A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

farm manager than Dick. However, this new freedom does not last. When Dick recovers from
his illness, she is not allowed to play the active role.
Being denied the active role and being unable to conform the acceptable role of wife
and mother, Mary lapses once more in to passivity, taking on the voice of the suffering female,
which she had watched her mother enact for many hears.
The Loss of identity and a mundane existence result in psychological imbalance which
can be set right only by good companionship. What she needs is a man stronger than her.
Naturally, she begins hating her goalless husband.
A turning point in Mary’s life comes, when Dick employs a Native Black servant,
Moses at home. Having already been boldly resisted by Moses in the farm once, she is afraid of
asserting her authority over him. To her surprise, Moses is a very obedient servant. When she
begins to like his gentleness and his kind care towards her, she falls in love with him. She is now
torn between her black attraction and her deeprooted contempt for the black natives nurtured in
the whites from their childhood. She now suffers a mental-breakdown.
Society and culture play a vital role in the life style of a man or a woman. Marriage is
imposed upon Mary; against her will and pleasure she marries Dick, since people ridicule her.
They comment on her age, her way of dressing and marriage prospects. An unmarried woman
has to face social-harassment and in order to avoid this; she has to succumb to marriage, a
socially accepted culture but alien to her mental make-up. Within her own society and culture,
Mary is compelled to be an alien as she cannot conform herself to the dictates of the society. She
has to sacrifice her independence.
When Mary has settled down with Dick in the (bush) countryside, she suffers from the
different kinds of conflicts at one and the same situation brought about by her faulty
psychological developments from her past experience in her youth. She suffers from a conflict
between her basic self concept to dislike a life on the countryside (as it is psychologically
associated with her mother’s suppressed life of misery and her grief and poverty-stricken life)
and her new social concept to accept it for the sake of her husband. Though she represses her
basic hatred for a country life for some while, when Dick fails and is reduced to poverty as her
father was, she develops hatred for the country life. As she wishes it is not possible to get away
from her husband once for all, she suffers from a conflict between her ideal self to revolt against
the dependent role of a woman and her basic self to accept the normal role of a Woman with her