They have difficulty keeping a servant until Dick assigns his best field hand, Moses, to the house. Black people have never been part of Mary's world, and she treats them with frigid contempt. The natives, whom Dick employs on the farm, are a further source of tension. The Turners' barren existence is contrasted with the fierce beauty of the land, to which they are oblivious. Their white neighbors make overtures of friendship, but, out of shame at her poverty, Mary rejects them. When Mary becomes involved in the running of the farm, she realizes that its failure is not down to bad luck, as Dick keeps telling her, but his incompetence. From the beginning, they are distant and cold, but, except when Mary briefly runs away, fear of loneliness and lack of money keep them together. Dick is also in a hurry to wed, because he is very lonely and unhappy clawing a bare living from a subsistence farm and living in a bare, ugly little house. But, after overhearing her friends laugh at her as sexless and immature, she resolves to marry, and when Dick Turner asks her she consents, though she has met him only twice. The bulk of the novel is the story of Mary's life.Īfter a loveless, wretched childhood, Mary is contented with her life as an office worker in a city in Rhodesia. The novel begins with a newspaper clipping about the death of Mary Turner, a white woman, killed by her black servant, Moses. The novel created a sensation when it was first published and became an instant success in Europe and the United States. It takes place in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in southern Africa, during the 1940s and deals with the racial politics between whites and blacks in that country (which was then a British Colony). CRT theorists ascribe the utilization of speech and silence to power relation in societies governed by patriarchal authority and inherited social norms consequently they require racial emancipation and insubordination to all sorts of prejudice.The Grass Is Singing is the first novel, published in 1950, by the British author Doris Lessing. The paper investigates how the novel gives chances to each character to express openly his/her story, showing the situations in which silences are their finest choices. Both of them sometimes find difficulties in articulating their thoughts, and some other times they find it suitable to explain their viewpoints and narrate their stories. In Lessing’s novels the colonist and the colonized exchange silences and storytelling in their communications. Therefore, CRT theorists call for the confession of the occurrence of such a phenomenon, then the urgent need to eradicate it. Unlike other civil rights movements and liberal approaches, which deny the existence of discrimination at present, CRT emphasizes the continuation of racial biases even in the most urbanized countries. Actually, silence and storytelling are recurrent terms in the Critical Race Theory (CRT), a theory devoted to curing social injuries caused by imperialism and racialization. The paper traces the employment of silence and storytelling as significant techniques fortifying those themes and spotlighting their atrocities. The present paper examines Lessing’s first novel The Grass Is Singing (1950) as a literary work introducing the themes of apartheid and colonialism with a deliberately unique vision. SILENCE AND STORYTELLING IN DORIS LESSING'S THE GRASS IS SINGINGĪrticle 13, Volume 65, Issue 1, Summer 2018, -466 PDF ( 715.04 K)ĭoris Lessing’s novels and short stories have been exposed to frequent criticisms, especially after her winning the Noble Prize in Literature in 2007, due to their complex natures and the unavoidable messages they occasionally deliver.
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