A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

characters of Dick and Mary, the patterns of their lives’ (Lessing 27)
In pointing to the need to understand the deep rooted causes of Mary’s murder, Lessing
draws attention to the need to understand the different points of views.
‘The Grass is singing’ gives prominence to the political and economic factors in the
deterministic presentation of both the whites Mary and Dick. Mary’s hostility to men and her
loathing of the African bush can be attributed to her childhood, impoverished by her father’s
drinking and embittered by her mother’s struggle for economic survival. Dick’s failure in
farming can similarly be related to his failure in maintaining the better economical status than
that of a black. Economic factors alone however do not account for the loss of self esteem and
social approval experienced by the turners. In this society, financial success is a guarantee of
racial superiority. Without it, the white man or woman is reduced to the level of the native. The
individual’s failure thus threatens the myth of white superiority according to which black men
are poor because they lack the ability.
Doris Lessing unlike other feminists does not merely point out the problems of women
in terms of relationship between Man and Woman, but analyses and addresses their problems on
socio-cultural, political and psychological perspectives. As lessing feels, women’s problems in
colonial society are more complex, she is not reluctant to present those problems with that much
complexity as she had perceived and observed in the colonial society. As a radical feminist, she
calls for open discussions, reviews of people to probe out the truths, about the women’s
problems, buried under other major factors and terms in a colonial society of southern Rhodesia.
The writer does not want to miss the direction and reality with all her concentration focused upon
the only factor of man-woman relationship.
The novel ‘The Grass is singing’ as a radical, political form fed by social facts and
social urgencies is the pursuit of a true story underlying colonial fictions. As a radical realist,
Lessing makes a thorough study about the political matters and the social problems. He presents
those in new perspectives with her own observations. In the first chapter a white woman has
been murdered by her black servant and the readers are then shown in an extended flashback her
childhood, her courtship and her married life.
In Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing the heroine, Mary is forced through her marriage
to compromise with certain things. She has had an unhappy childhood, when she had to witness