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. Mary's dementia is read as a symbol of J. Thus, whilst the omniscient narrator often looks to assume the imperial perspective of the district, Lessing’s. Even as Mary's sense of historical guilt becomes a debilitating form of abjection, it encodes and bolsters powerful forms of agency. This posture helps to elucidate some of the ambiguity of Lessing’s debut novel, The Grass is Singing, which appears to both anxiously reinforce and progressively transgress the psychological barriers of colonial Southern Rhodesia. 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. This novel focuses on the psychological depiction of a black manservant killing a white mistress, revealing the racial discrimination and oppression in African colonies. 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. The Grass Is Singing is Lessing’s debut novel, which brings her instant reputation. However, the political aspect is but one of the. This paper examines representations of historical guilt, agency, and transformation in Doris Lessing's novel "The Grass is Singing." 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. It has been widely welcomed as the most successful colonial novel since The Story of an African Farm of 1883.