The Grass is Singing: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

There is an important shift that takes place in this final chapter regarding the way Mary’s thoughts are presented on the page. Up until this point, the narrator illustrates the ways in which Mary’s behavior is inspired by her thoughts and feelings, thus highlighting the internal logic of her mind. At this point, however, the narrator’s description of Mary’s existence matches the erratic state of her subjectivity.

Visions, thoughts, and emotions start to occur to Mary almost at random, and she oscillates between different mental and emotional states at breathless speed. Furthermore, Mary now seems to be aware of the future in an almost mystical manner, shown by the fact that she predicts that Moses will kill her and that the farm will be abandoned and overgrown.

Mary’s state of mind in this passage shows that she no longer experiences the world rationally, but rather symbolically. When she runs outside, the tree she encounters seems to be a reflection of herself; although it is only a sapling, it has a knotted trunk like an old tree and is crawling with beetles, evoking the poisonous, parasitical force that has seemingly taken over Mary’s mind.

The suitcase full of books about Cecil Rhodes at first seems to be an odd detail that jars with the rest of the narrative. Yet by encountering and then ignoring the books, Mary symbolically betrays the colonial project Rhodes advocated. She no longer feels a sense of loyalty to other white settlers; the only person who matters to her (whether as enemy or beloved) is Moses.

In this passage, Moses’s presence is most obviously comparable to that of a ghost—a specter that is either haunting Mary alone, or is a figment of Mary’s imagination. In Victorian literature, there exists a trope of ghosts haunting women, and this narrative is often linked to explorations of repressed sexuality. In this sense, Moses is both a ghost haunting Mary and a figment of her imagination.

Moses clearly has a special relationship with Mary and little interest in the other characters; at the same time, Mary’s fear of Moses is seemingly irrational and baseless, the product of her own mind.

As Mary descends further into delusion and paranoia, she seems to sense the house already being subsumed by the wilderness. Her acceptance of her “illness” appears to be more than just an acknowledgment of her mental state—the fact that she says she’s “always” been ill suggests that she sees some fundamental flaw in herself, or perhaps a fundamental disconnect between her “heart” and the world she has been forced to live in.

The final passage of the novel proves that Mary’s premonition that Moses would kill her was correct. This provokes the question of how she knew this would happen, and the question of whether Mary’s death at Moses’s hand was inevitable. Under one interpretation, the transgression of a white woman sexually desiring a black man in the colonial context is so great that it can only end in violence and death. Throughout colonial and postcolonial history, black men have been killed even for the suspicion of desiring white women, and—as is revealed at the beginning of the book—this will be Moses’s final fate. Another interpretation might suggest that Moses’s murder of Mary represents the struggle of all colonized people to overthrow their oppressors, and in doing so to reject false notions of white innocence and racial hierarchies. Perhaps Moses then hands himself in because this struggle is not truly a sin or crime, but a symbolic restoration of justice.