Town and country lovers nadine gordimer summary

Introduction to the Short Story

“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”

—Flannery O’Connor, American writer

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Describe early forms of storytelling and their cultural contexts. • Identify and differentiate features of the short story, and analyze their use in particular

stories. • Analyze the themes and concepts in "Country Lovers." • Successfully complete academic assignments that involve writing about and analyzing

short stories.

How Stories Began Chapter 3

From the time we are very young, we see the world and understand our lives through stories. We learn from them long before we can explain what a story is. Research shows that young children can identify which is the story when presented with an unfamiliar five-minute narrative about a boy with magical powers and a five-minute presentation written humorously to describe how to play a children’s game (McAdams, 1996). The recognizable pattern of a story is as old as human existence; we have always been storytellers.

3.1 How Stories Began Your environment and personal experiences influence your response to stories. Whether you are aware of it or not, the lens through which you envision a story is filtered by insights you have gained from family traditions, religious beliefs, and critical life issues. Thus, interpretations of a story vary based on the reader’s age, breadth of experience, and emotional connection. Likewise, interpretations differ from culture to culture. For example, stories that once grew out of particu- lar political controversies continue to be told long after the original political context has been for- gotten. The familiar nursery rhyme “Rock-a-bye Baby” is a classic example. In late 17th-century England, when there was a struggle for political power between Catholics and Protestants, King James II, who had converted to Catholicism, came to power. The “Rock-a-bye Baby” narrative is thought to reflect the rumor that the son born to him and the queen was not their child—but a boy hidden and secretly exchanged, giving them a Catholic heir to the throne—until, at some point (“when the bough breaks”) the truth would be known. The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes provides extensive background information about the stories that became known as nursery rhymes with the publication of John Newbery’s book Mother Goose’s Melody in mid-18th-century England.

The earliest stories in every culture are its myths, anonymous stories through which primitive people sought to explain the world around them, including the mysteries of divinity, creation, truth, and death. Literature often retells myths, using them as literary patterns. Because Greek and Roman myths are the ones most closely related to our culture, their patterns turn up often in other literature.

Prometheus had a prominent role in Greek creation mythology. He was a Titan who enjoyed pleasures that humans lacked. In a bold move, he stole fire from the sun and brought it to earth as a gift to humanity. Zeus, father of the gods, was offended by this defiant action. Because he was quarrelling with Prometheus at the time, Zeus arranged a horrible punishment: Prometheus was chained to a remote rock where an eagle tormented him constantly by tearing at his liver. Zeus set up conditions for ending the torment, but it did not happen for a long, long time. This myth addresses the risk that may accompany efforts to improve human conditions, espe- cially if the action defies the established order of things.

Prometheus has a counterpart in British literature. Matching the pattern of the original myth to a large extent, novelist Mary

◀ After giving fire to humanity, Prometheus was chained to a rock as punishment by Zeus.

Nicolas Sebastien Adam/The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty

Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

Shelley introduces readers to Dr. Victor Frankenstein, an eccentric scientist who manages to create “new” human life. However, the man he creates does not possess the kind of human refinements he hoped to achieve. Instead, his experiment produces a grotesque monster that torments Dr. Frankenstein and eventually kills members of the doctor’s family. In the subti- tle of her novel, Shelley identified Frankenstein as “The Modern Prometheus” (Shelley, 1818). Both Prometheus, the ancient Titan, and Frankenstein, the modern scientist, saw themselves as champions of humanity; both acted boldly and risked reversals, which came; and both suffered lasting pain as a result of their actions.

Other early story forms include the legend, the fable, the parable, and the tale. All are short and, like myths, provide reflections on human experiences. Legends often are traditions as well as stories. They are rooted in history and have fewer supernatural aspects than myths do. Fables are stories that often feature animals as characters, although people and inanimate objects may also play a key role, and always offer a moral or lesson. Parables also illustrate a moral or lesson, but the details of these stories carefully parallel those of the situation surrounding the moral. Tales, told in an uncomplicated manner, are anecdotes about an event.

3.2 Features of the Short Story The short story, as we know it, is a fictional narrative with a formal design. More stylized than a simple anecdote or narrative sketch, the short story form was developed in the 19th century. Two American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, were highly influential in creating the short story genre. In 1842, Poe was the first to define the genre formally, calling it an artistic composition controlled to produce a single unified effect—something he achieved brilliantly in his stories that explored themes like vengeance and fear of death. Beginning in the 20th century, short stories tended to focus more and more on real-life situations. In the early 20th century, O. Henry popularized the surprise ending as a short story technique. You will find one of his stories in Chapter 4.

Generally, a short story has the following features:

• a plot (a series of actions, events, or developments) • conflict (opposing actions, ideas, and decisions that hold the plot together) • a setting (the place where the action occurs) • a clear time frame (usually a relatively short period of time) • characters (fictional individuals who initiate the action and create the conflict) • a point of view (the particular perspective or slant through which the story is presented) • a theme (the underlying idea that the story illustrates or represents) • particular stylistic features, including tone, irony, and symbolism

Detailed discussion and illustrations of each of these elements are included in the next few chapters.

Stories also reflect culture. The term culture refers to common characteristics of a group or a region. Culture is never static; it is a changing phenomenon, constantly reconfigured by human behavior, language, laws, events, patterns, products, beliefs, and ideals. To put it simply, culture refers to a way of life, an ethos. Writers often reflect a particular culture through the setting of a story or the spirit of the characters’ lives—providing insight, for example, into Southern culture,

Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

post–World War I culture, or global culture. In this way, stories preserve culture: They freeze moments in time and create cultural awareness.

As you read “Country Lovers,” you are faced with interracial issues, which are explored through the character development, actions, and personal dilemmas of a privileged white boy and an ulti- mately powerless black girl. Notice how the author pulls you into an awareness of the culture in which the action happens. Also, look for the characteristics of the short story listed above; each one is important. (A number of common words in the story, such as “labourer” and “honourable,” may appear somewhat unfamiliar because they are spelled using the British and South African conventions rather than American ones.)

Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)

Nadine Gordimer has lived in South Africa since birth and, except for a year spent in university, has devoted all her adult life to writing—completing 13 novels and 10 short story collections, works that have been published in 40 languages. Her strong opposition to apartheid, the socioeconomic system that oppressed the majority black population in South Africa (1940–1994), is a dominant theme in her writing, with her later works reflecting challenges accompanying the changing attitudes in the country toward racial relation- ships. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991.

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Country Lovers Nadine Gordimer (1975)

A story about forbidden love on a South African farm.

The farm children play together when they are small, but once the white children go away to school they soon don’t play together any more, even in the holidays. Although most of the black chil- dren get some sort of schooling, they drop every year farther behind the grades passed by the white children; the childish vocabulary, the child’s exploration of the adventurous possibilities of dam, koppies,1 mealie lands,2 and veld3—there comes a time when the white children have surpassed these with the vocabu- lary of boarding-school and the possibilities of inter-school sports matches and the kind of adventures seen at the cinema. This use- fully coincides with the age of twelve or thirteen; so that by the time early adolescence is reached, the black children are making along with the bodily changes common to all, an easy transition to adult forms of address, beginning to call their old playmates mis- sus and baasie little master.4

1 Koppies, a small village in South Africa. 2 Mealie lands, maize fields. 3 Veld, wide-open, rural spaces. 4 Baasie little master, a way of addressing a young white male.

Setting: The first three paragraphs describe the

setting of the story, intro- ducing the reader to a rural environment in South Africa

where white children and black children share some

common childhood experi- ences, but, their customs,

expectations, and roles become distinctly different

as they grow up. For exam- ple, only the white children leave the Kraal, or village,

to attend school in town.

Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

The trouble was Paulus Eysendyck did not seem to realize that Thebedi was now simply one of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal,5 recognizable in his sisters’ old clothes. The first Christmas holidays after he had gone to boarding-school he brought home for Thebedi a painted box he had made in his wood-work class. He had to give it to her secretly because he had nothing for the other children at the kraal. And she gave him, before he went back to school, a bracelet she had made of thin brass wire and the grey-and-white beans of the castor-oil crop his father cultivated. (When they used to play together, she was the one who had taught Paulus how to make clay oxen for their toy spans.6) There was a craze, even in the platteland towns like the one where he was at school, for boys to wear elephant-hair and other bracelets beside their watch-straps; his was admired, friends asked him to get similar ones for them. He said the natives made them on his father’s farm and he would try.

When he was fifteen, six feet tall and tramping round at school dances with the girls from the “sister” school in the same town; when he had learnt how to tease and flirt and fondle quite inti- mately these girls who were the daughters of prosperous farmers like his father; when he had even met one who, at a wedding he had attended with his parents on a nearby farm, had let him do with her in a locked storeroom what people did when they made love—when he was as far from his childhood as all this, he still brought home from a shop in town a red plastic belt and gilt hoop ear-rings for the black girl, Thebedi. She told her father the missus had given these to her as a reward for some work she had done— it was true she sometimes was called to help out in the farmhouse. She told the girls in the kraal that she had a sweetheart nobody knew about, far away, away on another farm, and they giggled, and teased, and admired her. There was a boy in the kraal called Njabulo who said he wished he could have brought her a belt and ear-rings.

When the farmer’s son was home for the holidays she wandered far from the kraal and her companions. He went for walks alone. They had not arranged this; it was an urge each followed indepen- dently. He knew it was she, from a long way off. She knew that his dog would not bark at her. Down at the dried-up river-bed where five or six years ago the children had caught a leguaan one great day—a creature that combined ideally the size and ferocious aspect of the crocodile with the harmlessness of the lizard—they squatted side by side on the earth bank. He told her traveller’s tales: about school, about the punishments at school, particularly, exaggerating both their nature and his indifference to them. He told her about the town of Middleburg, which she had never seen. She had nothing to tell but she prompted with many questions, like any good listener. While he talked he twisted and tugged at the roots of white stinkwood and Cape willow trees that looped out of the eroded earth around them. It had always been a good spot for children’s games, down there hidden by the mesh of old,

5 Kraal, a village of southern African natives. 6 Wagons, typically pulled by a team of oxen.

Characters: Paulus and Thebedi are introduced as

the main characters. What can you conclude about

them based on their actions and the description of their

physical appearances?

Point of View: The charac- ters are introduced by an observer who is not part

of the story’s action (third- person point of view). This

observer appears to under- stand the racial conditions,

presenting the action in the story without advocat- ing openly or stridently for

changes.

Details: The setting and associated customs

described here add depth and background context.

These details allow the reader to understand how

and why Paulus and Thebe- di’s relationship develops.

Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

ant-eaten trees held in place by vigorous ones, wild asparagus bushing up between the trunks, and here and there prickly-pear cactus sunken-skinned and bristly, like an old man’s face, keeping alive sapless until the next rainy season. She punctured the dry hide of a prickly-pear again and again with a sharp stick while she listened. She laughed a lot at what he told her, sometimes drop- ping her face on her knees, sharing amusement with the cool shady earth beneath her bare feet. She put on her pair of shoes— white sandals, thickly Blanco-ed7 against the farm dust— when he was on the farm, but these were taken off and laid aside, at the river-bed.

One summer afternoon when there was water flowing there and it was very hot she waded in as they used to do when they were children, her dress bunched modestly and tucked into the legs of her pants. The schoolgirls he went swimming with at dams or pools on neighbouring farms wore bikinis but the sight of their dazzling bellies and thighs in the sunlight had never made him feel what he felt now when the girl came up the bank and sat beside him, the drops of water beading off her dark legs the only points of light in the earth-smelling, deep shade. They were not afraid of one another, they had known one another always; he did with her what he had done that time in the storeroom at the wedding, and this time it was so lovely, so lovely, he was surprised . . . and she was surprised by it, too—he could see in her dark face that was part of the shade, with her big dark eyes, shiny as soft water, watching him attentively: as she had when they used to huddle over their teams of mud oxen, as she had when he told her about detention weekends at school.

They went to the river-bed often through those summer holidays. They met just before the light went, as it does quite quickly, and each returned home with the dark—she to her mother’s hut, he to the farmhouse—in time for the evening meal. He did not tell her about school or town any more. She did not ask questions any longer. He told her, each time, when they would meet again. Once or twice it was very early in the morning; the lowing of the cows being driven to graze came to them where they lay, dividing them with unspoken recognition of the sound read in their two pairs of eyes, opening so close to each other.

He was a popular boy at school. He was in the second, then the first soccer team. The head girl of the “sister” school was said to have a crush on him; he didn’t particularly like her, but there was a pretty blonde who put up her long hair into a kind of doughnut with a black ribbon round it, whom he took to see films when the schoolboys and girls had a free Saturday afternoon. He had been driving tractors and other farm vehicles since he was ten years old, and as soon as he was eighteen he got a driver’s license and in the holidays, this last year of his school life, he took neighbours’ daughters to dances and to the drive-in cinema that had just opened twenty kilometers from the farm. His sisters were married,

7 Blanco, a compound used to protect leather and maintain color.

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Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

by then; his parents often left him in charge of the farm over the weekend while they visited the young wives and grandchildren.

When Thebedi saw the farmer and his wife drive away on a Saturday afternoon, the boot of their Mercedes filled with fresh- killed poultry and vegetables from the garden that it was part of her father’s work to tend, she knew that she must come not to the river-bed but up to the house. The house was an old one, thick-walled, dark against the heat. The kitchen was its lively thor- oughfare, with servants, food supplies, begging cats and dogs, pots boiling over, washing being damped for ironing, and the big deep-freezer the missus had ordered from town, bearing a cro- cheted mat and a vase of plastic irises. But the dining-room with the bulging-legged heavy table was shut up in its rich, old smell of soup and tomato sauce. The sitting-room curtains were drawn and the T.V. set silent. The door of the parents’ bedroom was locked and the empty rooms where the girls had slept had sheets of plas- tic spread over the beds. It was in one of these that she and the farmer’s son stayed together whole almost: she had to get away before the house servants, who knew her, came in at dawn. There was a risk someone would discover her or traces of her presence if he took her to his own bedroom, although she had looked into it many times when she was helping out in the house and knew well, there, the row of silver cups he had won at school.

When she was eighteen and the farmer’s son nineteen and working with his father on the farm before entering a veterinary college, the young man Njabulo asked her father for her. Njabulo’s parents met with hers and the money he was to pay in place of the cows it is customary to give a prospective bride’s parents was settled upon. He had no cows to offer; he was a labourer on the Eysendyck farm, like her father. A bright youngster; old Eysendyck had taught him brick-laying and was using him for odd jobs in construction, around the place. She did not tell the farmer’s son that her par- ents had arranged for her to marry. She did not tell him, either, before he left for his first term at the veterinary college, that she thought she was going to have a baby. Two months after her mar- riage to Njabulo, she gave birth to a daughter. There was no dis- grace in that; among her people it is customary for a young man to make sure, before marriage, that the chosen girl is not barren, and Njabulo made love to her then. But the infant was very light and did not quickly grow darker as most African babies do. Already at birth there was on its head a quantity of straight, fine floss, like that which carries the seeds of certain weeds in the veld. The unfocused eyes it opened were grey flecked with yellow. Njabulo was the matt, opaque coffee-grounds colour that has always been called black; the colour of Thebedi’s legs on which beaded water looked oyster-shell blue, the same colour as Thebedi’s face, where the black eyes, with their interested gaze and clear whites, were so dominant. Njabulo made no complaint. Out of his farm labourer’s earnings he bought from the Indian store a cellophane- windowed pack containing a pink plastic bath, six napkins, a card of safety pins, a knitted jacket, cap and bootees, a dress, and a tin of Johnson’s Baby Powder, for Thebedi’s baby.

Time frame: Notice how the selected events in these

paragraphs account for the passing of time, here

guiding the reader to focus on Paulus as a young man

(age 19) and Thebedi as an 18-year-old.

Conflict is introduced in two ways: (1) by Thebedi’s

marriage to Njabulo, and (2) by her pregnancy. In

both cases it is internal con- flict—something that The- bedi, at this point, chooses

to deal with alone.

Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

When it was two weeks old Paulus Eysendyck arrived home from the veterinary college for the holidays. He drank a glass of fresh, still-warm milk in the childhood familiarity of his mother’s kitchen and heard her discussing with the old house-servant where they could get a reliable substitute to help out now that the girl Thebedi had had a baby. For the first time since he was a small boy he came right into the kraal. It was eleven o’clock in the morn- ing. The men were at work in the lands. He looked about him, urgently; the women turned away, each not wanting to be the one approached to point out where Thebedi lived. Thebedi appeared, coming slowly from the hut Njabulo had built in white man’s style, with a tin chimney, and a proper window with glass panes set in straight as walls made of unfired bricks would allow. She greeted him with hands brought together and a token movement rep- resenting the respectful bob with which she was accustomed to acknowledge she was in the presence of his father or mother. He lowered his head under the doorway of her home and went in. He said, “I want to see. Show me.”

She had taken the bundle off her back before she came out into the light to face him. She moved between the iron bedstead made up with Njabulo’s checked blankets and the small wooden table where the pink plastic bath stood among food and kitchen pots, and picked up the bundle from the snugly blanketed grocer’s box where it lay. The infant was asleep; she revealed the closed, pale, plump tiny face, with a bubble of spit at the corner of the mouth, the spidery pink hands stirring. She took off the woollen cap and the straight fine hair flew up after it in static electricity, showing gilded strands here and there. He said nothing. She was watching him as she had done when they were little, and the gang of chil- dren had trodden down a crop in their games or transgressed in some other way for which he, as the farmer’s son, the white one among them, must intercede with the farmer. She disturbed the sleeping face by scratching or tickling gently at a cheek with one finger, and slowly the eyes opened, saw nothing, were still asleep, and then, awake, no longer narrowed, looked out at them, grey with yellowish flecks, his own hazel eyes.

He struggled for a moment with a grimace of tears, anger, and self-pity. She could not put out her hand to him. He said, “You haven’t been near the house with it?”

She shook her head.

“Never?”

Again she shook her head.

“Don’t take it out. Stay inside. Can’t you take it away somewhere. You must give it to someone—”

She moved to the door with him.

He said, “I’ll see what I will do. I don’t know.” And then he said: “I feel like killing myself.”

With Paulus’s return, the conflict becomes external.

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Emotional Depth: Deep emotions are often

expressed in short stories. Notice the range of feelings

and emotions that Paulus experiences.

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Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

Her eyes began to glow, to thicken with tears. For a moment there was the feeling between them that used to come when they were alone down at the river-bed.

He walked out.

Two days later, when his mother and father had left the farm for the day, he appeared again. The women were away on the lands, weeding, as they were employed to do as casual labour in the summer; only the very old remained, propped up on the ground outside the huts in the flies and the sun. Thebedi did not ask him in. The child had not been well; it had diarrhoea. He asked where its food was. She said, ‘“The milk comes from me.” He went into Njabulo’s house, where the child lay; she did not follow but stayed outside the door and watched without seeing an old crone who had lost her mind, talking to herself, talking to the fowls who ignored her.

She thought she heard small grunts from the hut, the kind of infant grunt that indicates a full stomach, a deep sleep. After a time, long or short she did not know, he came out and walked away with plodding stride (his father’s gait) out of sight, towards his father’s house.

The baby was not fed during the night and although she kept tell- ing Njabulo it was sleeping, he saw for himself in the morning that it was dead. He comforted her with words and caresses. She did not cry but simply sat, staring at the door. Her hands were cold as dead chickens’ feet to his touch.

Njabulo buried the little baby where farm workers were buried, in the place in the veld the farmer had given them. Some of the mounds had been left to weather away unmarked, others were covered with stones and a few had fallen wooden crosses. He was going to make a cross but before it was finished the police came and dug up the grave and took away the dead baby: someone— one of the other labourers? their women?—had reported that the baby was almost white, that, strong and healthy, it had died suddenly after a visit by the farmer’s son. Pathological tests on the infant corpse showed intestinal damage not always consistent with death by natural causes.

Thebedi went for the first time to the country town where Paulus had been to school, to give evidence at the preparatory examina- tion into the charge of murder brought against him. She cried hysterically in the witness box, saying yes, yes (the gilt hoop ear- rings swung in her ears), she saw the accused pouring liquid into the baby’s mouth. She said he had threatened to shoot her if she told anyone.

More than a year went by before, in that same town, the case was brought to trial. She came to Court with a new-born baby on her back. She wore gilt hoop ear-rings; she was calm; she said she had not seen what the white man did in the house.

Paulus Eysendyck said he had visited the hut but had not poisoned the child.

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Theme: From this point on, the main theme of the

story is developed and emphasized—as circum-

stances present at least the possibility that Thebedi will

be able to take a credible stand against Paulus’s crim- inal action and confront the

racially biased conditions that oppose her. Ultimately,

though, her strength and intentions are no match

for the impenetrable social traditions.

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Features of the Short Story Chapter 3

The Defence did not contest that there had been a love relation- ship between the accused and the girl, or that intercourse had taken place, but submitted there was no proof that the child was the accused’s.

The judge told the accused there was strong suspicion against him but not enough proof that he had committed the crime. The Court could not accept the girl’s evidence because it was clear she had committed perjury either at this trial or at the preparatory exami- nation. There was the suggestion in the mind of the Court that she might be an accomplice in the crime; but again, insufficient proof.

The judge commended the honourable behavior of the husband (sitting in the court in a brown-and-yellow quartered golf cap, bought for Sundays) who had not rejected his wife and had “even provided clothes for the unfortunate infant out of his slender means.”

The verdict on the accused was “not guilty.”

The young white man refused to accept the congratulations of press and public and left the Court with his mother’s raincoat shielding his face from photographers. His father said to the press, “I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district.”

Interviewed by the Sunday papers, who spelled her name in a variety of ways, the black girl, speaking in her own language, was quoted beneath her photograph: “It was a thing of our childhood, we don’t see each other any more.”