A Woeful Song Of The "Other"

This thesis is aimed at interpreting English writer Doris Lessing’s first novel TheGrass is Singing (1950) from the perspective of postcolonial criticism. Throughdiscussing the causes and destructive consequences of being the “Other” of the blacknatives and the white women, this thesis argues that in the colonial Southern Africansociety, the fate of the “Other” is inevitably tragic owing to colonialism andpatriarchal system. Lessing once said that we lived in a series of prisons called race,class, male and female. There were always those classifications. Through analyzingthe text of the novel, we can find that in The Grass is Singing, Lessing presents to thereaders how the black natives on the colonies are turned to be the enslaved “Other”under the white colonizers’“Orientalist Gaze” in “the prison of race”; and how thewhite women are turned to be the marginalized “Other” in “the prison of patriarchy”.Being the “Other” causes their loss of the voice and subjectivity, and leads to the finaltragedy. The Grass is Singing is actually a woeful song for the helpless “Other”.