IB English A1 -- Grass Is Singing

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The Grass Is Singing – Study Notes from www.skoool.ie

In common with many novels in the social realist tradition, The Grass is Singing is not

merely art for art's sake. It has a didactic, political purpose. Lessing's two great concerns,

the evil of colonialism and the evil of patriarchal societies (societies in which men set the

rules and standards and women are thus subordinated), form the fundamental themes of

this novel.

Mary Turner's life is tragic. She is effectively forced into marriage by the weight of social

expectations and traditions. She never loves her husband, but she is - at least initially -

glad to have one, as it makes her "normal". From the moment she marries, however, she

is engaged in a losing battle to hold on to her own identity. The struggle becomes too

much for her, and eventually her mind gives. There is no redemption. The moral of the

novel could not be starker.

Perhaps Mary's tragedy is all the deeper on account of the fact that she never realises that

the native Africans who must work the farms of the white settlers are just as much tragic

victims as she is. She treats all her house boys dreadfully; she despises their carelessness,

their laziness, and their failure to pander adequately to her. At one moment, when she

replaces her sick husband in the fields, she is thoroughly brutal with the black farm

hands. One is left with a sense that when prejudice and false ideas generated by self-

interest become institutionalised, they cloud the perception of people so thoroughly that

even the victims are capable of victimising others.

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Genre

The genre of this novel could be termed social realism. It deals with modern issues,

specifically Rhodesian white culture with its racist and prejudiced attitudes.

General Vision or Viewpoint

The unity between the opening and conclusion of this novel serves the function of

making a powerful statement about the issues treated in this novel. Both opening and

conclusion show the murder of Mary by Moses the black servant together with the

immediate reaction from the white population.

The general vision at the conclusion seems to be how fragile and shaky is the hold which

the whites insist on having in Africa. Mary’s relationship with her black servant Moses

shatters the complacency of the whites in Africa. Moses’ power in the relationship is

unquestionable and real. His action in murdering Mary is simply a demonstration of the

control which he exerts over her and in general which the blacks have in their own

country still. The whites retain a hold based on lies and corruption. This is demonstrated

in the way Charley Slatter and Sergeant Denham conduct the interview with Marston the

manager, and in how they bully and undermine him in case he might tell the full story

about the situation. The system of gross injustice dominates this society.

Cultural Context

Rhodesia in the 1930s/40s was dominated by white culture and its accompanying

attitudes and mores. Social standing was important and the native Africans were second-

class citizens. The work ethic is strong.

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The environment and weather have a significant part to play. Mary cannot stand the heat

when she moves to the farm and we are introduced to the native methods for bringing

water for bathing. We note that people have different methods of working the land,

varying from Dick's fondness for his land to Charley's extreme cruelty towards his.

The local culture is not rich and the humiliating results of poverty are always apparent.

Even the shop has terrible memories for Mary, who remembers her mother trying to steal

money from her drunken father to raise enough to buy food.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a newspaper announcement of the murder of Mary Turner at the

hands of Moses, a black house-boy. The rest of the novel traces Mary's story, from her

young and happy days in the town, through her unwise marriage to Dick Turner, to her

eventual derangement and death.

It is pressure from her friends in the city that pushes Mary into marriage, but she soon

comes to regret it. She is cut off from her city friends, isolated in a ramshackle farmhouse

in a hostile landscape, and married to a farmer whose every venture is an abysmal failure.

At one point her discontent reaches such a pitch that she runs back to the city where she

had been so happy before. But starting again is impossible. She has been so long away

that even her clothes mark her off as being of the poor farmer class. Her attempt to get

her old job back fails badly and leaves her humiliated.

Eventually, her husband arrives to bring her back to the farm. She is so dispirited that she

goes with him uncomplainingly - back, so to speak, to serve the rest of her sentence.

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Her mental health deteriorates still further. She is filled with a profound hatred of her

social situation, and she begins to take this hatred out on Moses, the latest of a series of

black house-boys. Her relationship with him is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, it is

governed by her received ideas about class and colour; on the other, she becomes ever

more dependent on him. These mixed dispositions cause confusion for both of them, and

at last Moses, unable to stomach her humiliation of him, kills her. The impression is

strongly given that Mary has, at some level, brought this upon herself wilfully.

Themes and Issues

Money

This is a culture where being rich provides superiority. Charley Slatter is an example of

such success for the Turners. He uses his financial power to gain respect in the

community and to take over the Turners' farm. On the other hand, the Turners' lack of

money adds to the community's dislike of them. In this instance, their lack of money

reduces them to the level of the natives, although to admit this would be unacceptable.

For the sake of appearances, the community must pretend to support them.

Emotional Failure

Mary is not only financially poor, she also lacks a spiritual life. Her hard childhood

produced an insecure woman who cannot form relationships and shuns sexuality. Friends

in the city assumed she would not marry, which pushed her into a doomed marriage and

into a fascination with Moses. By the end, she is motivated by fear and obsession which

leads to a breakdown and subsequent death.

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Mary cannot stand Dick, who is not a successful farmer despite various attempts, which

Mary comes to recognise as incompetence. This is a sharp contrast to Charley's wealth of

ability to exploit land and workers.

Dick's emotional failure is also apparent after Mary dies. He is described as "incurably

mad." He and Mary are tragic figures through their failure to address the difficulties in

their lives, both emotional and practical.

Colonialism

This novel presents the basic conflicts of white colonialism in African culture and the

reader is prompted to question its values.

Prejudice is not limited to the native Africans. There is a strong sense of necessary

bonding between the white population, something which Mary and Dick are not part of.

They lived in very basic conditions and were despised by the rest of the community

because "they did not recognise the need for esprit de corps." This attitude was prevalent

long before the murder.

Tony Marston is a character used by Lessing to accentuate these double standards. He is

confused and conflicted by what he sees around him, notably during the murder

investigation which seems nominal and involves a Sergeant who somehow seems

complicit, to the extent that Marston's "ideas of right were upset."

The hypocrisy of the community is accentuated in Chapter One, "…to live with the

colour bar in all its nuances and implications means closing one's mind to many things, if

one is to remain an accepted member of society."

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Links

Analysis

http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/0498/0498lynda.htm

Review of Lessing's autobiography

http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~litrev/199710/166.html

Website about Doris Lessing

http://lessing.redmood.com/

"Lessing uses symbolic images of rooms to illustrate the limitations that individuals,

particularly women, experience because of the patriarchal collective, in both "To

Room Nineteen" and The Grass is Singing." (Lynda Scott, University of Otago)

Here I examine Lessing's first novel The Grass is Singing (1950), her short story "To

Room Nineteen" (1978), The Summer Before the Dark (1973), and Martha Quest and A

Proper Marriage, the first two novels of Children of Violence. The reason that I group

them together is because each text deals with Lessing's constant preoccupation between

an individual's conscience and that of the wider collective, although in neither of her texts

do her protagonists seek deliberately to break down into madness as they will in later

texts and in The Golden Notebook. Since Lessing's interest in Sufic thought almost

coincides with the publication of The Golden Notebook (1962), understandably it is only

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after this date that her protagonists most fully confront archetypal images and aspects of a

Jungian self.

Lessing's The Grass is Singing and "To Room Nineteen" are most remarkable for their

accurate depiction of her characters' self-annihilation. Such a death, whether literal or

psychological, occurs because the characters cannot act independently of the ideologies

which impinge upon them. Kate Brown is more fortunate in developing a sense of a more

complete self than Martha in these early Children of Violence texts. In a similar way to

Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook, who decides to become a social worker, Kate

Brown returns to her family responsibilities with a heightened sense of self-knowledge

and identity. Unlike Anna though, Kate Brown never seeks "madness" nor does she allow

her self to merge with the collective unconscious in the same way. Her psychic

transformation falls short of the Sufic ideal of individual evolution through an exploration

of subjectivity and a corresponding realisation of one's inherent potential.

In both Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage, Martha is resentfully cognisant of

collective pressures which include, as was the case for Mary Turner, a societal

expectation for her to marry conventionally. In contrast to Mary Turner, and Susan

Rawlings in "To Room Nineteen," however, Martha fights, even if unsuccessfully, against

these collective forces. Like Kate Brown, she makes conscious efforts to develop her own

definition and statement of selfhood. She differs from Kate though, in that she decides to

leave her marriage, rather than to return to it.

* * * * * * * * * *

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In her first novel The Grass is Singing (1950), Lessing sets up the model of the collective

experience, then illustrates how Mary attempts to adapt herself to andocentric

expectations about women even though she is unsuited to them. Then she undercuts these

expectations and these artificial constructions of selfhood with Mary's personal

experience of negating self through death. It is significant that Mary "could have become

a person on her own account. But this was against her instinct."1 It is this unwillingness

and inability to act on her own account which distinguishes her from other women

protagonists of Lessing's transitional or intermediate novels. In later works such as

Children of Violence, The Golden Notebook, and The Memoirs of a Survivor, Lessing's

heroines undertake successful journeys towards individuation. These protagonists are

active and dynamic whereas Susan Rawlings and Mary Turner choose only to die.

Lessing states of Mary's life that "it was a passive one, in some respects, for it depended

on other people entirely" (35). Her life becomes the object of other people's

commentaries since "she was not playing her part, for she did not get married" (36).

When she inadvertently overhears friends discussing how "[s]he just isn't like that," she is

spurred into looking for a marriage partner in order to fulfil patriarchal expectations (39).

In The Grass is Singing, then, Lessing reveals the consequences of a protagonist's failure

to reconcile personal experience and aspects of her personal identity with the dictates of a

wider collective. For example, Mary does not consciously seek to explore her past and

her unhappy childhood, even though she makes every effort to live an existence different

to that of her mother. By her obdurate and unexamined attempts to reject the way her

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parents lived, Mary, like the Martha of the early novels of Children of Violence, repeats

their mistakes. She resists marriage because

[w]hen Mary thought of "home" she remembered a wooden box shaken by passing trains;

when she thought of marriage she remembered her father coming home red-eyed and

fuddled; when she thought of children she saw her mother's face at her children's funerals

— anguished, but as dry and as hard as rock. Mary liked other people's children but

shuddered at the thought of having any of her own. She felt sentimental at weddings, but

she felt a profound distaste for sex; there had been little privacy in her home and there

were things she did not care to remember; she had taken good care to forget them years

ago. (37-38)

It is partly Mary's refusal to come to terms with the sexual side of marriage that causes

the later sterility of her own marriage.

Her initial fear of sexuality bars her from entering into a relationship, and when her

acceptance of a proposal is rewarded with a kiss, a "violent revulsion overcame her and

she ran away" (42). Understandably, when she experiences love-making for the first time

with her new husband Dick Turner, she is unable to meet him sexually. Instead, "she was

able maternally to bestow the gift of herself on this humble stranger and remain

untouched" (57). With relief she thinks, "[i]t was not so bad ... not as bad as that. It meant

nothing to her, nothing at all" (57). Having experienced sex, however, she does not want

children. Maternity would mean a deeper, more personal confrontation with her sexuality,

which she refuses to acknowledge. Once, when she passes a group of African women, she

knows that she hated the way they suckled their babies, with their breasts hanging down

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for everyone to see; there was something in their calm satisfied maternity that made her

blood boil. "Their babies hanging on to them like leeches," she said to herself shuddering,

for she thought with horror of suckling a child. The idea of a child's lips on her breasts

made her feel quite sick; at the thought of it she would involuntarily clasp her hands over

her breasts, as if protecting them from a violation. (105)

Her revulsion towards her own body becomes significant later in the novel when she

allows Moses to view her as she dresses.

Mary's horror of sexuality is inextricably linked with an inescapable past. Although she

banishes thoughts of her childhood from her consciousness, her fear of her father

becomes manifest in her dream life. Dreams reveal her need to become reconciled with

her past in order to live a whole and balanced life in the present. In one unpleasant dream,

[t]here was her father, the little man with the plump juicy stomach, beer-smelling and

jocular, whom she hated, holding her mother in his arms. ... Her mother was struggling in

mock protest, playfully expostulating. Her father bent over her mother, and at the sight,

Mary ran away. (189)

In another dream in which she plays hide-and-seek, [h]er father caught her head and held

it in his lap ... to cover up her eyes. ... She smelled the sickly odour of beer, and through it

she smelled too — her head held down in the thick stuff of his trousers — the unwashed

masculine smell she always associated with him. She struggled to get her head free, for

she was half-suffocating, and her father held it down, laughing at her panic. (190)

This last dream must have autobiographical significance, for Lessing repeats it in The

Memoirs of a Survivor, which she calls her "attempt at an autobiography," and again in

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her actual autobiography Under My Skin. It exemplifies Lessing's use of self-

representational writing to confront, examine, and exorcise frightening aspects of her

past, something which Mary Turner never does. Mary does not learn from her past, and it

comes to haunt her marriage to Dick Turner. The union is a mistake, since she marries in

order to prove she is like her conventional friends, who settle, happily, it seems, into

marriage and family life. Mary cannot become like them because she is neither willing to

remember her childhood nor to learn from it. Because of this failure she does not mature

emotionally or psychically.

Not only does she not reconcile herself with her past, but she also does not attempt to

adapt herself to her hated present. For example, she dislikes accompanying Dick out on to

the lands and shrinks from having to observe the unprofitable farm, which traps her.

Because she holds fast to the racist assumptions about Africans taught to her by her

parents, she becomes fearfully insistent that their workers are pilfering her household

belongings. Alone day after day in the house, with the sun beating down relentlessly on to

the roof directly above, her entrapment forces her into a close contact with Moses, who

makes her confront her abhorrence and fear of African people and her lack of knowledge

about them. Paradoxically, when he becomes her house servant, Moses gains power over

her. This is because she cannot forget the occasion when she once hit him, and she fears

that he will retaliate. For Mary then, sex, fear and violence are intimately connected.

Moses mesmerises and obsesses her as he carries out his household duties in clothes that

are too small for him, in a house which seems too large, filled up with his bulk.2

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Mary's unexamined fear of her own sexuality, a fear shared by Maudie Fowler in The

Diaries of Jane Somers, and Mrs Quest and Emily's mother in Memoirs, causes her to

retreat into grotesque parodies of the conventional flirtatious behaviour expected of

young matrons and the unmarried women of the town. She behaves inappropriately

towards both Charlie Slatter and Moses, and disgusts Charlie when she violates the

unwritten social code between white people and their black servants by allowing Moses

to be overly familiar with her.

Because of Mary's inability to act satisfactorily within patriarchal and social boundaries

the marriage is doomed to failure. Lessing comments of Dick (the statement applies

equally to Mary) that "[i]t is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself [sic] in the

interests of truth or some other abstraction. How can one know he will be able to create

another to enable him to go on living" (43). Mary's marriage to Dick forces her to enter

into an adult life for which she is not ready, and to abandon her life as a popular

companion in the town for a life of solitude and isolation. Lessing points out the

differences between Dick, who although he has no success as a farmer, feels at one with

the veldt and nature, and Mary, who cannot adjust to the harshness of her new life. For

Mary, "it was impossible to fit together what she wanted for herself, and what she was

offered" (44). Through Mary's slow descent into lethargy, Lessing reveals to the reader

just such an inability to forge a personal sense of self independently of Dick or the

expectations of others.

Partly because neither Mary nor Dick develops their own sense of selfhood, both

immediately regret their decision to marry. But it is too late. Mary's new life of

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respectable poverty and struggling decency binds her to her past, and upon arriving at

Dick's after her wedding she comes to know that "this tiny stuffy room, the bare brick

floor, the greasy lamp, were not what she had imagined" (55). A gap opens up between

the myths of the collective and the real experiences of her parents, which she inevitably

repeats. Lessing provides no escape for Mary, who can neither return to her single life

before marriage nor adapt herself to marriage. Unlike Martha in The Four-Gated City,

Mary cannot escape the pressures of the collective through mysticism and a

transcendence of the earthly self. As Lessing comments,

[t]he 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. Mary, with the memory of

her own mother recurring more and more frequently, like an older, sardonic double of

herself walking beside her, followed the course her upbringing made inevitable. (99)

Mary chooses the passive course and seems to die from within as she observes Dick's

many unprofitable attempts to save the farm from bankruptcy.

When Dick, having failed at his schemes to turn his farm to profit with bees, pigs, turkeys

and rabbits, opens a "kaffir" store on their property, the similarities between Mary's past

and present appear complete: "[i]t seemed to Mary a terrible thing, an omen and a

warning, that the store, the ugly menacing store of her childhood, should follow her here,

even to her home" (103). Like Susan Rawlings in "To Room Nineteen," Mary cannot talk

to Dick honestly about her feelings, "for the good reason that he was now associated in

her mind with the grayness and misery of her childhood, and it would have been like

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arguing with destiny itself" (105). For Mary then, an individual cannot change her or his

self through an act of will. Her inability to develop positively her own sense of self

proves fatal.

Because she does not perceive her childhood or her earlier life in the town as steps in the

inevitable creation and re-creation of her identity, Mary becomes trapped when she

refuses to take positive steps towards creating her own sense of self. She thinks instead

that her past is segmented into distinct life-stages which one can forget or return to at

will. This belief means that she leaves Dick to take up employment in her old firm as

soon as a position is advertised (109). Once there though, she realises the differences

between her present existence and past, and becomes aware that she is too old for the

position. She has cracked brown hands of which she is ashamed, and wears an old dress.

When Dick comes to town to collect her, she returns to him without argument, painfully

aware that she is not the woman she once was or believed herself to be. It becomes "an

effort for her to do anything at all. ... This was the beginning of an inner disintegration in

her. It began with this numbness, as if she could no longer feel or fight" (115). Her death

of her conscious self in this way contrasts with her frenetic "house-keeping" at the start of

her marriage. Then Mary had made her new home more comfortable, sewing and white-

washing all the walls: "[t]here she sat all day, sewing and stitching, hour after hour, as if

fine embroidery would save her life" (65). Later, however, "even her restlessness passed.

She would sit for hours at a time ... as if she were in a stupor. It seemed that something

had finally snapped inside of her, and she would gradually fade and sink into darkness"

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(153). Her experience is similar to Lessing's own frantic efforts at adapting to her first

marriage as she recounts in Under My Skin. 3

Mary degenerates into madness because she fails either to reconcile herself with her past

and her past selves, or to integrate successfully into her self such facets as her sexuality.

But she also breaks down because she does not seek an equilibrium between her personal

conscience and the dictates of the collective. One might conclude therefore, that her

inability to think beyond the experiences of the collective, to free herself from the

ideologies of the androcentric society in which she has grown up, lead inextricably to her

self-willed death. "What had happened," says Lessing,

was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by

the personal relation; and when a white man [sic] ... looks into the eyes of a native and

sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt,

which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip (166-67).

Such authorial intrusion might allow a critic to interpret The Grass is Singing as a text

chiefly concerned with racial issues.

The ideology of race traps Mary just as the ideology of womanhood limits and suffocates

Susan Rawlings in "To Room Nineteen." Unable to view Moses except as a danger and a

threat to her existence, Mary feels that "she had lost her balance; she had no control over

her actions" (167). Moses' polished black skin symbolises the threat he poses to Mary, the

power which he exerts over her when "he forced her, now to treat him as a human being

[so] ... she never ceased to be aware of him" (181). He also symbolises her own sexuality,

which she fears, loathes and views as evil. When Mary becomes hysterical after Moses

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asks to leave, he guides her to her bed: "[i]t was like a nightmare where one is powerless

against horror: the touch of this black man's hand on her shoulder filled her with nausea;

she had never, not once in her whole life, touched the flesh of a native" (175). Her world

disintegrates partly because of her inability to live the life of a white "missus." Without

her adherence to the strict cultural and racial protocols of her society, she has nothing

stable upon which to base her existence. She cannot think outside of the ideologies taught

to her as a child.

Mary drifts into a state of confusion because of her feelings about Moses and Dick, both

of whom she associates with her father. Her mental turmoil arises as a result of her hated

childhood, her fear of her father and her disgust at her sexuality, none of which she deals

with. For example, when Moses tends Dick who is sick with malaria, Mary dreams that

her husband is dead and that Moses

approached slowly, obscene and powerful, and it was not only he, but her father who was

threatening her. They advanced together, one person, and she could smell, not the native

smell, but the unwashed smell of her father. ... He was comforting her because of Dick's

death, consoling her protectively; but at the same time it was her father menacing and

horrible, who touched her in desire. (192)

Mary's dreams, her fear about her sexuality, the problems she has with accepting her past

and so learning to live in the future, all occur in her house. It therefore comes to

symbolise the disintegration of Mary's conscious self which leads to her death, and to

represent Mary's literal, emotional and psychological entrapment. Tony, the fresh young

Englishman whom Slatter employs as manager for the Turner farm, comes to understand

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Mary's plight. Analysing her degeneration into a thin, sick, mad woman, he thinks "[f]or

her, there was only the farm; not even that — there was only this house, and what was in

it. And he began to understand with a horrified pity, her utter indifference to Dick; she

had shut out everything that conflicted with her actions, that would revive the code she

had been brought up to follow" (221). Unfortunately, Mary's attempts to forget her past

serve only to alienate her from her neighbours as well as her husband. Intent on leading a

decent life, she offends her good-willed neighbours by her aloofness and refusal to

participate in the expected round of social visiting.

Mary's collapse into madness occurs because she does not have the strong psychic

motivation to integrate her various aspects of a integrated self. Lacking the courage to

confront her past and to thrust herself into a new environment, she continues to measure

herself against the old standards of the town. The harmless comment made by her friends

about her lack of relationships and sexual awareness obsesses her to the extent that she

allows Moses to help her into her dresses, while she remains still, doll-like and childish.

Such an action reveals her alienation from her essential self as well as from the standards

of both town and country. The episode also violates the formal pattern of black-white

relations. Dick her kind-hearted husband becomes to her "a torturing reminder of what

she had to forget in order to remain herself" (225). She refuses to allow herself to become

close to him since that would mean she would become vulnerable. Instead she forces

herself to endure the nights with him. In everything she remains passive, and she makes

no attempt to carve out her own existence.

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When she waits for her death at the hands of Moses (who murders her with the same

weapon she once used against him), she wonders "[w]hat had she done? Nothing, of her

own volition. Step by step, she had come to this, a woman without will, sitting on an old

ruined sofa that smelled of dirt, waiting for the night to come that would finish her"

(230). Tangled in the ideology of patriarchy, Mary is at first sure that Tony will rescue her

because he is aware of the menace Moses appears to her to represent (234), but although

Mary dies an inevitable death, she does achieve some form of limited knowledge, for

when she had visited Tony it became clear to her that he could not help her. She had

thought then that she

would walk out her road alone. ... That was the lesson she had to learn. If she had learned

it, long ago, she would not be standing here now, having been betrayed for the second

time by her weak reliance on a human being who should not be expected to take the

responsibility for her. (238)

Mary Turner's realisation of her need for self-reliance and for self-absorption comes too

late. But it is a lesson learned by both Kate Brown in The Summer Before the Dark and

Martha in Children of Violence. Kate never comes to know the fragmentation of her

acknowledged self such that Anna Wulf experiences, nor the crossing of trans-personal

ego boundaries that Martha achieves with Lynda. Neither does she endure the dissolving

of the individual into the collective as completely as the Survivor or Martha. But she does

come to a fuller understanding of her self and the various collective pressures upon it,

despite her more limited psychological growth.

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In Lessing's much later short story "To Room Nineteen" (1978), the main protagonist also

dies. Her death, unlike Mary's, does not derive from a complete lack of volition or limited

self-awareness. Rather, it occurs when the tensions she experiences and acknowledges

between her needs and the demands of the collective become too great for her. Lessing

depicts the Rawlings as bound and limited by the ideologies of marriage, family life, and

childhood, as well as by the conventional standards of "success." Susan, for example,

leaves her job in an advertising firm upon marriage and is pregnant after two years4.

Shaped by collective pressures, the Rawlings attempt to adhere to middle-class standards,

while learning from what they perceive to be the mistakes and failures of others who they

believed "had married young" and who "probably regretted lost opportunities" (253).

They establish their marriage through rational discussion which takes precedence over

emotional contact and honesty. Although Susan Rawlings refuses to "make the mistake of

taking a job for the sake of her independence" (255), she is trapped in the ideology of the

patriarchal collective which demands from her "motherhood" and life as an

uncomplaining, charming and devoted wife.5

Through an ironic use of the collective's language, which is Susan's only way of thinking,

Lessing reveals Susan's tensions between her personal sense of "self" and the ideology of

the collective. Lessing comments,

[f]or it was inevitable that the handsome, blond, attractive, manly man, Matthew

Rawlings, should be at times tempted ... by the attractive girls at parties she could not

attend because of the four children; and that sometimes he would succumb ... and that

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she, a good-looking woman in the big well-tended garden at Richmond, would sometimes

be pierced as by an arrow from the sky with bitterness. (257)

The couple believe that they have acted by choice and will in all their decisions, but both

Susan and Matthew experience a certain disappointment with their well-planned life.

Each though, reassures the other that "everything was all right. Everything was in order.

Yes, things were under control" (255). Susan, increasingly isolated from her life as a free

woman, becomes aware that she did not choose her limited life. More and more she relies

on archetypal images and the phrases of the collective, and prepares for "her own slow

emancipation away from the role of hub-of-the-family into woman-with-her-own-life"

(311). Unlike Kate Brown in The Summer Before the Dark, however, Susan fails to make

the transition, and never gains a life apart. She comes to realise that "[a] high price has to

be paid for the happy marriage with the four healthy children in the large white gardened

house" (310). That price is the loss of her freedom and sense of her social self.

Water imagery in "To Room Nineteen" conveys to the reader the course of the Rawlings'

marriage, the emotional turmoil, and the gradual disintegration of Susan's ego which

causes her lack of energy. To begin with, Susan is comfortable with her marriage,

husband, and family, and happy in the confines of the "big married bedroom (which had

an attractive view of the river)" (255). Later, as husband and wife fall into habit and out

of love, drifting apart into such different lives, they "lay side by side, or breast to breast in

the big civilised bedroom overlooking the wild sullied river, [and] they laughed, often,

for no particular reason; but they knew it was really because of these two small people ...

supporting such an edifice on their intelligent love" (258). The river comes to symbolise

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Susan's reluctance to change, her inability to define herself against and in relation to the

collective, rather than letting herself float along with the demoralising collective

experience. Once, to be alone, she "went to the very end of the garden, by herself, and

looked at the slow-moving brown river ... and closed her eyes and breathed slow and

deep, taking it into her being, into her veins" (263). Her actions here are ironic, because

she identifies with the social collective, although it is the very force which prevents her

from having time to herself and to be her self.

Gradually, however, the collective experience metaphorically submerges and subsumes

Susan and she allows herself to drown. The last time she visits the hotel she spends her

time "delightfully, darkly, sweetly, letting herself slide gently, gently, to the edge of the

river" (286). As she dies, "[s]he was quite content lying there, listening to the dark soft

hiss of the gas that poured into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drifted off

into the dark river" (286). That final image, suggestive perhaps of the mythological river

of forgetfulness, is significant. It illustrates Susan's complete loss of self-identity to the

patriarchal collective in spite of her disillusionment with its ideals. The passivity of the

image reveals Susan's submission to the collective. Like Mary Turner in The Grass is

Singing, she can perceive escape only through death.

Her literal death mirrors her death of any sense of an independent self which occurs

slowly once cultural expectations overwhelm her. Like Anna Wulf in The Golden

Notebook, for instance, Susan forgets herself while her children are at home. She devotes

her complete being to family life, to the fulfilment of the patriarchal dream of

"normality." But after her twins start school, she loses her function within the family and

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her place within society. Although she now has only herself to think about, she does not

know who she really is, and cannot seem to find her self. Alone,

she sat defeating the enemy, restlessness. Emptiness. She ought to be thinking about her

life, about herself. But she did not. Or perhaps she could not. As soon as she forced her

mind to think about Susan (for what else did she want to be alone for?) it skipped off to

thoughts of butter or school clothes. (262)

She resents that never "was she free from the pressure of time, from having to remember

this or that. She could never forget herself; never really let herself go into forgetfulness"

(264). It is as though her family is a "painful pressure on the surface of her skin, a hand

pressing on her brain" (264). She is unable to have a life apart from her family. Even

when she goes on a walking holiday to Wales she finds that she cannot help thinking of

her family responsibilities. She feels tormented by her family and "the telephone wire

[which was] holding her to her duty like a leash" (271). Her acute awareness of her role

as a wife and mother means that "[t]he mountains themselves seemed trammelled by her

freedom." Unfortunately, therefore, Susan cannot separate herself from her role as a wife

and mother in order to create an existence for herself.

In a vain effort to have time to develop her own sense of selfhood she rents a room in a

hotel in which to be alone. When she is unable to explain to Matthew her reasons for

doing this she resorts to patriarchal expectations and invents an affair. Matthew, like

Susan, is trapped within patriarchy and more specifically, within a role as a successful

husband. He plays a role which implicitly allows for, and condones the occasional affair.

In response to her pleas for time apart, he merely says that it seems unnecessary now that

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the children are at school, noting that he has no time of freedom either (265). Thus

Matthew embodies patriarchy while also being its victim. He refuses either to appreciate

that he is acting out a socially-conditioned role as a man or to understand the limited roles

patriarchy forces upon women.

Lessing uses symbolic images of rooms to illustrate the limitations that individuals,

particularly women, experience because of the patriarchal collective, in both "To Room

Nineteen" and The Grass is Singing. In each case rooms represent female entrapment and

limitation rather than psychic growth, freedom, and the merging of the personal and

collective experiences as they do in later texts such as The Four-Gated City. In "To Room

Nineteen," "Mother's Room" becomes another family room, which makes Susan feel

"even more caged than in her bedroom" (266). When Matthew later traces her through a

detective agency to her hotel room, it too fails to provide her with sanctuary:

[s]he tried to shrink herself back into the shelter of the room, a snail pecked out of its

shell and trying to squirm back. But the peace of the room had gone. She was trying

consciously to revive it, trying to let go into the dark creative trance (or whatever it was)

that she had found there. ... Several times she returned to the room, to look for herself

there, but instead she found ... a prickling fevered hunger for movement, an irritable self-

consciousness that made her brain feel as if it had coloured lights going on and off inside

it. (280)

Unable to escape from her role, Susan decides to die. It is obvious that, like Mary Turner

in The Grass is Singing, she does not have the ability to think outside the ideologies of

the androcentric collective. As Susan prepares to commit suicide by gassing herself she

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thinks, "what hypocrisy to sit here worrying about the children, when she was going to

leave them because she had not got the energy to stay" (286). Throughout her life, she

had lacked the energy to form a life for herself, and her passivity unfortunately has fatal

consequences.

It is such an absence of personal will and vitality which Kate Brown in The Summer

Before the Dark learns to avoid. Like Mary Turner and Susan Rawlings, she finds that in

middle-age she must evaluate her past, since the conflicting stories and myths of her

personal and collective experiences confuse and de-centre her, and she puzzles over who

she really is. In a similar fashion to Martha who attempts to appropriate first the

definitions of literature for herself, and then the roles that the patriarchal collective

prescribes for her, Kate feels as if "for some time now she had been 'trying on' ideas like

so many dresses off a rack. She was letting words and phrases as worn as nursery rhymes

slide around her tongue: for towards the crucial experiences custom allots certain

attitudes, and they are pretty stereotyped."6 The lives of her grown-up children need no

longer dictate the shape of her existence, and the impending disintegration of the family

over the summer leads Kate to think about a role in a life which is increasingly becoming

more unreal to her. She thinks that "[t]he truth was, she was becoming more and more

uncomfortably conscious not only that the things she said, and a good many of the things

she thought, had been taken off a rack and put on, but that what she really felt was

something else again" (2). She gradually realises that she needs to have a personal

definition of self instead of always adapting herself to meet her family’s needs and

neglecting her own, which is what Susan Rawlings in "To Room Nineteen" could no

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longer bear to do. Kate muses that "[l]ooking back it seemed as if she had been at

everybody's beck and call, always available, always criticised, always being bled to feed

these — monsters" (89). These sentiments resemble those of Martha in A Proper

Marriage, but whereas Lessing allows Martha to explore such feelings over the course of Children of

Violence, her five-volume Bildgunsroman, Kate Brown comes to terms with her

resentment over the course of the summer holiday.

As the long summer approaches, and Kate at last has the chance to do as she pleases with

her time and life, she forces herself to understand the constant pressures of the collective

upon her. She wonders "[w]as there something wrong with her memory perhaps? It was

seeming more and more as if she had several sets of memory, each contradicting the

others" (52). She contrasts her upbringing with the reality she painfully experiences:

[l]ooking back now at the beautiful girl, indulged by her mother, indulged and flattered

by her grandfather, treated always with that slightly mocking deference which is offered

to girls, and contrasting her with the same young woman of only five years later, she was

tempted to cry out that it had all been a gigantic con trick, the most monstrous cynicism.

Looking back she could see herself only as a fatted white goose. Nothing in the homage

her grandfather paid womanhood, or in the way her mother had treated her, had prepared

her for what she was going to have to learn, and soon. (91-92)

Both Kate's realisation and Lessing's language with which to describe it are significant.

Kate initially experiences the patriarchal collective as one which nurtures and idealises

women, while at the same time de-valuing them. She comes to understand that from birth

society imbues women with false expectations of respect from, and equality with men.

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Society, however, feeds off women once they reach maturity. During her summer alone it

becomes apparent to Kate that women, including herself, have been done a great dis-

service. Rather than being treated as "goddesses," society denies them an existence of

their own. They become slaves to the expectations of others — namely men. Alone at

last, Kate slowly begins to realise that her roles as wife and mother are inimical to her

own process of self-nurture. It is significant that such an observation can occur only when

at last she is free to think, just as Anna Wulf's journey into madness and towards

individuation happens when her daughter Janet is away at boarding school.

Like Anna, Kate must seek and find a balance between the claims, demands, and

conflicting needs of her personal conscience and those of the collective. When she

achieves this equilibrium she comes closer to her archetypal image of the self. Kate

recalls the early years of her marriage and her life with three young children, and how she

had "to fight for qualities that had not been even in her vocabulary. Patience. Self-

discipline. Self-control. Self-abnegation. Chastity. Adaptability to others — this above

all. This always" (92). Her marriage and motherhood meant the adoption of a new

persona, the creation of a new self. During the time away from her family she must

discover her own personal self if she is going to return happily to her family

responsibilities when the summer is over.

In The Summer Before the Dark, then, Kate Brown acknowledges and confronts the

distance between the way various collectives have structured her life, and her experience

as she perceives it. During her time away from her family she undertakes a journey of

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self-discovery. Rather than subsuming her acknowledged self to collective pressures, she

begins to understand the necessity of nurturing and protecting it. She realises that

[w]hile her body, her needs, her emotions — all of herself — had been turning like a

sunflower after one man, all that time she had been holding in her hands something else,

the something precious offering it in vain to her husband, her children, to everyone she

knew — but it had never been taken, had not been noticed. But this thing she had offered,

without knowing she was doing it, which had been ignored by herself and by everyone

else, was what was most real in her. (126)

Conscious of her impulse to nurture, she holds herself back from acting like an over-

protective mother towards her younger lover when he falls dangerously ill.

Her dream of rescuing an injured seal and of travelling over hard terrain to return it to the

ocean represents her growing concentration on her own developing sense of an integrated

self. She deliberately immerses herself in the dream of the seal, and acts out many

different roles such as being the manager of Global Foods conferences, the lover of the

irresponsible young man, and the confidante of Maureen who is both a mother and

daughter figure for her. By taking this approach Kate is able to return to her marriage,

safe in the knowledge of who she really is, and less likely to become trapped again.

Martha Quest also feels entrapped in her conventional middle-class roles as wife and

mother like Susan Rawlings, Mary Turner and Kate Brown. But instead of choosing

death or confinement within her roles, she increasingly seeks escape. In Martha Quest,

Lessing again wrestles with the tensions which emerge from the paradigms of "personal"

versus "public." Much of the language of the novel becomes a refrain echoing throughout

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the later works, particularly A Proper Marriage and Under My Skin. For instance, an

adolescent Martha starts "having terrible nightmares of being tied hand and foot under the

wheels of a locomotive, or struggling waist-deep in quicksands, or eternally climbing a

staircase that moved backwards under her."7 All of her efforts to escape her social fate

only trap her more effectively. Later as she moves towards marriage she "was feeling the

last three months as a bewildering chaos of emotion, through which she had been pulled,

will-less, like a fish at the end of a string, with a sense of being used by something

impersonal and irresistible" (79-80).8 Such images reveal her preoccupation with the way

in which collective pressures shape the lives and emotions of many women when they

follow the dictates of society rather than their own instincts.

In A Proper Marriage, Lessing deals with a woman's misery when she gives in to societal

expectations, marries and has a child. The novel anticipates her later works because of its

constant attention to women's biology. Although The Golden Notebook and Under My

Skin also discuss women's private experiences in detail, it is only A Proper Marriage

which so painfully records the tension a woman feels between her wants and the dictates

of a body which seems to rebel against her intellect and better judgement. For instance,

when Martha realises that her friend Alice is pregnant, she

felt towards the pregnant woman, the abstraction, a strong repulsion which caused

various images all unpleasant to rise into her mind one after another. ... She felt caged, for

Alice. She could feel the bonds around herself. She consciously shook them off and

exulted in the thought that she was free. ... But at the same time a deeper emotion was

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turning towards Alice, with an unconscious curiosity, warm, tender, protective. It was an

emotion not far from envy.9

Thus Lessing realistically depicts the dreadful tensions many women experience between

their biological urges for another child and their need to cherish and protect their

freedom.

Lessing was not immune to these conflicting emotions, and A Proper Marriage reveals

many of her own personal and often painful experiences of and responses to motherhood,

as perhaps do also The Summer Before the Dark and The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984).

It poignantly illustrates the tensions which exist between the miseries and sheer hard

work of raising a child mostly alone, and the intense joys that can nevertheless occur. For

example, Lessing juxtaposes Martha's anguish when she tries to coax Caroline to eat a

congealed mess of food with her delight when she watches her daughter's waking

moments in a sun-dappled cot. But these happy moments often contrast with Martha's

sense of unhappiness and of inadequacy. In a conversation with her mother, for example,

she is "silenced by the knowledge that she was certainly a failure, she could no more

manage Caroline than Mrs Quest had managed her" (231). The ideology of motherhood

traps Martha, who tries desperately to escape from her biological yearnings for another

child. She feels "herself to be a hopeless failure; she was good for nothing, not even the

simple natural function that every female should achieve like breathing: being a mother"

(232). Aware of the possible fate which awaits her daughter, she cautions her against an

early marriage (268).

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Torn between developing her own definition of self, and yet fitting into the roles

patriarchy prescribes for her, Martha daydreams: "[o]ne of those warm, large, delightful,

maternal, humorous females she would be; undemanding, unpossessive. One never met

them, but if she put her mind to it, no doubt she could become one. She would lapse into

it as into a sea and let everything go" (358).10 Because she knows that in truth she can

never fit this ideal image, Martha must constantly fight "the pangs of pure panic that kept

rising in her every moment at the idea of abandoning the person she felt herself to be"

(358). The novel concludes with Martha leaving Douglas and Caroline, still on a quest to

find her essential self.

In this early work, Lessing's depiction of Martha's final decision is still positive, since

Martha is no longer content to remain bound to a role and expectations she cannot fulfil.

Martha has obviously matured into self-awareness when she muses about her husband, "I

don't see how he can complain that I am what I always said I was" (399). Lessing

explores her insight thus: "[f]or at this moment, she forgot the years of feminine

compliance, of charm, of conformity to what he wanted. They had all been a lie against

her real nature and therefore they had not existed" (399). Martha's reasons for deserting

Douglas and Caroline cause Mrs Knowell, Douglas's mother, to realise suddenly how

"her own life was made to look null and meaningless because Martha would not submit

to what women always had submitted to" (435-36). The old woman envies Martha's new-

found personal strength, and weeps silently because of her own sterile existence. Unlike

Mrs Knowell who perseveres in unhappy circumstances, Martha continues to seek her

own definition of selfhood and thus to control her own image in A Proper Marriage.

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Consequently, she moves further towards attaining a realisation of "Self" which Lessing

documents in The Four-Gated City. Martha achieves this sense of selfhood not just

through her exploration of the collective unconscious and her experiences of madness,

but because she also accepts all the various aspects of her essential self.

Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, and "To Room Nineteen" are all transitional works in

which Lessing deals with her recurring themes of the collective pressures upon an

individual, "madness" and the exploration of "Self." Although all of the same themes are

present in her first novel The Grass is Singing, it is different since her protagonist does

not even begin to fight collective pressures. Although Lessing wrote both The Summer

Before the Dark and "To Room Nineteen" after embracing Sufic philosophy, only The

Summer Before the Dark reflects her exploration of the dream lives of her protagonists,

and their meeting of aspects of selves and archetypal images as they progress towards the

attainment of a sense of an integrated and palimpsestic self.

Bibliography

Lessing, Doris, A Man and Two Women Hammersmith, London: Paladin-Harper Collins,

1992

---, A Proper Marriage [1954] Hammersmith, London: Flamingo- Harper Collins, 1993

---, The Grass is Singing [1950] New York, London: Plume, 1978

---, The Summer Before the Dark [1973] New York: Bantam, 1974

---, Martha Quest [1952] Hammersmith, London: Flamingo-Harper Collins, 1993

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---, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of my Autobiography, 1949-1962 New York,

Harper Collins, 1997

1Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing [1950] (New York, London: Plume, 1978) 35.

2Interestingly, Lessing comments in Walking in the Shade (New York, Harper Collins,

1997), that she has not always been sure whether or not Mary Turner and Moses had sex.

8.

3Doris Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of my Autobiography, to 1949

(Hammersmith, London: Harper Collins, 1994). Typically, Lessing analyses her

experiences: "Now I ask myself what I thought I was doing, piping inner seams and

whipping raw edges no one would ever see, when my usual way of going about things

was a slapdash but successful improvisation," 230.

4 Doris Lessing, "To Room Nineteen," A Man and Two Women (Hammersmith, London:

Paladin-Harper Collins, 1992) 233.

5Lessing, in Walking in the Shade, mistakenly refers to Susan as "Kate," 268.

6Doris Lessing, The Summer Before the Dark [1973] (New York: Bantam, 1974) 7.

7Doris Lessing, Martha Quest [1952] (Hammersmith, London: Flamingo, 1993) 37.

8

9Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage [1954] (Hammersmith, London: Flamingo, 1993)

121-22.

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10I suggest that Molly in The Golden Notebook perhaps represents such a figure. Lessing

modelled Molly, to an extent, on her good friend Joan Rodker, as she explains in Walking

in the Shade, 47.

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