The Origin Of Mary’’s Madness: A Freudian Analysis The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing is one of the most important British novelists of the twentieth century. She was awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007 for her incredulity, passion and insight in analyzing a split civilization. Her works touch on many of the social taboos like women talking about their attitudes toward men with unprecedented freedom and a white woman being attracted to a black man. Her representative work, The Grass Is Singing, is a novel which touches the taboos of patriarchy and colonialism in white colonized South Africa. Many researches abroad and at home have been conducted on analyzing this novel from perspectives of postcolonialism, feminism and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, R. D. Liang and Carl Jung have been employed in analyzing the personality or the tragedy of Mary, the protagonist. Different from the previous studies, this paper tries to use Sigmund Freud’s personality theory of the id, the ego and the superego to explore the origin of Mary’s madness. By analyzing the inner conflicts and the imbalance among the id, the ego and the superego Mary suffered as a result of the power and supervision of the superego—patriarchy and colonialism, this paper tries to prove that the origin of her madness and final tragedy lies in the double oppression of patriarchy and colonialism. The Freudian analysis of The Grass Is Singing provides a new way of interpreting the novel and furthers the study on Doris Lessing and her novels.