Abstract
Since its publication in 1950, The Grass Is Singing has been read from Marxist, psychoanalytical and post-colonial approaches. However, these approaches fail to bring to light the various ambiguities and “gray areas” in this novel. Drawing mainly on the theories proposed by Michele Foucault, bell hooks, Jonathan Rutherford and Edward W. Soja, this thesis attempts to shed light on the “Gray” characters, who belong neither to one place nor the other. All suffer from identity crisis, for they cannot be categorized into either side the binary divisions of male-masculine/female-feminine, white dominating/black dominated and white bourgeoisie/black proletariat suggest. According to Michele Foucault’s conception of power, the operation of power discourse contributes to the ideology of dichotomy and creates the boundary of the so-called margin and center. But, the relationship between margin and center is not always fixed and stable; instead, it is flowing and reversal. In The Grass Is Singing, though the marginal characters can rebel against the supremacist hegemony and patriarchal authority, the subversion they make is temporary and the transformation they cause is local. They can not be called the “powerful marginality” as bell hooks and Edward W. Soja propose, for they fail to create the new third space beyond margin and center. At the same time, they fail to achieve Homi Bhabha’s “hybridity,” a third space from which the opposing differences can be integrated. Living within the framework of binary oppositions, these “Gray” characters all live in the “space between,” unable to avoid the fate of death, madness and exclusion in the end. For them, Southern Rhodesia is like the reflector of the wasteland, full of alienation, uncertainty illusion. Like people on The Waste Land, the marginal characters in The Grass Is Singing wait for the coming of rain to save their infertile spirit. Yet, there is no hope for Mary, Moses and Tony; they are doomed to live in disillusioned and helpless world.