Search results for "female bodies"

The White Woman’s Haunted Body in Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing

2012

Underpinned by an interpretative grid where the analytic categories of gender and race are interwoven, the paper contends that Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), unveils and dismantles culturally-constructed inscriptions of the white female body as elaborated within the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British colonial discourses and largely reproduced at folk level. Exploring Lessing’s robust delineation of the entanglements of gendered sexuality and race-biased social constraints as active in the colonial context, the paper also suggests that the novel problematizes and recasts traditional British identity configurations from an authorial perspective which po…