A Critical Evaluation of the heroines of Nadine Gordimer

Abstract

The conflict of identity and allegiance is exemplified in Nadine Gordimer’s portrayal of the white African woman who is intellectually and emotionally alienated from white colonial society and at the same time physically barred from black Africa. Gordimer’s usual subject is the young woman who ventures from the white enclosure, who walks out of the sick relationship between the white mistress and black servant, and identifies her own quest for an independent identity with the blacks’ cultural, political and finally, military quest for freedom. The fiction of Gordimer presents the ambiguous, self divided figure of the white girl or woman is the site of the hesitant, fraught rapprochement of white and black. The image of the black body buried in the white-ruled land is a powerful pattern in Gordimer’s fiction. She has followed this metaphor of white South Africa as a graveyard, connecting the imagery of dryness and sterility prevalent in white South African fiction with decadence and death. Black South Africa oppressed and repressed, is the buried body that threatens, or promises, to raise up- to inundate and destroy, or to revive and fertilize- the country of the whites. The metaphor of the buried black body is both self and other. The black other can neither be assimilated nor granted full personality by the white subject. The white subject in Gordimer’s fiction cannot ‘self’ the black other. The novel’s metaphor is of white South Africa as ‘a picnic in beautiful graveyard where the people are buried alive under your feet’. Gordimer uses the interior monologue to bring out the experience of Africa as inside the white mind.