In The Grass Is Singing Analysis

The story narrates Mary and Dick Turner’s as settlers on their farm in order to “demythologize” (Tseng 159) the constructed order of white colonial prestige. The Grass is Singing opens with a newspaper clipping with the headline: “Murder Mystery.” It recounts a murder in a cool tone:

Mery Tuner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murder on the front veranda of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is though he was in search of valuables. (GS 9)

The story presents a resolution of not just the mystery of the murder, but the mystery of white society’s reaction to the murder. It tells Mary Turner’s story as unspoken and unspeakable among the white settlers. Mary works in town and she is “leading the comfortable carefree existence of a single woman in South Africa” (GS 35). During these years Mary, although insensitive to her own feelings, is happy in the day to day activity of her life. The routine work at the office, the

“In the Grass is Singing, Doris Lessing reveals how racial domination penetrates into the most intimate psychological recesses of those who appear to be in privileged positions” (Manion 438). It is the starting point for her to find herself bound in an ambivalent identity. Mary Tuner’s “parents were South Africans and he had never been to England” (GS 32), but they respected ‘Englishness’ or ‘English identity’ as a crucial element of all the settlers in Africans lands. After her movement to Dick’s farm on the veldt among all those black native people, Mary had to regard English identity which had been in an ambivalent position after their movement in a new place with a new culture. “Mary’s problem, of course, is not simply a matter of needing something to fill her times, but rather her need of a sense of authentic identity” (Shabka