When she saw him, she stopped dead, and stared at him with fear. Then her face, from being tormented, became
slowly blank and indifferent. He could not understand this sudden change. But he said, in a jocular uncomfortable voice : `There was once an empress of Russia who thought so little of her slaves, as human beings, that she used to undress naked in front of them.’ It was from this point of view that he chose to see the affair; the other was too difficult for him. `Was there?’ she said doubtfully at last, looking puzzled. `Does that native always dress and undress you?’ he asked. Mary lifted her head sharply, and her eyes became cunning. `He has so little to do,’ she said, tossing her head. `He must earn his money.’ – From The Grass is Singing The Grass is Singing is a psychological novel based upon the life of a distressed woman and her marriage in the backdrop of the Rhodesian society of the forties, in which the black people were treated shabbily by the
whites. This is the first novel of the Nobel prize winning author Doris Lessing. Soon after its publication in 1950, it became very popular in United States and Europe. Mary, the central character of the novel is a lifeless Rhodesian white woman who has married Dick Turner, a white farmer also working in Rhodesia. With a highly disturbed childhood, she finds herself totally unsuited to marriage. With the
decline of the fortunes of Dick, Mary develops an illicit relationship with Moses, one of the black farm workers of Rhodesia.This decline of Dick has been seen as a metaphor of the decline of whites in South Africa. Mary’s ill-treatment of black farm-workers and servants has been viewed critically in the novel. The problem of blacks and whites in South Africa was not due to their economic standards . Moses is depicted in the novel as an intelligent man who is bent upon preserving his dignity. The sexual intimacy between Mary and Moses comes to a tragic end with the murder of Mary in the hands of Moses, since attraction between a black person and a white person was not taken kindly in South African society at that time. When Lessing was five years old, her family moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia. They, like all white people of that time, had black servants and farmworkers, who worked without proper remuneration. She was not happy with this she grew older. She left school at the age of fifteen, and started living in Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia, up to the ageof 30. Lessing had married twice but both marriages failed miserably. This childhood experience of Lessing seems to be the motivating factor of writing her first novel which brought her instantly to the limelight of literary world.