A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

the stage of self-actualization. Culture plays a vital role in shaping men and women mentally
and spiritually.
The Grass is Singing is set in southern Rhodesia, where the writer grew up. It tells the
story of a white woman, Mary who leaves the poor family farm on the veld to lead a happy
single life in the town until she feels pushed by her friends into seeking a husband. Disastrously
in a hasty way she marries Dick Turner, a poor stubborn farmer and in the frustration of a life
mirrioring her own mother’s gradually deteriorites into breakdown and in doing so crosses a
taboo. She tries to give up despising and hating natives in the way conventional with in her own
cultural context. She comes to rely physically and emotionally on her black servant, Moses.
When Tony, young man fresh from England, arrives on the farm, she sends Moses away only to
have him return and kill her.
The novel beginning with the newspaper report of the murder of Mary, a white by the
black servant Moses and the whites’ analysis of the murder mystery vividly presents the political
situation in the colonial context. The whites who turn in to poor farmers called the turners are
more sensitive about their superiority over the blacks, since the maintenance of the white
superiority is becoming increasingly difficult in economical and political terms. The
impoverished life style of Mary and Dick and Mary’s death have severely threatened white
solidarity, a quality carefully cherished in the colonial society. That is why the white farmers
who discuss the murder of Mary are content with a stereotypal interpretation of the motives for
Murder. What is every black servant but potential thief in the view of the whites? That Mary was
sexually attracted to Moses was almost unthinkable and culturally unspeakable to the whites. A
society of white settlers in Africa established discourses of power which have ways to subscribe
to any foreigner their priorities superior or inferior. Tony Marston, Dick’s manager, a white fresh
from England thwarts those prejudiced opinions and shocks the whites with his statements that
the motives for the murder of Mary are complicated by Mary’s emotional involvement with his
black servant. Lessing uses Tony to represent her impartial views that are against the colonial
myth of the whites. Through him the novelist both articulates and undermines the authority of the
liberal outsider particularly that of the British. Tony Marston performs an important function in
indicating how the novel is to be read.
But the important thing that really mattered, so it seemed to him
was to understand the background the circumstances, the