부산대학교 도서관

The Grass is Singing has been seen by many critics as being mainly about the issue of racial discrimination. The novel records the decay and disintegration of both society and the individual owing to a lack of balance at both levels. This paper analyses the increase in consciousness attained by the main character in The Grass in Singing, Mary Turner, through her distress and misery. Doris Lessing has been consciously concerned with understanding and exploring the relationship between the individual and the collective, revealing her belief that the hope for man lies in the balance between his private and social selves. Her insistence on the importance of descent-of developing the inner realm of consciousness as an initial step in order to achieve a healthy relationship with the collective-forms the pivot of this early novel, where Mary Turner`s failure to understand her inner self-interests interacts with the oppressive social pressure of her environment. This interaction is the cornerstone to understanding the tragedy developed in The Grass is Singing. Later she moved to another outsider position, to that of antipsychiatry, for example, and more recently to that of Sufi mysticism, an interest now at last twenty years old. Yet Lessing`s example is radical. Her determinedly antimodernist practice is only in part related to her Maxist commitment. Lessing`s "profoundly dialectical consciousness" or her "competing codes", have been central to the interpretations of major Lessing critics. These interpretations imply a view of the dialectic that needs to be made more explicit. They have not been specifically Marxist; instead they have assumed that the dialectic refers to the conflict between opposites, a conflict that can involve interaction as well as polarity. Although Jung generously sprinkles his work with "paired opposites" and his influence on Lessing has been assumed by much American criticism, it would be a shock if Lessing`s work failed to register an awarness of Freud`s precedence. Freud`s whole "theory of mental life" is of course "a theory of conflict". In fact she probably finds the pschoanalytic theory of dreams, both the Freudian and the Jungian, more usable than any other aspect of psychoanalystic thought. The use of Oedipal theory is most marked in The Grass is Singing, Developing an inner realm which can combat society becomes the task of later heroines. The Grass is Singing, therefore, sets the pivot of the crucial test which all her later heroines face with varing degrees of success in their relationship with their community. In The Grass is Singing, however, Mary never undertakes this arduous journey that the later heroines must undergo. She therefore reaps negative results from her lack of equilibrium. However, this undeveloped challenge of facing the inner self clearly becomes the task of the protagonist of a later Lessing novel, The Golden Notebook