Selected Stories by Nadine Gordimer

First published: 1975

Type of work: Short Stories

Form and Content

Selected Stories includes an introduction by Gordimer and thirty-one stories written between 1943 and 1973, selected by Gordimer from her five previously published short-story collections: The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1951), Six Feet of the Country (1956), Friday’s Footprint (1960), Not for Publication (1965), and Livingstone’s Companions (1972). Selected Stories presents from five to eight stories from each previously published collection, always including the title story. Arranged chronologically, this collection provides a historical perspective, since more than half of the stories have political themes dealing with the difficulties of living under apartheid in South Africa. Reading Selected Stories provides insight into the social and political climate surrounding Gordimer as she wrote.

The stories present thirty-one separate fictional glimpses into people’s lives. Not directly addressed, apartheid is revealed through the characters who are living under the system. Gordimer chronicles sometimes moments, sometimes years in the lives of whites and blacks, old and young, males and females, in various locations. Character is portrayed through either home and family, social connections, or political views. Almost half of the stories deal with husband-and-wife relationships, and of the remaining stories, eleven have female protagonists. Women’s position in society and in the home and women’s political views are evident throughout the collection.

The women characters are diverse as are their positions in society and their political views. In the initiation stories, for example, many of the female protagonists are young and are from the privileged white population. Yet “Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants” and “Friday’s Footprint” center on working middle-aged women, and the protagonist of “Enemies” is a seventy-one-year-old woman who once was a baroness. Other stories in the book—“A Chip of Glass Ruby,” “Ah, Woe Is Me,” “Happy Event,” and “Something for the Time Being”—have Indian or black women as protagonists or as foils for the protagonists. A few stories are apolitical, but most are either overtly political or include political details as a concomitant part of the characters’ lives. The middle-aged Indian woman—Mrs. Bamjee—in “A Chip of Glass Ruby” is arrested for her political activity, as is the young white Joyce McCoy in “The Smell of Death and Flowers”; in the former story, political activity has long become a way of life, while it is a new experience for Joyce McCoy. In contrast to the activism of these women, the young black wife in “Something for the Time Being” wishes that her husband would stop his political activities.

Yet Selected Stories does not deal exclusively with women or couples; several stories have male protagonists, and these, like Gordimer’s women characters, are diverse: Carl Church, the London foreign correspondent in “Livingstone’s Companions”; Mr. Van As, in “The Last Kiss,” who is nearly seventy, an Afrikaner who once was a cartage contractor in a gold mining area of the Transvaal; Manie Swemmer, a middle-aged working man with Scottish ancestors in “Abroad”; Praise Basetse, in “Not for Publication,” a young beggar taken from the streets of Johannesburg to be educated. Selected Stories presents characters in their daily activities, sometimes living as they choose, but often as they believe they must because of the dictates of society or politics.

Context

Gordimer’s fiction highlights the dangers of repressive cultures, whether racist or sexist. Yet she downplays her position as a woman writer; in her introduction to Selected Stories, she writes, “All writers are androgynous beings.” Her view on feminism in South Africa is also subdued. The politics of the country precludes feminism as a primary issue; the vast differences between the lives of white and black women in South Africa make a sense of community between the two quite difficult to achieve.

Through the use of character foils, “Happy Event” from Selected Stories helps to clarify this position. Ella Plaistow goes to a nursing home to have an abortion, freeing herself and her husband for their planned six-month European holiday; Lena, her maid, is sentenced to six months of hard labor after a dead newborn found in the veld proves to her child. In Gordimer’s story, Ella has no sympathy for Lena despite the indirect plea for help Lena sends, wrapping the infant in the blue nightgown given to her by Ella because Ella could no longer bear to wear the gown herself, associating it with her abortion.

Although downplaying her role as a woman writer, Gordimer deals frankly with women’s issues such as abortion. Much of Gordimer’s fiction is narrated from the woman’s perspective, and woman’s plight is not neglected. Many of her short stories and several of her novels, in the Bildungsroman tradition, focus on young women who are freeing themselves of parental authority, establishing their sexual lives, or committing themselves to political action. Other issues in Gordimer’s fiction of special concern to women are the sexism that results from a patriarchal culture and the difficulty of reconciling one’s responsibility to children and to oneself.

In 1991, Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of the quality of her large body of writing. Her short stories and novels, if read chronologically, provide not only an artist’s vision of twentieth century South Africa but also the history of an artist’s growth. Gordimer has created many worlds, narrating them from the perspectives of men and women, the privileged and the oppressed, the blind and the insightful. Her different perspectives provide insights into the complexity of social and political problems, including, but not exclusive to, those of women.

Bibliography

Clingman, Stephen. The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986. Places Gordimer’s novels in the context of South African history. The subtitle emphasizes that Gordimer’s treatment of history is that of one who is living in the midst of the events. Includes a thorough bibliography of works by and about Gordimer, on South African history, and on South African literature.

Eckstein, Barbara. “Pleasure and Joy: Political Activism in Nadine Gordimer’s Short Stories.” World Literature Today 59, no. 3 (Summer, 1985): 343-346. Suggests that Gordimer’s stories are more complex and ambiguous than is sometimes assumed.

Gerver, Elisabeth. “Women Revolutionaries in the Novels of Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.” World Literature Written in English 17 (1978): 38-50. Argues that Gordimer’s women revolutionary characters gain strength and complexity in later novels (1953-1974). Connects the women revolutionary characters to critical realism.

Haugh, Robert F. Nadine Gordimer. New York: Twayne, 1974. Deals with thirty-five stories and the first five novels. Prefers the stories to the novels. Includes a chronology of Gordimer to 1973 and a selected bibliography that has been superseded by Clingman’s.

Smith, Rowland, ed. Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. The introduction details positive and negative criticism of Gordimer’s works. Sixteen essays originally published between 1954 and 1988 show the development of Gordimer criticism and deal with short stories and eight novels. Essays by Sheila Roberts and Dorothy Driver concentrate on Gordimer’s treatment of women. Indexed.

Trump, Martin. “The Short Fiction of Nadine Gordimer.” Research in African Literature 17, no. 5 (1986): 341-369. Deals with short stories from the 1940’s into the 1980’s. Categorizes many into three groups: initiation stories of young women, satiric stories of affluent whites, and stories of physical or moral conflict caused by South African apartheid. Traces the link between the political oppression of blacks and the social oppression of women. Provides a context for the political stories by dealing with Gordimer’s position in South Africa.

Visel, Robin. “Othering the Self: Nadine Gordimer’s Colonial Heroines.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 19, no. 4 (1988): 33-42. Addresses Gordimer’s complex treatment of the white female South African who identifies her struggle for greater independence with the political struggles of blacks—the white female who identifies the black other within herself.