Doris Lessings Book Character Essay Example for Free

Doris Lessings Book Character EssayWe are first introduced to Mary as being an independent young woman. However Lessings character currently shows signs of being an insecure woman, who cares deeply what other people think about her. The reviewer is forced to sympathise with this self-destructing character. Throughout the novel Mary is described as being in a state of tension and under strain. Mary is unable to adapt to her new life on the farm with Dick, she is constantly thirst for the town she left behind. The linear plot is about Mary Turners life, going back to her electric razorhood and progressing to her characters fatal ending. The narrator tells of Mary being raised by frustrated parents and the hatred she felt towards her father. Her body is treated with discust,She smelt the thick stuff of his trousers, a possibility that some sort of child abuse occurred, which would account for her arrested sexuality, the fear and repulsion of sex. Mary becomes a friendless chara cter who receives no help from her Husband and no loyalty from the servant.However cutthroat Mary becomes with her servant she neer actually commits a crime. Mary is driven to marry Dick after she over hears people mocking her and she feels she is being ostracized. The commentator views Mary as a heroine who has lost her struggle. We are told by the narrator that evil was not contained within this woman but that evil was all round her. Throughout the novel the authors disapproval of sexual and political prejudice and the colonialism in South Africa is constantly reinforced. This in turn influences the reader not to adapt to the main characters viewing of the world.Lessings novel advise be seen as Marys constant struggle to preserve her authenticity and whizz of self but she fails to overcome her struggle due to the forces and conditions that surround her. Marys failures are rooted in her family and culture that in turn dooms her to her death. Although at the beginning of Mary and Mosess relationship, Mary exerts all her power and authority, we soon see a role reversal and a curious relationship coach when Moses insists on being treated like a human. From the beginning of the novel we become aware of Marys family struggles of poverty.Lessing intentionally tried to make the reader constantly switch from sympathising with Mary to despising her. Both Mary and Dick are identified as being tragic figures because of their failure to communicate and to track the practical and emotional difficulties in their lives. Marybelieved that she was as a white person is superior to the stern natives in every way.The relationship that Mary develops with her forbidding servant Moses shatters the complacency of the whites in Africa. Moses power in the relationship is unquestionable and real. His action in murdering Mary is simply a demonstration of the control which he exerts over her and in general which the blacks have in their own country still. The whites only retain a hold based on lies and corruptionThe solid ground is what kills Mary. Marys efforts to assert her white authority over a black man continually backfire and leave her with less control. While it is never explicitly stated, the novel suggests that Mary succumbs to him sexually just as her mental faculties begin to disintegrate(40)Marys cognizance of the murder as bingle compoundedby her own guilt and by vengeance, rather than unwarranted aggression, shows a strange ability to forgive her own murderer even as he performs the act that she knows he is compelled to do.(42)Theshadow of regret, followed by the desire to explain and to be absolved of guilt, marks the first and only moment in the novel in which Mary is conceived as a self-possessed agent of her own destiny(43)The reader never consent to Marys view of the world but they can relate to the traditions and cultures that she was raised in that influenced her behaviour. Mary had been brought up to be afraid of black menShe was afraid of them the natives, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her puerility she had been forbidden to walk out alone, and when she asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her(chapt4)She hated their half-naked, thick-muscled black bodies stooping in themindless rhythm of their work. She hated their sullenness, their averted eyes when they spoke to her, their veiled insolence and she hated more than anything, with a violent physical repulsion, the dull smell that came from the, a hot, sour animal smell.(chap.7)The reader identifies with Marys Emotional failure as a white woman, a wife that rendered from her childhood upbringing and formed her into this insecure woman.