However, just as socially and phenomenologically pertinent as skin to Lessing’s novel, albeit less obviously so, is milk,Īnd the border zones that it transgresses. Dick and Mary are poor and do not socialize with the other white settlers in their farming district. Mary Turner, the wife of Dick Turner, has been murdered, and a houseboy has confessed to the crime. The border between each subject and the external world, separating individuals while also potentially uniting them in theĬhiasmic tactile encounter that French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty theorized, also in the mid-century period. The Grass is Singing is set in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the 1940s. From a phenomenological perspective, skin also marks Social groups in the world of Mary Turner, Lessing’s tragic protagonist. Of the European colonizers, on one hand, and the indigenous Africans, on the other, that demarcate the two most fundamental At the most obvious, social level, it is primarily the different skin colours

Southern Rhodesian society that Lessing depicts. The most apparent signifier of these boundaries is skin, which defines multiple border zones between people of the mid-century Doris Lessing’s initially well-received but subsequently neglected 1950 debut novel, The Grass is Singing, is a searching narrative of cultural boundaries, the nature of their enforcement and the potential for their transgression.

Doris lessing the grass is singing