A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Language, Power, and Psychological Conflict in The Grass is Singing

Lessing's novel The Grass Is Singing (1950), a powerful description of colonial psychosis, racial discrimination, and psychological disintegration takes place in Southern Rhodesia. This paper provides a psycholinguistic analysis of the novel based on Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, Julia Kristeva's conception of the semiotic and the abject, and systemic functional linguistics. It is claimed that the linguistic system of the novel the use of different narrative perspectives, the use of the specific linguistic mood structures, and gradual loss of the ability to speak by the heroine represents the psycholinguistic structure of colonial psychosis. The paper is devoted to the three aspects of language functioning in the novel: grammatical expression of power and dominance via the use of declarative, interrogative and imperative mood structures, linguistic signs of the psychological collapse of Mary Turner and her regression from symbolic language into the semiotic one, symbolic overturning of power via the master and servant dialogic relations between Mary and Moses. From the findings, it is clear that in the colonial context, language is not an unbiased medium, but rather a space of conflict in which identity, power, and sanity are negotiated and surrendered. The deterioration of Mary's verbal ability, seen in the form of her unfinished sentences, her borrowing of her mother's voice, and her automatic speech, symbolizes the inability to maintain a stable subject position in the face of the conflicting ideologies of colonialism.