inevitable consequence of the confrontation of humanity with moral ethics. Yet, Moses influence over Mary goes far beyond his act of murder. He is also the leading factor of Marys spiritual collapse. Moses awakens the libido that has been asleep in Mary

23、 for years, which should have been the sole hope of Marys salvation. However, this is forbidden and tabooed by moral conventions, so Mary is subjected to serious mental torture, which quickens her pace of destruction.The theme reveals that Marys symbolic figure as a Waste Lander by analyzing her ali

24、enated relationships with her husband, her fellow woman, Mrs. Slatter and the white community represented by Charlie Slatter. The theme of the work is that Marys tragedy is rooted in the formation of her distorted personality under the shadow of her unhappy childhood, and leads by the confrontation

25、of humanity with moral ethics. Her tragedy is not a personal or typical one; rather, it predicts the tragic existence of every modern being on this barren waste land.3 Analysis of the Image of Mary in The Grass Is Singing This chapter analyses how Mary Turner, the protagonist ignores the self as a h

26、appy single girl, searches for the self as an antidote to her emptiness and loneliness and tears the self when lured by her black servant and finally fulfilled the self-salvation.3.1 The ignored selfNancy, the founder of The Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, argues that the first few years, for bo

27、th boys and girls, are preoccupied with issues of separation and individuation, which includes breaking or attenuating the primary identification with the mother and beginning to develop an individuated sense of self, mitigating the totally dependent oral attitude and attachment to the mother. In Th

28、e Grass Is Singing, specific information is not given much on Marys childhood, yet the brief description hits the point. “Girls, after the age of five or so, begin gradually to help their mothers in their work and spend time with their mothers” (Choldorow, 1989:65) Marys mother can only get some con

29、solation from her daughters company, for her husband has never brought home even a little happiness except drunkenness or quarrels over money. “A tall, scrawny woman with angry, unhealthy brilliant eyes. She made a confidante of Mary early. She used to cry over her sewing while Mary comforted her mi

30、serably, longing to get away, but feeling important too, and hating her father” (Lessing, 1994:39). Mary thus plays an important role in supporting her mother spiritually. Mother-daughter ties, seems to be composed of companionship and mutual cooperation, and to be positively valued by both mother a

31、nd daughter.Whats more, she runs errands for her mother. “She was always having to run across to bring a pound of dried peaches or a tin of salmon for her mother, or to find out whether the weekly newspaper had arrived.”(Lessing, 1994:38) Living in the bitterness of poverty, Mary seldom thinks of he

32、rself. She witnesses the hardships and unhappy married life her parents have had, which arouses her strong detestation and horror toward the village life. She feels herself important, not on behalf of her own, but for her mother. Happiness, for her, at first means no quarrels between her parents whe

33、n her two elders die of dysentery. Then, she is sent to boarding school and she is extremely happy because she dreads going home in holiday to face, again with hatred, her fuddled father and her bitter mother and the fly-away little house that is like a small wooden box on stiffs. At the age of sixteen she gets a job in