Asimmetrie di genere e di razza in The Grass is Singing di Doris Lessing

Abstract

Published in the early 1950s, The Grass is Singing (1950), the first work by Doris Lessing (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007), through the deconstruction of certain normative characters traditionally attributed to Englishness, anticipates in its narrative plot some of those founding issues that, in the decades to come, would be explored both by the theoretical-critical writings of Second Wave Feminism and within that complex study field which became known over the Seventies, such as (post-) colonial studies. In the novel, the body of the white colonial woman living in the colonies is depicted as the site of opposite tensions and the traditional homogeneity of the group of colonizers is decontructed.