Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing as a Critique of the Colonialism Enlightenment

The Grass Is Singing, a novel written by Doris Lessing in 0591, portrays the domination of western colonizers civilization as a masculinist ideology over nature and woman in parallel. The novel is about the degeneration of the core ideas of the Enlightenment – rationalism and progress – into brute domination,colonization and the rift between nature and culture. The novel, therefore, is a critique of colonial racism based on Enlightenment binary notions of civilizedand uncivilized. This study attempts to demonstrate the centrality of this critique to the novel. Atwood scathingly criticizes the rampant consumerism and capitalism of the modern age embodied in the threat posed by colonist culture, or colonist mentality, to Africa and nature which runs parallel to the masculine rationality which wills to submerge the feminine and the natural. The paper also discusses a number of other related dualisms represented in the novel

Keywords:

Doris Lessing , The Grass Is Singing , The Enlightenment , Ecofeminism , Colonialism , Nature , Power