Analysis Of Doris Lessing's The Grass Is Singing

Doris Lessing is a modern writer contemporaneous with Africa's conditions and obstacles. Her experience helps her to picture African affairs. In 1950, Lessing tended to establish some distorted facts in Africa in her first novel The Grass is Singing. Part of the novel is an autobiography that she portrays her life indirectly. Lessing criticizes the whiteness ideology, although she is part of them. Accordingly, she is a realistic writer that spots light on false beliefs to reform society. She chose a particular setting in Africa to add to the realism of the novel. Rhodesia is a place where Lessing's parents moved to work in farming and to improve the economic standard of living. Lessing's parents moving to Rhodesia stand for any white person want to dominant natives there. Rhodesia is a land where the colonizers reach to settle and have permanent jobs and houses. It is familiar for Lessing to illustrate such an issue because she grew up until she was thirty. Thus, The Grass is Singing's characters are parallel to real citizens in Rhodesia for the author's dealing with them since her childhood. Moreover, racism spreads in southern Rhodesia as a policy. Statistically, about 38 % of Rhodesians were employed in wage labour; half of them are servants or parts of white people's property.

Eliot's line "the grass is singing" is a metaphor for Europe after the drastic war and show the decay of the modern era compared with the elevated past. Correspondingly, The Grass is Singing according to Lessing is a metaphor for showing the injustice of African society. She clarifies forms of oppression in the African landscape. This title is ironical carrying contrasting meaning to the incident of the novel. Throughout the novel, the grass is burned; withered and yellowish that abolishes the sense of singing. Thus, the intention beyond the title is to reflect the pessimistic vision of