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Dick can continually look the to future, but Mary already sees herself on the other side of wasted years this thought sends her into the despair we witness in the free indirect discourse of this passage. Mary realizes that all of her and Dick's plans to make money and resolve their debts, whether by raising pigs or planting tobacco, will likely end in naught. The miraculous reprieve was not going to be granted. It would certainly mean no more than a partial recovery. Dick's ineptitude with the farm disturbs her.
Narrator, 134Įven though Mary feels a sense of self-satisfaction after taking control of some farm operations while Dick is sick, ultimately she does not see herself as a person to run the place or to take Dick's place. She needed a man stronger than herself, and she was trying to create one out of Dick. When she saw him weak and goalless, and pitiful, she hated him, and the hate turned in on herself. She needed to think of Dick, the man to whom she was irrevocably married, as a person on his own account, a success from his own efforts.
When one, who we later learn is called Moses, does not immediately obey her, she feels deeply offended and ends up hitting him in the face with a sjambok. When Dick falls ill with malaria, Mary, already easily irritated by the native houseboys, goes to supervise the fieldworkers. And she saw in his eyes that sullen resentment, and-what put the finishing touch to it-amused contempt. She opened her mouth to storm at him, but remained speechless. That lazy insolence stung her into an inarticulate rage. The thought that she will therefore have to continue living in poverty makes her feel trapped and helpless. Narrator, 94Īs she spends more time married to Dick, Mary realizes that she cannot change how he thinks, nor can she influence him to run their farm better. The women who marry men like Dick learn sooner or later that there are two things they can do: they can drive themselves mad, tear themselves to pieces in storms of futile anger and rebellion or they can hold themselves tight and go bitter. This leads her to wonder what other sorts of things she has been overlooking in the past. She realizes first of all that the man is making fun of Dick, but then, more significantly, she realizes that she would not have noticed the former's undertone of ridicule before. Narrator, 89ĭuring a visit to the station with Dick, Mary hears a farmer making a thinly concealed joke at her husband's expense. She wondered for the first time, whether she had been deluding herself. GradeSaver, 5 November 2019 Web.She who had once taken everything at its face value, never noticing the inflection of a phrase, or the look on a face which contradicted what was actually being said, spent the hour’s drive home considering the implications of that man’s gentle amusement at Dick.
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As with The Golden Notebook (1962), the later novel that won her international attention, this first novel demonstrated Lessing's moral strength as a writer-the sort that the Swedish Academy would cite in awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, calling her "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." Next Section The Grass is Singing Summary Buy Study Guide How To Cite in MLA Format Lin, Alexander. The Grass is Singing was adapted into a film as Killing Heat in 1981. In the end, Moses murders her, and Dick Turner goes insane over being forced off of his farm by a more successful neighboring farmer.ĭoris Lessing published the novel, her first, in 1950, depicting the Southern Rhodesian society she knew intimately as it was in the 1940s. As she despairs in Dick and his attempts to improve their farm, Mary finds herself falling under the power of Moses. The Grass is Singing dramatizes the racial tensions between British colonialists and African natives in Southern Rhodesia by telling the story of a troubled sort of love triangle among perennially unsuccessful small farmer Dick Turner, his intelligent but repressed wife Mary, and their native houseboy Moses.