Some Grass is Singing Q & A

1) Mary doesn't like the farm and instead prefers the town. Dick on the other hand would rarely go into town and liked to stay on the farm. However he was not capable of effectively running the farm and thus he and Mary lived in poverty. Charlie Slatter saw the farm as a way to make profit and thus was protective of it.

4) Mary over hears her friends saying that she "is not like that", meaning that she is not the type to settle down and get married. She has reasons for not wanting to however, especially after seeing how miserable her parents were together. Yet then realizing that she may end up alone in life, she gets scared and seeks a partner whom she finds in Dick Turner.

6) The Turner house is described on page 23 as an overwhelmingly hot, "ugly little house" with a "bare crackling tin of a roof", "faded gimcrack furniture", and "dusty brick floors that were covered with ragged animal skins." This seemed to symbolize misery and even to Tony it seemed like a hell hole trap.

9) For a long time Mary had worked to support herself so she wasn't refusing economic responsibility. But she showed refusal in other areas of life such as her reluctantness to get married and her loathing of showing physical affection to her husband. She doesn't seem to have a concrete identity. It seems that she tried her best to fit in in any situation.

10) I think the most powerful institutions are race and gender assignations because these determine who will be master and who will be slave, thus making human relations difficult. These two institutions play a crucial role in this book as whites are masters over blacks and women are slaves to men.

11) Mary's fear of marriage/sexuality, which was based a lot on her father, plus her realization that she is stuck in her lowly status position and must abide by societal norms perhaps contributed to her feeling isolated. After hearing her friends talk about her she began to feel as though her time to find a man would soon run out with her fading beauty/youth.


Work Cited

Lessing, Doris. "The Grass is Singing". New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 2008.