An Interpretation Of Mary’s Living Spaces In The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing(1919-2013)was regarded as the greatest woman writer after Woolf.She was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.The Grass Is Singing was Lessing’s first novel,which established her remarkable position in the literary arena.This novel sets the apartheid,South Africa,as background.On this “wasteland”,patriarchal discourse,racial segregation,and hierarchical conflicts within white colonists interweave intricately.A considerable number of researches about this novel have been done at home and abroad.However,previous studies mainly focus on feminism,postcolonialism,psychoanalysis,and so on.“women’s survival” is a paramount issue that runs through Lessing’s works.Therefore,this thesis makes researches from the spatial perspective,based on Lefebvre’s spatial criticism,and assisted by Foucault’s power-space theory,exploring the female protagonist Mary Turner’s living spaces from physical spaces,social spaces,and psychological spaces,attempting to investigate spaces’ metaphorical functions in interpreting the theme of Mary Turner’s survival predicaments,and revealing Mary’s difficult living spaces and the inevitability of her tragic destiny under the powerful disciplinary spaces.Firstly,Mary has been living in confined and alienated physical spaces from her childhood to adulthood to married life.The Southern African dorp and the store represent her rootlessness as the exiled white and her miserable childhood.The Southern African town where she works and socializes is a space under surveillance.The house in the veld after marriage is the representation of white identity and gender.No matter where Mary lives in,she suffers a series of survival crises.Secondly,in oppressive social spaces,the unharmonious family relationship,white capitalist’s alienation,and oppression,and patriarchal discourse’s oppression cause her living predicaments.What’s more,the deformed interracial love with Moses catalyzes her survival predicaments.Consequently,in her psychological space,her deformed sexual desires form serious sexual repression,the unbalance of the outer world and inner world form twisted “self”,then she demonstrates her “death’s desire” to liberate herself.As a humanitarian writer,Lessing compresses many conflicting elements such as identity,gender,hierarchy,and power into a limited space,South Africa,thus demonstrating the marginalized “other” poor white woman’s difficult living spaces in powerful disciplinary spaces realistically.Lessing expresses her deep concerns for women’s living conditions incisively.Meanwhile,she warns women to take positive spatial practices to resist discipline and walk out their roads alone.