As the novel continues, Lessing immerses her prose in Mary’s mental decline, and realism unravels. Coetzee's more recent characterization of apartheid as an event of "collective insanity," and forms the basis for a broader critique of the limits and exclusions of white postcolonial guilt. From the independent, girlish young woman who marries Dick Turner, the ennui of years on the farm leave Mary a frustrated and depressed wife. Mary's dementia is read as a symbol of J. Even as Mary's sense of historical guilt becomes a debilitating form of abjection, it encodes and bolsters powerful forms of agency. Mary's experience of guilt is analyzed according to Judith Butler's argument that subject formation relies paradoxically upon the twin experiences of both abjection and agency. Published in 1950, The Grass is Singing was written by British author Doris Lessing.It tells the story of Dick and Mary Turner, struggling white farmers living in Southern Rhodesia, South Africa. The allegorical violence that infuses this narrative of atonement is historicized within the context of the Black Peril in South Africa and the heightened surveillance of feelings under apartheid. From the very beginning of the novel, Lessing depicts and sets up the tension within the Southern Rhodesian society regarding race relations, especially surrounding the notion of a sexual relationship between a black man and a white woman the newspaper article reporting Mary Turner's murder speaks volumes more in what it does not mention (i.e. In particular, this paper argues that the warped interracial relationship between the novel's white female protagonist, Mary Turner, and her black servant Moses, becomes the vehicle for a cathartic and redemptive alleviation of white postcolonial guilt. This paper examines representations of historical guilt, agency, and transformation in Doris Lessing's novel The Grass is Singing.