A Study Of Traumatic Themes In The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing(1919-2013)is taken as the greatest female writer after Virginia Woolf and has been one of the most prominent British writers for more than 50 years. In 2007, she won the Nobel Prize for literature and the Swedish Academy describes her as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny”. Thus Doris Lessing becomes the eleventh female writer as well as the oldest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her writing career had lasted for more than six decades with themes touching almost all the significant problems in the 20 th century.The Grass Is Singing is Doris Lessing’s first novel which plays an essential role in the literary career of Doris Lessing not only because it appears as a best-selling novel making its author famous, but also because it embodies the seeds of her later novels.The female protagonist Mary Tuner in the novel shares many similarities with Doris Lessing in her colonial growing up, poor life in her girlhood and the unfortunate married life. As the first novel to expose colonialism and racial segregation in the Southern Africa, the writer draws a picture of the real living condition of the white colonizers and the natives as well. The novel touches the problems of society, history, race, gender to disclose the consequences of the colonialism and racial segregation in the colony.The present thesis tries to make a traumatic study of The Grass Is Singing from the perspectives of family trauma, racial trauma, ecological trauma and cultural trauma. In so doing, it intends to argue that Doris Lessing is the forerunner to draw a real picture of the traumatic lives of both the white settlers and the black natives in the deteriorating and traumatic African colony.