The grass is singing door Doris Lessing

A. CONTENTS

1. Summary
The first chapter of the book is a flash-forward. It starts with a newspaper report; Mary Turner, wife of the farmer Richard Turner was found murdered. The houseboy has been arrested and he had confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is thought he was in search of valuables. A young Englishman who is just in Africa, and who was stayed with the Turners has his ideas, but he hold his peace. In the next chapter the story goes back to the past. The history of Mary=s life is told. She lived a lighthearted life in the town till she was thirty. She waked up to the fact that she was on her way to become an old maid. She rushes into marriage with Dick Turner, a poor farmer of a distant farm. Complete inprepared and unaware of the life on a farm, she arrives. The life reminds her to her own poor youth. Her marriage to Dick isn=t a succes and she is very unhappy. She can=t mix with the black servants. She=s lonely and the life on the farm is monotonous. After failed projects with bees, pigs and turkeys, Dick starts a store and Mary has to serve the natives. She runs away to the town, but after a while she comes back. Dick falls ill and Mary has to run the farm. She hates the black population, the farmer=s life and Dick the misfit. After she has sent the hundredth (black) houseboy away, there=s Moses. Moses is an high developed, English speaking seasonal worker. At any time, Mary has strucked him in his face with a whip. Moses is the new houseboy. Mary is fascionated by him. He can read and write and he does his work perfect. But she doesn=t forgot that he=s a native, she hates him as native. But for the first time, she doesn=t see a native only like a working machine or like a dog. When Moses threats to go away too, she becomes hysterical. Dick has said that he, after Moses, wouldn=t engage an other houseboy. Moses promises her to stay, provided that she behaves reasonable. So, the tables are turned. When Dick gets a malaria attack, Mary is complete at the mercy of Moses. After Dicks illness, Slatter, a rich neighbour of the Turners visits them. He is frightened of the circumstances they lived him, and the whole situation. He makes Dick an handsome proposal. He present him to buy the farm, to pay his debts and to engage a replacer for six months so that Mary and Dick would go on holiday. Tony, a young Englishman, becomes engaged as temporary manager. Tony is frightened when he see that Moses helps Mary to put on her clothes. He feels shocked and affirm in his ideas about the seksual hypocrisy in Africa. He finds that Mary is totally confused. Tony chases Moses away. In the night after the next night, the night before Mary and Dick would go on holiday, Moses kills Mary.

2. Time and place of action
The first chapter is a flash forward. Mary is killed and >nobody= knows the motive of the murder. The second chapter describes the life of Mary before she married to Dick and how she married to him. Before the marriage she lived in a town in Southern Africa, after her marriage she has to live on the country. The rest of the chapters describes the period they are married (two years?). It will be about the beginning of this century.

3. Historical background
There is an important background in to story, but I don=t know if it is an historical one. Doris Lessing scrutnized the relations between whites and blacks in Southern Africa. She writes too about the hypocritical double seksual moral and about the labour proportions. All this things were taboo in the beginning of this century, but Lessing writes about all this themes in her book(s).

4. Title
The title >The Grass is Singing= was taken from the poem >The Waste Land=, written by T.S. Elliot in 1922. It is Elliot=s second important poem. Here modern life is portrayed as a land of desert and rocks, lacking water upon which life depends. The >singing grasses= is a result of the noise of the cicadas. They only make this noise when it is dry or hot, exactly the weather Mary hates.

The Waste Land

In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind=s home. It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico, co co rico
In a flash of lightening. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder

T. S. Elliot

B. CHARACTERIZATION

1. Main characters
2. flat-round
3. development
Mary Turner. She\'s a strange woman, she\'s a misfit, socially, sexually and geographically. She didn\'t want to marry, but she did, because other people were gossiping about her. She loves the city. She hates living in the middle of nowhere. Besides this, she\'s afraid of the natives and tries to make them see she\'s the boss. She also hates sex. Dick (Richard) Turner. He married Mary. He loves living in the country and he loves farming, but he doesn\'t do this well. He\'s very poor and he doesn\'t make much money. As a man he wants to get married, because he wants children and he wants company. Moses. He\'s yhe houseboy, in the last part of the story. He has been hitten by Mary. Later, when he is fired as a houseboy, he kills Mary. Tony Marston. He\'s young guy, who just came from England. Charlie Slatter found him in the city an brought him to Dick Turner, because Dick is bankrupt and Carlie wants Tony to run the farm for at least 6 months, while Dick en Mary would be on holiday. Charlie Slatter. He means society for the Turners. This 20-year-old man once was a grocer\'s assistant in London. Charlie is Dick\'s friend, but only because otherwise they would be lonely. They talk a lot about farming. Mrs. Slatter. She\'s Charlie\'s wife. Later, she hates Mary en Mary hates Mrs. Slatter. She gossips.

4. How to know the characters
You learn about the characters by the description the writer gives of them. A good example is the description the writer gives to Charlie Slatter, in the beginning of the book. There is no dialogue. There is only the description.

C. FORM

1. Literary genre
This book is a psychological detective, because in the first chapter you read that Mary Turner is murdered. The murder must be solved. Then in the next chapter and following you read about her life. How she lives, how she thinks about things etc. That\'s the psycological part of it.

2. Constructing
The book has eleven chapters. In every chapter there is a development in the life. Mary learns about things and how other think about her.

3. Chronological order, flashbacks
The writer uses the flashback technique. In the first chapter you read about the present time: Mary Turner is murdered. In the mext chapter you suddenly notice that you read about Mary\'s life in the passed.

4. Suspense
There isn\'t any suspense in the book. You only read about Mary=s life. There isn\'t any suspense, because you already know who murdered Mary.

D. AUTHOR / BACKGROUND

1. Personal information
Doris Lessing was a British novelist and short-story writer. She is born at 22 October 1919 in Persia. When she was five she moved with her British parents to a farm in Southern Rhodesia. In her first published novel, The Grass is Singig, did she wrote about that period of het life. The novel shows her feelings about the farm and the lifestyle. The story is not het life, but ground on her own experiences. Doris left school when she was fifteen and worked as a nursemaid, then as a shorthand typist and telephone operator in Salisbury. After the break-up of her first mariage she became involved in radical politics. She was a communist. Maybe that is de reason why she wrote about a white farmer\'s wife and her black servant and about the violent conclusion of their relationship. In a interview she shows her hatred of the way black people be treaten. Doris Lessing said communism is based on hatred. In her period of communist she didn\'t saw it, but later, she knew what was wrong. She remarried in 1945, but in 1949 she left for England with her youngest child; soon afterward she was declared a Prohibited Immigrant and barred from Rhodesia until the advent of black majority rule in 1980. Her novel The Grass is Singing is inspired by the first part of het life, the novel presaged Doris\' continuing fascination with misfits and madness and it shows the psychological insight of her later work. In the person of Mary Turner, she sees what she was; an outsider, a misfit.

2. Author - Literary period
Doris Lessing is born in 1919. The twentieth century will go down in history as an age characterized by the rise of science and the decline of religion. The place of the church became important in de modern society, but we didn\'t see this aspect in the novel The Grass is Singing.

We see the civilization and intimacy between whites and natives (which was forbidden). Doris Lessing doesn\'t belong to a fixed literary period but we can see the influence of communism in her work.

E. THEME

1. Why the writer wrote this book
Lessing\'s work is characterized by a strong and political commitment. Her early work reflects her Marxist sympathies. So she writes books to tell people how she thinks about things.

2. Themes of Lessing=s works
Her themes are social psychological. The theme in this book is human isolation and alienation, because Dick Turner doesn\'t understand Mary, neither do the people around her. She builds a wall around het and doesn\'t like to be with people anymore. She doesn\'t like to be judged by people.

F. EVALUATION

1. Our opinion about this work
We didn\'t like the book very much, because it was rather boring. You only read how Mary Turner lives, or how she thinks. There isn\'t very much suspense in the book. There didn\'t happen very much.

2. Ethical point of view
We learn from the book: when you are isolated, it\'s often your own fault. If you look at Mary, you see that she doesn\'t get alone with the people around her.

3. Aesthetic point of view
It isn\'t a very special book. We think it doesn\'t have something special. It was a bit boring.