(IM)Purity, danger and the body in doris lessing's the grass is singing

Abstract

This article uses a psychoanalytic framework to examine the troping of the body in Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing. Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection is used to describe the attraction/ repulsion dialectic which characterizes not only Mary Turner's relationship with her ‘houseboy’, Moses, but which also accounts for the position both characters occupy as threats to the colonial ‘body politic’. The argument extends Kristeva's discussion of the maintenance of individual subjectivity through abjection to group identity in order to explain the importance of bodily metaphor to racist constructions. Ultimately, Lessing's deployment of a discourse of corporeal metaphor is presented as emphasizing the defensive paranoia of the closed ‘social body’ and thus as a powerful indictment of colonial ideology.

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English Studies in Africa
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(IM)PURITY, DANGER AND THE BODY IN
DORIS LESSING'S THE GRASS IS SINGING
Bridget Grogan
Published online: 07 Nov 2011.
To cite this article: Bridget Grogan (2011) (IM)PURITY, DANGER AND THE BODY IN DORIS LESSING'S
THE GRASS IS SINGING , English Studies in Africa, 54:2, 31-42, DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2011.626181
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00138398.2011.626181
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31
DOI: 10.1080/00138398.2011.626181 English Studies in Africa 54 (2)
E-mail: B.Grogan@ru.ac.za © University of the Witwatersrand
pp 31–42
(IM)PURITY, DANGER AND THE BODY
IN DORIS LESSING’S THE GRASS IS SINGING
Bridget Grogan
Abstract
This article uses a psychoanalytic framework to examine the troping of the body
in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection is
used to describe the attraction/ repulsion dialectic which characterizes not only
Mary Turner’s relationship with her ‘houseboy’, Moses, but which also accounts
for the position both characters occupy as threats to the colonial ‘body politic’.
The argument extends Kristeva’s discussion of the maintenance of individual
subjectivity through abjection to group identity in order to explain the importance
of bodily metaphor to racist constructions. Ultimately, Lessing’s deployment of
a discourse of corporeal metaphor is presented as emphasizing the defensive
paranoia of the closed ‘social body’ and thus as a powerful indictment of colonial
ideology.
Keywords: Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, abjection, Julia Kristeva,
bodily metaphor, Mary Douglas, the body politic, racism, colonial
discourse, Black Peril
µ,WLVE\WKHIDLOXUHVDQGPLV¿WVRIDFLYLOL]DWLRQWKDWRQHFDQEHVWMXGJHLWVZHDNQHVVHV¶
So reads the second anonymous epigraph of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, the author’s
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what she names South Africa during the apartheid era.1 The epigraph reveals a curious paradox:
µIDLOXUHVDQGPLV¿WV¶DUHVRFLDORXWVLGHUV\HWEHLQJµof a civilization’, they exist within the social
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use Julia Kristeva’s term, they become ‘abject’.2 ‘The body’ in the novel, both as a metaphor for
the social order and as a metaphor of ‘otherness’ threatening that order, is essential to Lessing’s
indictment of colonial ideology. The Grass is Singing advances the idea that the coherence of the
social body is based upon the rigorous expulsion of that which threatens it from the inside. In this
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32
Bridget Grogan
case, the social body is white Southern African society, which is governed by ‘the esprit de corps
«WKH¿UVWUXOHRI6RXWK$IULFDQVRFLHW\¶/HVVLQJDSKUDVHLWVHOIHYRNLQJWKHPHWDSKRURI
the body.
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on an understanding of abjection preceding Julia Kristeva’s naming of the concept. Over
the course of her life, the colonial social body reviles Mary for: her desire not to marry; her
poverty after eventually succumbing to social pressure and marrying Dick, a failed Rhodesian
farmer; her stark, isolated personality and impending madness; and, most of all, her apparently
illicit relationship with a black male servant, Moses. Mary is frightening and distasteful to her
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most damningly, she does not perform her colonial femininity ‘correctly’ because she does not
adequately adhere to the rules of racial engagement. Moses, as a black man, is the ultimate abject
of colonial, white society and Mary is tainted, according to her community (and indeed to some
degree to Mary herself), by her association with him. When she responds at one point in the novel
to his physical touch ‘with loathing … as though she had been touched by excrement’ (152), the
corporeal comparison reveals the importance of bodily metaphors to racist constructions. These
metaphors promote and maintain the myth of social contagion.
For Kristeva, subjectivity arises and is maintained when the abject is expelled from the
body and constructed via loathing as unclean. Excrement, for example, is discharged from the
inside of the body to the outside, becoming ‘other’ in the process, an otherness cemented by
our understanding of waste as an object of revulsion – as abject. The problem inherent in such
RWKHULQJLVWKDWH[FUHPHQWLVDSDUWRIWKHERG\WKDWFDQQHYHUEH¿QDOO\H[SHOOHG,WFURVVHVWKH
ERXQGDULHVRIWKHERG\IURPWKHLQVLGHWRWKHRXWVLGHEXWDOVRGH¿HVVXFKERXQGDULHVEHFDXVHLW
exists both internally and externally. The violent disgust response whereby an aspect of the self
becomes ‘other’ corresponds, as the example of excrement illustrates, to the notion of rigidly
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borders, positions, rules’, and that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’ (4). Group identity, like
individual subjectivity, is maintained via abjection, operating through corporeal metaphors that
link it to the primitive psychological process that Kristeva describes, most notably the common
metaphor of society as a body and, by extension or metonymy, the threats to that social body as
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threats from both within and without.
Kristeva’s notion of abjection derives from anthropologist Mary Douglas’s theory of
pollution and taboo developed in her seminal text, Purity and Danger. Douglas espouses the link
between the social and the physical body by arguing that the boundaries of the physical body
decided upon within culture are taken up in discourse to represent necessary social limits:
ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as
their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by
exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and
female, with and against, [black and white,] that a semblance of order is created. (4)
According to Douglas, the boundaries of the body become the boundaries of the social order and
vice versa. Thus, where the limits of the social order are strictly policed – for example, in the
paranoid structures of a racist system – notions of pollution related to the body arise: ‘pollution is
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33
(Im)purity, Danger and the Body in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing
a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social,
DUHFOHDUO\GH¿QHG¶Purity and Danger 113). Pollution involves the transgression of such rigid
lines of structure. Anyone who should defy the limits of society via the limits of the body is thus
condemned: ‘A polluting person is always in the wrong. He has developed some wrong condition
or simply crossed over some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement
unleashes danger for someone’ (Purity and Danger 113). The archaic, subject-forming process
of abjection thus extends to social governance, explaining the primitive and often nameless
horror inherent in the maintenance of ideological boundaries. In Lessing’s plaasroman, Mary
Turner’s apparent sexual intimacy with her black ‘houseboy’, Moses, results in her transgression
of the imaginary line to which Douglas refers. She therefore develops the symptoms of a ‘wrong
condition’, which society believes Moses, by virtue of his blackness, to embody all along. Both
characters are ‘pollutants’ in white colonial Rhodesia, but Mary, opening the social body to the
threat of Moses as apparent ‘other’, reveals that rigid society is in fact destroyed by its own
exclusionary constitution – from within.
The suspicion of Mary’s sexual liaison with Moses, her eventual murderer, therefore
awakens the community’s unspeakable terror or abjection. The novel is retrospectively narrated
from the narrative present of the opening chapter, which focuses on the community’s response
to Mary’s murder. This episode, where others view Mary’s corpse as ‘unpleasant and unclean’
(11) – the manner in which she is perceived in death and life by her community – emphasizes
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excellence of the abject, ‘show[ing] me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live’ (3,
original emphasis). Indeed, the image of Mary’s corpse functions metonymically to reveal what
must be cast aside in order for the social body to ensure its survival: the metaphorical threat of
her physical body to the strictly policed borders of the social body. Mary’s body, as the supposed
‘polluted’ receptacle of ‘polluting’ black semen, throws white hegemony into doubt, producing
the hysteria of hatred and terror necessary for the maintenance of a body politic subscribing to
the rigid law of compulsory whiteness. Thus Charlie Slatter, a fundamentally important character
revealing the novel’s allegorical dimension by ‘personif[ying] Society’ (13), looks down at
Mary’s corpse with the ‘hate and contempt that one would have expected to show on his face
when he looked at the murderer’ (17). This ‘profound instinctive horror and fear’ (20) – this
abjection – is foregrounded throughout the opening chapter, and extended to the novel as a whole
when the newcomer to the district, Tony Marston, intuits this as ‘the key to the whole thing:
the look on the Sergeant’s and Slatter’s faces when they looked down at the body; that almost
hysterical look of hate and fear’ (27).
The metaphor of the body politic can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth
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the state. Hobbes described the correspondence between the social body and the natural body,
comparing elements of the former to parts of the human anatomy. Moreover, according to
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Hobbes famously claimed that, without society, man must live with ‘continual fear, and danger
of violent death’ (65). In such conditions, life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (65).
By this understanding, ‘natural man’, in his creation of the body politic, defends himself against
nature – surely an aspect of himself, as Hobbes’s adjective unwittingly insists, that he cannot
deny. Society, then, renders ‘nature’ abject. Indeed, as Kristeva argues, ‘[t]he abject confronts us
… with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’ (Kristeva 12, original
emphasis). To protect himself, ‘natural man’ thus projects his ‘natural’ condition onto those
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34
Bridget Grogan
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Southern Africa, for example, as Lessing’s novel reveals, women and the racially Other sit at the
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he abjects. As objects (abjects) of paranoia horrifying and threatening to the body politic, they
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colonial Southern Africa is imaged as distinctly white and male, symbolized as it is by the character
Charlie Slatter. Slatter ‘farms with the sjambok’ (Lessing 14), a phallic symbol suggesting the
symbolic and sometimes literal violence enacted upon women and the racial Other in colonial
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of white South Africa’: ‘Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point;
because if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are’ (178). He is appalled by Mary’s
social descent into poverty, which is synonymous with her growing association with blackness
and therefore her increasing symbolisation of a weak point within the structure of white society.
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the servant and take Mary away from the farm, ‘[t]he strongest emotion of a strongly organised
society [speaks] in his voice’ (178–79, my emphasis). Indeed, as Mary Douglas asserts, the
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Colonial Southern Africa, symbolized by Slatter, legitimizes the white male body, thereby
validating the racist patriarchal exertion of control over black and/or female bodies. The Grass is
Singing, which criticizes this power differential by describing and analysing it, has nevertheless
itself been criticized for not transcending the colonial script; Lessing’s transgressive characters are
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man as criminal, willingly turning himself over to the authorities after the murder. As Katherine
Fishburn observes, such a narrative telos begs the question of whether the novel is ‘complicit
with the very system it purports … to subvert’ (2). However, The Grass is Singing must be read
as an indictment of the rigidity of colonial discourse, making its political comment by revealing
the impossibility of maintaining an incendiary difference within the face of monolithic social
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political focus in The Grass in Singing:
If what one is fascinated by is the image of one body, one voice, one reason, any deviation
takes the form of gibberish. If woman speaks from her body, with her voice, who can
hear? Who can decipher the language of an hysteric, the wails of a hyena, the jabbering
of a savage – apart from other hysterics, hyenas and savages? (86)
Gatens contends that within the patriarchal body politic, ‘political vocabulary is so limited
that it is impossible, within its parameters, to raise the kinds of questions that would allow the
articulation of bodily difference: it will not tolerate an embodied speech’ (86). Lessing’s political
critique emphasizes this lack of tolerance.
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maintaining themselves via the fear and anxiety of colonial abjection, thereby exposing their
potential weaknesses. Homi Bhabha has famously argued that expressions of racism paradoxically
undermine the supposed strength of repressive ideology, contending that the stereotype, the
‘major discursive strategy’ of colonial discourse, is a
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35
(Im)purity, Danger and the Body in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing
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already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated … as if the essential
duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African that needs no proof,
can never really in discourse be proved. (66)
The phenomenon of ‘Black Peril’, for example – the fear of sexual crimes against white women
by black men – was one of white Southern Africa’s most compelling mythologies of pollution
and danger and one of the most extreme examples of the stereotype of the ‘bestial sexual licence
of the African that needs no proof’ (Bhabha 66). As a colonial neurosis anxiously defending
against female sexuality and miscegenation, it reveals the enmeshment of the boundaries of
the body and the boundaries of the social order. Indeed, Jock McCulloch argues, white settlers’
narratives of ‘Black Peril’ in colonial Rhodesia indirectly expressed their anxieties concerning
the body politic. A language of the body provided an outlet for this social anxiety: ‘Whites shared
a conceptual language for crisis and it was corporeal’ (McCulloch 82).
The pervasive anxiety of Black Peril informs the themes of The Grass is Singing. Like
‘[e]very woman in South Africa’, Mary Turner has been brought up to be afraid of black men:
‘In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone, and when she had asked why, she
had been told … that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her’ (Lessing 59). John
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in order to solidify racial and gender differences and thereby to construct a white and male
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white women as the protected possessions of white men, and, second, it constructed the black
man as a primal, sexual animal, incapable of controlling his physical impulses. In both cases,
women and Africans were perceived as dumbly corporeal, requiring the dominating control of
the rational white man. Moreover, the myth reveals the construction of a compulsory mode of
femininity: weak, passive, and without desire. The woman was required to become the object
possession of the white patriarch, submitting to his desire and authority. Because the anxiety
regarding rape, a crime requiring the roles of victim and villain, kept both woman and black
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manner of Bhabha’s stereotypes, speakable, even compulsively so. The desire of a white woman
for a black man, on the other hand, was, as Lessing’s novel suggests, unmentionable, implying
consent between the races, female agency, and a female sexuality exceeding the vice-like grip
of the social order. Hence, the circumstances of Mary’s murder, which her community intuits as
arising out of a sexual relationship with Moses, remain the focus of a ‘tacit agreement’ (Lessing
10) of silence: ‘The most interesting thing about the whole affair was this silent, unconscious
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of a kind of telepathy’ (11).
Ironically, if the most ‘comfortable’ threat to the body politic is the fear of rape, then the
metaphor of society as the image of the white man is problematized. An equivalent image of
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Mary Douglas argues, ‘the body is a model that can stand for any bounded system’, its boundaries
representing ‘any boundaries which are threatened or precarious’ (Natural Symbols 115). Within
the novel, the potential weakness of the social group maps onto the most penetrable and thus
threatened part of the female body: the vagina as unspoken symbol of social vulnerability.
Like the female body, the social body is not impregnable. The bodily exchanges of Mary and
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36
Bridget Grogan
representing social Law, thus bring about pollution and danger, imperilling the social order.
Mary threatens a double pollution to the patriarchal white supremacy of Rhodesian society:
the transgressive desire of the unruly female, and the woman befouled by her association with
blackness.
Arguably, Mary’s transgressive desire is what is most shocking to her community. Indeed,
the supposed hierarchical difference between Slatter and Moses – society and its abject – is
collapsed when, towards the end of the novel at the height of her neurotic breakdown, Mary
DSSDOV6ODWWHUE\ ÀLUWLQJ ZLWK KLP EHIRUHDGGUHVVLQJ 0RVHV ZLWK µH[DFWO\ WKH VDPHÀLUWDWLRXV
FR\QHVV¶ 0DU\ WKXVÀRXWV WKH UXOHVRI WKH ZKLWHµesprit de corps’ (11) and exposes its
LQDELOLW\WRGH¿QLWLYHO\SROLFHLWVRZQERUGHUV+HUIHPDOHERG\EHFRPHVDPHWDSKRUIRUZKLWH
VRFLHW\¶V SRWHQWLDO µRSHQQHVV¶ WR LQ¿OWUDWLRQ E\ WKH UDFLDO 2WKHU +RZHYHU DV 7RQ\ 0DUVWRQ
realizes,
‘white civilization’ … will never, never admit that a white person, and most particularly,
a white woman, can have a human relationship, whether for good or for evil, with a black
person. For once it admits that, it crashes, and nothing can save it. So, above all, it cannot
afford failures. (26)
$VDIDLOXUHDQGDPLV¿WµDQGPRVWSDUWLFXODUO\>DV@DZKLWHZRPDQ¶0DU\LVDGDQJHURXVWKUHDW
to the way in which her social group perceives itself. She exists on the margins of her community
and, as Elizabeth Grosz explains, ‘[t]hat which is marginal is always located as a site of danger
and vulnerability’ (195).
,QGHHG0DU\¶VPDUJLQDOLW\GH¿QHV KHU6KHLVSDUWRIKHU FXOWXUHHYHQLIVKHLQFUHDVLQJO\
GLVUHJDUGVLWVUXOHV$VDZKLWHVKHKDVSRZHUDVDZRPDQVKHKDVOLWWOH+HUUDFLVPLGHQWL¿HV
her with her community and grants her authority. Yet her racist ideology oscillates with her
individualist desire for a human connection irrespective of race. Mary is in an impossible
SRVLWLRQ VKH ERWK LGHQWL¿HV DQG GLVLGHQWL¿HV ZLWK D JURXS WKDW PDUJLQDOL]HV KHUFDXVLQJ KHU
to seek a human relation outside of its bounds, with a man she has been taught to despise. It is
WKHLPSRVVLEOH LGHQWL¿FDWLRQ ZLWKKHUVRFLDOJURXS ZKLOVW UHFRJQL]LQJWKHKXPDQLW\RI DEODFN
man that splits her character, resulting in her hysterical madness. Lessing’s critique is implicit:
LIDV WKHHSLJUDSKVXJJHVWV 0DU\LVDPLV¿WUHYHDOLQJWKHZHDNQHVVHV RIKHUVRFLHW\WKHQ KHU
complaints must be read as symptomatic of the problems inherent in the body politic, which
itself is deeply divided.
0DU\¶V GH¿QLQJ ÀDZ LV KHU LQDELOLW\ WR DFNQRZOHGJH KHU ERG\ LGHQWLI\LQJ KHU WR VRPH
degree with the ‘disembodied’ ideology of European society that Hobbes’s observations imply.
This discomfort with her body is essential to the relation of Mary’s childhood and adulthood
prior to marriage to her later experiences and encroaching madness on the Rhodesian farm.
Roberta Rubenstein has hinted at the link between Mary’s internal fragmentation and her race
relations: ‘The seeds for Mary Turner’s eventual psychic breakdown are sown years earlier, in
her progressive alienation from herself’ (20). According to Rubenstein, Mary’s relations with her
servants are thus ‘the culminating crisis in a process already underway’ (20). However, a clear
link between the two phases of Mary’s life remains unexplicated. The connection between them
is however clear in her original relation to her body, a profound splitting which allows her to later
project her corporeality onto the African workers she encounters on the farm.
0DU\LVWHUUL¿HGRIVH[XDOLW\DIHDUWUDFHDEOHWRKHUXQKDSS\DQGSRYHUW\VWULFNHQFKLOGKRRG
‘there had been little privacy in her home and there were things she did not care to remember’
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37
(Im)purity, Danger and the Body in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing
(39). Indeed, Mary’s fundamental reason for splitting her consciousness from her body can be
traced back to the horror she has felt in relation to her father’s sexuality. Her constituting trauma
is the repressed memory of a game of hide-and-seek gone horribly awry when playful thrill
turns into grotesque sexual excitement. In a dream on the farm, Mary recalls her father catching
her head and holding it in his lap as her mother hides. She is overwhelmed by the ‘smell of
beer, and through it she smelt too – her head held down in the thick stuff of his trousers – the
unwashed masculine smell she always associated with him’ (163). Later, as a young woman,
VKHUHVROXWHO\ GHQLHVKHUVH[XDOLW\PRGHOOLQJ KHUVHOIRQµWKHPRUH FKLOGLVKORRNLQJ¿OPVWDUV¶
(36), and lives, beyond the age of thirty, at a girls’ club in town. Here, she is reminded of the
schooldays she adored, and permitted to live as a girl as opposed to a woman of sexual maturity.
Somewhat grotesquely for her age, she wears ‘little girl frocks in pastel colours’ and her hair in
‘little-girl fashion on her shoulders’ (38). Small clues reveal her extreme repression at this time
in her life: she is stiff, aloof and immune to the social intrigue that consumes the young women
with whom she lives. Moreover, if she fantasizes at all about a man, he is a ‘creature of her
imagination whom she endow[s] with hands and lips but [leaves] bodiless’ (55). This is fallibility
masquerading as strength: it is the ‘weakness she would not have considered a weakness: she felt
disinclined, almost repelled, by the thought of intimacies and scenes and contacts … And she
ZDVTXLWHXQFRQVFLRXVRILW¶0DU\¶VZHDNQHVVLVDIDLOXUHLQWZRUHVSHFWV¿UVWKHUGHQLDORI
the body is a pathology Lessing explores at both the individual and social level; second, Mary’s
disinclination to grow up and marry is a failure from the perspective of her society.
If, as Judith Butler argues, gender and sexuality are ‘strateg[ies] of survival within
a compulsory system’ (178), then Mary, who does not perform her gender ‘correctly’, is
doomed. She realizes this, in fact, upon accidentally overhearing her friends discussing her
inappropriate clothes and unlikelihood to marry. One observation, in particular, remains with
her, to traumatically repeat itself throughout her life: ‘She just isn’t like that, isn’t like that at all.
6RPHWKLQJPLVVLQJVRPHZKHUH¶7KLVLV0DU\¶V¿UVWSXQLWLYHLQWLPDWLRQRIKHULQDELOLW\WR
subscribe to the dictates of the patriarchal social order, an anomaly she immediately attempts to
rectify by seeking a husband despite her desire not to do so.
The compelling necessity for women to relinquish ownership of their bodies to the patriarchal
V\PEROLFRUGHULVVXJJHVWHG ZKHQ 'LFN ¿UVW JOLPSVHV 0DU\LQWKH FLQHPD D PHWDSKRU LQ WKH
QRYHOIRUQRUPDWLYHVRFLDOGHVLUH7KHDXGLHQFH±µKXQGUHGVRISHRSOHÀRZQRXWRIWKHLUERGLHV
and living in the lives of those stupid people posturing there’ (46) – symbolizes society and its
obsession with conforming to performative gender roles. For Mary, however, there seems ‘no
FRQQHFWLRQEHWZHHQWKHGLVWRUWHGPLUURURIWKHVFUHHQDQGKHURZQOLIHLWZDVLPSRVVLEOHWR¿W
together what she wanted for herself and what she was offered’ (44). Mary wants to repress her
sexuality, but society demands that she express it in marriage. When she tells herself, then, in
naïve expectation of her married life on Dick’s Rhodesian farm, that she will ‘get close to nature’
(51), she has no awareness of how much (of her own) ‘nature’ she will in fact have to endure.
Her revulsion for the sexual act soon ensures that she refuses intimacy with Dick. Nevertheless,
KHUPDUULDJHUHSUHVHQWVDVH[XDOLQLWLDWLRQUHVXOWLQJ LQ KHU LQWHQVL¿HG DQG K\VWHULFDO GHVLUH WR
repress her corporeality. Like other colonial novels – Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for example –
The Grass is Singing conceptualizes landscape as the external manifestation of its protagonist’s
displaced and anguished psyche. In particular, the landscape, dry and throbbing with heat, where
WKH HXSKRUELDV UDLVH µJUH\JUHHQ ÀHVK\ DUPV LQWR YLYLG EOXH VN\¶  EHFRPHV D WURSH IRU
Mary’s physicality, which she loathes and entirely displaces. As time passes on the farm, as she
is increasingly cast into neurotic crisis by the demands of her marriage and her simultaneous and
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38
Bridget Grogan
steadfast refusal of carnality, the steadily rising temperature begins to affect her; the throbbing
KHDWRIWHQVRFORVHO\FRQÀDWHGZLWKKHUERG\DVVHHPLQJO\WRHPDQDWHIURPLWµWKHVZHDWSRXUHG
off her all day; she could feel it running down her ribs and thighs under her dress, as if ants
were crawling over her’ (66). Heat, here, is a metaphor for sexuality and Mary’s body is often
eroticized in relation to it. Moreover, as the heat rises, demanding her awareness of her body and
permeating the dynamics of the text, so her virago attacks on the servants begin and increase in
their fury.
7RGHQ\WKHµQDWXUDO¶DQGWKHERGLO\ZKLFKKDYHWHUUL¿HGKHUWKURXJKRXWOLIH0DU\SURMHFWV
these negatively associated aspects of herself outward, resulting not only in her fear of the
landscape but also in her racism. In Mary’s bigoted estimation, the black servants become
increasingly associated with corporeality. She is painfully aware of the ‘reeking bodies of the
working natives’ (69). However, she is most repulsed by the women, the novel thus emphasizing
racism as a symptom of her divided self:
,IVKHGLVOLNHGQDWLYHPHQ VKHORDWKHGWKHZRPHQ6KHKDWHGWKHH[SRVHGÀHVKLQHVVRI
them, their soft brown bodies and soft bashful faces that were also insolent and inquisitive,
DQGWKHLUFKDWWHULQJYRLFHVWKDWKHOGDEUD]HQÀHVK\XQGHUWRQH«$ERYHDOOVKHKDWHGWKH
way they suckled their babies, with their breasts hanging down for everyone to see; there
ZDVVRPHWKLQJLQ WKHLUFDOPVDWLV¿HGPDWHUQLW\WKDWPDGHKHUEORRGERLOµ7KHLUEDELHV
hanging on 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. (94–95)
Mary’s ‘horror of suckling a child’ is at issue here, and not her loathing of black women. Whiteness
is disassociated from corporeality, yet white women are trapped within their physical immanence
by patriarchal culture, revealing their split identity. Mary is not alone in her projection of her
horror of female corporeality onto the racial Other:
since so many white women are like her, turning with relief to the bottle, she was in good
company, and did not think of herself, but rather of these black women, as strange; they
were alien and primitive creatures with ugly desires she could not bear to think about. (95)
Thus Lessing outlines the schizophrenic position of the generic colonial white woman, who
attempts to attain the ‘disembodiment’ associated with colonial identity yet disallowed by
women’s position in society.
)RU0DU\WKLVVSOLWWLQJPDQLIHVWVDVDQLQWHQVL¿HGUDFLVPDQLGHRORJ\IXUWKHUSUREOHPDWL]HG
in the novel by Lessing’s emphasis on its association with a complex suppression of guilt. When
Mary watches Moses washing himself, for example, and acknowledges yet suppresses his
displeasure and right to privacy, the radical division of society and splitting of the individual
required to maintain the colonial hierarchy is emphasized. Mary’s moment of voyeurism radically
divides her personality:
What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant,
had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident
looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief occupation
to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment, and he brings down
the whip. (144)
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39
(Im)purity, Danger and the Body in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing
To counteract her guilt, in a manner that ironically compounds it, Mary imagines the black man
as a soulless body, ‘as if he were a machine’ (68). Indeed Lessing emphasizes white society’s
exploitation of the black man as a mere body used for labour and thus for capitalist production.
Charlie Slatter’s method of ‘farming with the sjambok’, which hangs ‘over his front door like a
motto on the wall’ (14) reveals the dehumanization of Slatter’s human workers, who, according
to Rhodesian society, are mere bodily cogs in a machine of human labour producing white
wealth. Mary Turner therefore acts according to the rules of her society when she dehumanizes
her servants. However, she despises her servants when they retract their humanity. When one of
her early domestic workers presents himself as ‘only a black body ready to do her bidding’ (68),
for example, she wants to ‘pick up a plate and throw it in his face so as to make it human and
expressive, even with pain’ (68). Later, however, the recognition of Moses’s humanity rapidly
begins to unravel her character and push her over the brink of madness. Mary’s white identity,
predicated upon her hierarchical superiority to the black man, cannot sustain itself once the
notion of a shared humanity across the races is recognized. With the recognition of a ‘personal
relation’ (144) comes the awareness that the abject is not ‘other’, but, in fact, a constituent of the
self. By realising what she shares with Moses, then, Mary must confront her corporeality. Her
¿UVWLQWLPDWLRQRIKHUVH[XDODWWUDFWLRQWR0RVHVWKXVFRUUHVSRQGVZLWKKHUUHFRJQLWLRQRIKLV
humanity. As Moses washes himself behind the house, unaware that the ‘madam’ is watching,
Mary’s unspoken desire is evident in imagery such as ‘the white lather … startlingly white
against the black skin’ (143). Moreover, Mary becomes painfully aware of the landscape, which
has, due to her denial and projection of her own corporeality, become strongly associated with
her body. She feels ‘the pressure of the sun against the back of her bare neck, the sharp hot stones
SUHVVLQJXSDJDLQVWKHUVROHV¶6KH¿QGVKHUVHOIµVKDNLQJWKHEORRG>WKUREELQJ@LQKHUHDUV
… her mouth dry’ (145).
In addition to the novel’s focus on the repression and return of the body and the provisional
status of subjectivity in relation to the abject, the body is an important site of shifting power
relations in the novel, problematizing the ubiquity of white patriarchy. Consequently, throughout
the novel, ambivalent feelings emerge in Mary’s relationship with Moses as reactions to relations
of power determined by the bodies of both within the context of the colonial body politic. Moses’s
blackness renders him weak within the social context that privileges Mary with a symbolic
strength. However, his patriarchal strength overrides her feminine weakness. Blackness and
IHPLQLQLW\DUH WKHUHIRUH FRQÀDWHG LQ WKHQRYHO ,Q WKHLU UHODWLRQVWR SDWULDUFK\ DQG ZKLWHQHVV
WKH\DUHVKLIWLQJVLJQL¿HUVRISRZHUDQGLPSRWHQFH
The vacillating dynamic of power between Mary and Moses is evident in the structure of the
novel in two corresponding narrative episodes which deliberately confound the relation between
SDWULDUFK\DQGZKLWHQHVV,QWKH¿UVW0DU\HQFRXQWHUV0RVHVIRUWKH¿UVWWLPHZKLOVWVXSHUYLVLQJ
the labourers as they stack harvested corn, Dick having succumbed to malaria. Moses stands
aside from the ‘human conveyor-belt’ (118), refusing to work. When Mary upbraids him for both
ignoring her and for eventually addressing her in his own language, he translates: ‘I … want …
ZDWHU¶ +LV µKDOWLQJOXGLFURXV PDQQHU¶VXGGHQ VPLOH DQG JHVWXUHZLWK KLV ¿QJHU
down his throat encourage his workmates’ laughter and suggest his attitude of parodic mimicry.
Mary is incensed. Having adopted Charlie Slatter’s policy of farming with the sjambok, the
phallic symbol of power which she swings perpetually from her wrist, she raises the weapon and
strikes him across the face. Her assertion of white power over Moses, however, is concomitant
with her awareness of her physical vulnerability. As his face swells and bleeds, she notices that
KHLVµDJUHDWKXONRIDPDQWDOOHUWKDQDQ\RIWKHRWKHUVPDJQL¿FHQWO\EXLOW¶6KHUHDOL]HV
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40
Bridget Grogan
his phallic strength: he seems to ‘tower over her’ (119) and she recoils in terror for fear of attack.
7KHVHFRQGHSLVRGHRFFXUVDIWHU0DU\KDVUHSHDWHGO\¿UHGDQXPEHURIKRXVHVHUYDQWVDQG
Dick, unaware of her violence toward Moses two years prior, has employed the latter as domestic
help. When Moses, like the others, threatens to resign, Mary is overcome by her repeated failures.
Afraid of disappointing Dick yet again, she breaks down in front of Moses begging him to stay,
GHVSLWHKHUµVKDPHDQGPRUWL¿FDWLRQEHFDXVHKHZDVVHHLQJKHUFU\¶0RVHVIHWFKHV0DU\
a glass of water. His response is juxtaposed against the aforementioned episode, emphasizing the
inversion of power that occurs between the two characters:
«VKHVDZKLPJRDFURVVWRWKHVKHOIZKHUHWKHZDWHU¿OWHUVWRRGWR¿OODJODVV7KHVORZ
deliberation of his movements galled her, because of her own lost control … He held the
glass to her lips, so that she had to put up her hand to hold it, and with the tears running
down her face she took a gulp. She looked at him pleadingly over the glass, and with
renewed fear saw an indulgence for her weakness in his eyes.
‘Drink,’ he said simply, as if he were speaking to one of his own women; and she drank.
(151)
Moses reverses the power relation by providing Mary with the drink of water she has previously
denied him. By doing so, he displaces his former vulnerability, based upon the bodily marker
of blackness, and symbolized in the novel by the bodily need of thirst, onto Mary. Mary is now
GH¿QHGE\ODFNDQGLWLV0RVHVUHODWLQJWRKHUDVµRQHRIKLVRZQZRPHQ¶ZKRSRVVHVVHVSKDOOLF
SRZHU+HUGULQNLQJRIWKHZDWHUWKDW0RVHVJLYHVWRKHULPSOLHVYLDWKHLPDJHRIWKHLQ¿OWUDWLRQ
of her body, the weakening of her socialized (racist, colonial) identity and, by extension, the
weakening of the borders of the body politic.
Moses’s patriarchal association increases over the course of the novel until the culminating
scene of Mary’s murder, suggesting his rising threat to white patriarchy and thus his penetration
of the social body. Adopting phallic power, he becomes, in Mary’s experience, ‘almost fatherly’
(YHQWXDOO\LQ KHU µWHUULEOH GUHDP¿OOHG QLJKWV¶WKDWDULVHDV KHU REVHVVLRQ ZLWK 0RVHV
LQFUHDVHVVHUYDQWDQGIDWKHUDUHFRQÀDWHG
He [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,
QRWWKHQDWLYHVPHOOEXWWKHXQZDVKHGVPHOORIKHUIDWKHU,W¿OOHGWKHURRPPXVW\OLNH
animals. (165)
Mary’s dreams expose racism as linked to archaic abjection, connected as it is in the novel
to the incest taboo. Kristeva observes that abjection, ‘like prohibition of incest, is a universal
phenomenon, one encounters it as soon as the symbolic and/or social dimension of man is
constituted, and this throughout the course of civilization’ (68, original emphasis). Moses as the
abject of white colonial society is both repulsive and compelling, evident in Mary’s split desire
WRFRQIRUP WR KHU VRFLDO RUGHUDQG WR OLEHUDWH LWVKHU ¿[HG LGHQWLW\ E\ REOLWHUDWLQJLW ,QGHHG
Mary’s attitude toward Moses is ‘one of a strong and irrational fear, a deep uneasiness, and
even – though this she did not know, would have died rather than acknowledge – of some dark
attraction’ (Lessing 154). To allow attraction to the abject to prevail, and hence to be drawn
over the boundary separating the provisional categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’, where meaning
and order erode, can be of value in the liberation it offers from socialized identity. According
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41
(Im)purity, Danger and the Body in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing
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colonial Gothic of Lessing’s writing, one who continually encounters the abject is
on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the
danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot
help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the
more he is saved. (Kristeva 8)
Thus Mary, ‘forced into contact’ with Moses, and compelled to treat him ‘as a human being’
because ‘it [is] impossible for her to thrust him out of her mind like something unclean’, is
aware that ‘something in it’ – her growing fascination with Moses – is ‘dangerous’ (156).
Indeed, Moses threatens her with the liberatory danger of the dissolution of her socialized
identity.
Because Moses remains beyond the understanding of the social body, his character is elided
within the text. His inscrutability, however, is not necessarily due to the novel’s unwitting denial
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a tabula rasa onto which Mary and others project their racist pathologies and, second, as the
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The novel is complex in that it is presented as a realist text. However, it is also an allegory
emphasizing Mary and Moses as social symbols, their bodies positioned at the permeable
boundary of a threatened yet resolutely defensive body politic. For Lessing, writing in the late
1940s in Rhodesia, racist colonial society is such a protected social body that Moses remains
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her treatment of dangerous bodies (the body politic itself and the bodies that threaten it) exposes
social paranoia. Furthermore, it reveals the complex, neurotic splitting fundamental to the
construction of a closed social body. In itself, this literary exposure diminishes the apparent
strength and seemingly impenetrable system of the patriarchal, racist and colonial social body,
and the discourse with which it constructs itself. Lessing’s novel therefore remains a powerful
analysis of the importance of bodily symbolism and abjection to colonial racism.
NOTES
1. The novel is in fact set in Rhodesia. In an interview with Stephen Gray, Lessing explains
why she terms it ‘South Africa’: ‘I don’t think there was very much difference between the
Rhodesian experience and the South African experience’. As she goes on to explain, ‘The
Grass is Singing is very Rhodesian because it was based on the life of the district which
I was brought up in, [which] I’m sure … could have happened in South Africa’ (Gray
111). In Lessing’s understanding ‘South Africa’ may simply be another term for ‘Southern
Africa’. However, at the time of the novel’s publication (1950), the recent legislation
of apartheid (1948) had ensured South Africa’s greater international infamy. Lessing’s
decision, therefore, may well have been political, as well as an attempt to appeal to an
international audience.
2. Kristeva developed her psychoanalytic theory of abjection in her seminal work, Powers
of Horror, outlining the fundamental importance of the affect of disgust, or abjection, to
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loathsome’ (Kristeva 2); it is what we sever from our constructions of our selves and
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42
Bridget Grogan
our bodies as ‘clean and proper’, but which nevertheless confounds the boundaries of
our bodies and therefore our selves. Categories of the abject include food that disgusts
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To maintain subjectivity as healthy and unthreatened, abjection develops as a defence
response separating identity from the ‘Not me’, from the abject, that threatens it at its
borders (2).
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