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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Decay, Disease and Death in Doris Lessing's "The Grass Is Singing": A Feminist Perspective

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The article analyses Lessing’s first and highly acclaimed novel of 1950, whose action is set in Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s (the country remained British self-governing colony until 1980). Its interpretation from the feminist and gender perspectives, which also involves issues of race and class, is closely related to the themesof decay, disease and death. The process of identity formation of the heroine appears to be the case of social constructionism, for it is completed on her spouse’s farm where Mary comes to live with the man who proves to be inadequate as a husband and farmer, and ultimately as a representative of the white race. The major causes of the gradual collapse and tragic end of the two protagonists as well as of their farm can be seen as lying, on the one hand, in the kind of masculine gender identity that Mary assumes, and on the other, in the disintegration of Dick Turner as a subject, that is in his failure as an autonomous, independent, and self-determining individual.