Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of cross-racial desire in Doris Lessing’s 1950 novel, The Grass Is Singing. It draws upon Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and combines it with Fanon’s insights into the nature of interracial intimacies in racist societies to argue Lessing’s novel depicts a mimetic situation where the black man’s attraction to the white woman cannot be spontaneous and is in essence a desire for the power and privilege of the white mediator. Girardian analysis proves fruitful in explaining Moses’ conduct and his eventual murder of his white mistress. In this mimetic situation, Moses is mimetically carried away, and the white woman for him represents a means to an end, and when she decides to leave the farm and become, in Girardian terms, an inaccessible object, he murders her. The novel, then, this paper suggests, becomes an indictment of racist structures as it renders evident the distorting effects of structural racism on interracial and inter-human relationships.
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Keramatfar, H. Moses and Power: Mimetic Desire in Doris Lessing’s the Grass Is Singing. Neophilologus 106, 729–740 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09736-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-022-09736-7