Responses to "The Grass is Singing" by Doris Lessing

 The African landscape seems split into several sections. Mary comes from “town,” the heavily commercialized area where the colonialists tend to settle, it is the most “Brittainized” area in the novel. Mary is extricated from the town to live with Dick on his farm. The farms are part of the expanse of African wilderness where its inhabitants are subject to all the wiles of nature and consequences thereof. Charlie Sattler views Dick’s farm as a resource to be exploited, like his own farm, when Dick fails and the farm crosses into Charlie’s hands. To Charlie, farming is to make money. To Mary farming is nothing, and she’d rather have nothing to do with it. To Dick, farming is everything.

2.      The novel centers on an implied sexual relationship between Mary and Moses before her demise. A lot of the hard feelings felt towards Mary after her death were derived from this ambiguous relationship she had with her houseboy. There was a part of the novel that discusses how desperate the white man was to keep the natives in a subservient part of their culture, lest there be an uprising that would change the structure of the society and raise costs of labor. The traditional fear of black sexuality was that the savage black men would come to steal the virtue of the white women, and because it seemed Moses has succeeded in establishing this dominance, they would both suffer for the turbulence it would bring to society.

3.      Mary’s fears of marriage seem to stem from a fear of being dominated. She was always her own woman, not too unique but always responsible for her own decisions and actions. When she forsakes her longing to self-dominance and allows Dick to become her “master” she begins to seek dominance over the natives on the farm. She lives in an angry fear that the natives would be able to establish dominance over her one day, which is exactly what happens in the end.

4.      When Mary overhears her friends saying “she’s not like that” she becomes uneasy. She suddenly scrambles to avoid being this abnormality that her friends would discuss in distaste. She decides she must get married. Because she forced herself against her own nature, because Mary was indeed “not like that,” she set herself on this track that would lead her into misery. When she finally breaks down at the end the book, she reflects on this statement and how it led her to this despair.

5.      Lessing doesn’t criticize the myth of the sexually potent black man at all. Moses establishes both mental and sexual dominance over Mary, and when she asks him to leave, he murders her.

6.      The Turner’s house is the cage in which Mary and Dick are trapped. Dick recognizes this, but seems to have learned to cope with it. Mary struggles between wanting to leave and not being able to, this confinement drives her mad with depression and insecurity.

7.      Moses could almost be seen as the personification of all of the forces that working towards Mary’s destruction. His point of view is as mute as nature’s itself. He is this momentum that Mary fights against, her dominance and will are pit against his, but he is almost more setting than character, he seems to have no thoughts or feelings of his own, but only a capacity to push.

8.      Mary is constantly drawing parallels between the marriage of her parents and her own. Her mother was trapped in an unhappy marriage where she felt her husband wasn’t supporting her or provided the life she wanted. Her father was not necessarily a mean man, but he was a drunk and a symbol of dominance and gravity in Mary’s mind. Much like her father, Moses gained dominance over Mary and became this paternal, masterful figure.,

9.      Mary would like to have economic independence, but is unable. She attempts to gain some when she enjoys a brief stint of power over the farm, but her endeavor fails. She tries to exercise some sort of economic control through Dick to change the way the farm is run, she tries to manipulate him into treating the natives the way she felt they ought to be and grow the crops she thought she should. She treats her identity in much the same way, she is defined by the things that make her miserable and by the shortcomings of those around her.

10.  Mary’s character is confined by the institutions of marriage, “slavery,” and economy. Her loveless, cold, marriage with Dick tied her to the farm she hated and life she despised. The master-slave relationship she held with the natives demanded that she struggle for dominance, a struggle in which she would ultimately fail, which would cause her destruction. The institution of economy keeps Mary in poverty, an endless cycle that even further tied her to the life she hated and relationships she loathed.

11.  Mary’s psychological breakdown occurs shortly after Moses becomes a paternal figure, a dominant one. When they had their first interaction in the field, Mary becomes physically terrified when she thought Moses was about to strike her. This display of fear made her always uneasy around him as her houseboy. When their relationship would alter to a latently sexual, “slave” dominated exchange, her psyche could bear the struggle no longer and she succumbed to all that worked against her, and broke down.

12.  For Mary, salvation would be brought through the leaving the farm. When her breakdown began, it was largely in part due to her acceptance of this fate. Her visions of living in town again were dashed, and hope was dismantled. Even in her death, she is tormented by the disdain of the people whose opinions she felt mattered more than her own identity, the opinions that would lead her to Dick’s farm.