A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

stinking quarrels between her parents because of her father’s uncontrollable drinking and brutal
behaviour and her mother’s frustration and impotence. At the age of sixteen, as a relief from this
monotonous life of her countryside, she takes a routine job of type-writing in the town. By the
time she is twenty, her mother dies. Hardly does she see her father. The novelist says:
Being lone in he world had no terrors for her at all
And by dropping her father, she seemed in some way to be
avenging her Mother’s sufferings. (Lessing 38)
Her bitter childhood experiences make her an arid feminist which seems to have no meaning at
all in her own life, since she leads a comfortable existence of a single woman in South Africa.
Women are shown active manipulators of other women. Mary’s move from the simple
status in to a disastrous marriage is caused by the malice of overheard women’s talk. Mary
ultimately succumbs to what her mother has nurtured in her mind, to what she has read in the
magazine and to what she has watched in the film. Though she is not alien to the cultural
concept-marriage, she commits a blunder and to have chosen Dick, a poor farmer and a
conservative her life-partner to have left a job and her active way of life in the town to play the
role of a suffering female like her mother. If she had married a person of dynamic nature who
believes in the equalitarian role of woman, she would have actualized her potentialities
It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the
interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one
know he will be able to create another to enable him to go on
living? Mary’s idea of herself was destroyed and she was not
fitted to recreate herself. (Lessing 52)
Though Mary has to make many sacrifices in her in her married life, Dick neither honors
them nor is prepared to provide her with normal domestic comforts. On the other hand every
time when he implements a new scheme on the farm and wastes a lot of money, Mary warns him
of the short-comings of the particular scheme and tries to prevent him from a heavy Loss. Dick
never listens to the ideas of Mary, but ends up as bankrupt and sells their lands. Because of the
authoritarian suppression, Mary longs to lead an active life. She exploits to the full, the sense of
power, given to her in the situation when her husband falls ill. In spite of the fact that her strict
adherence to her rules makes most of the workers leave, she proves herself to be a more efficient