Forbidden Love in Nadine Gordimer's Town and Country Lovers - Book Report/Review Example

full “Town and Country Lovers” (a short story by Nadine Gordimer) 09 February Biography Nadine Gordimer (b. November 20, 1923 - ) is a world-famous and Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1991 for a large body of literary work. She is of Jewish descent, being the daughter of a Jewish immigrant and refugee in Czarist Russia while her mother is from an assimilated Jewish family in London, England. Nadine Gordimer was born in the mining area of Gauteng which is a mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. Her parents had later on resettled in South Africa after marriage where Nadine was eventually born. She is the second daughter of Isidore Gordimer who was a poor watchmaker from Lithuania while her mother, Hannah Myers-Gordimer, came from a relatively well-off middle-class English family. She is from a Jewish family essentially but raised in a largely secular household without religion. She began her early schooling in a Catholic convent school but had to stop going to a regular school when she was eleven years old because her mother thought she had a weak heart and so ended up being mostly home-schooled although she later on attended college but this was also quite brief (just for one year) at the University of the Witwatersrand. She instead developed an intense interest in reading and writing as a way to compensate for this. She married Gerald Gavron at the age of 26 on March 06, 1949 and had a daughter named Oriane and then got divorced in 1952. She re-married around three years later in 1955 to a German art dealer named Reinhold Cassirer with whom she has a son named Hugo. She also got a stepdaughter from this second marriage to Reinhold who died in 2001. Her being a home-bound child was a blessing in disguise as she turned to writing at the tender age of only fifteen, writing childrens stories and got her first work of fiction published by the next year. Her long remarkable life has also been remarkably production in terms of her literary output which includes novels (long fiction), short stories (short fiction), plays, and essays. The major themes of her work are apartheid, racial discrimination, and political activism; these in view of her jarring first-hand experiences with apartheid at an early age when she saw some of her friends suffer due to this enforced and legalized way of segregation of the races. People in South Africa endured strained relationships and their society likewise suffered as the result of an arbitrary but very devastating social, economic, and political system based on skin color. The whites, the blacks, and the coloreds had to find ways of living together uneasily. It is not surprising majority of her works tackled the problem of apartheid in South Africa for which many of her works were banned due to the sensitive topic these contained. It took great courage on her part to be anti-establishment and not support apartheid when she is of the white race and she could have opted to live it easy because apartheid favored the white. Her conscience did not allow her to choose apartheid but instead to fight it at all costs. Gordimers first-ever published novel is The Lying Days which saw print in 1953 but many other novels and short stories followed in quick order as she is a prolific writer. A World of Strangers was published in 1958, then Occasion for Loving in 1963, The Late Bourgeois World in 1966, A Guest of Honor in 1970, and followed by nine succeeding novels over the years of which Burgers Daughter in 1979 and Julys People in 1981 are more well known. A book by Gordimer, The Conservationist in 1974, won the prestigious Booker Prize. But her preferred literary form when writing is the short story which she believes is the more appropriate form for modern-day readers. She wrote a total of 21 such short stories over a span of six decades, beginning with the Face to Face in 1949 and ending Life Times: Stories in 2011. However, she wrote very few essays but has otherwise remained active until recently in the international writing circles she belongs. She has remained an atheist. Introduction The short story “Town and Country Lovers” is actually a two-part story in the sense it tells the story of two sets of lovers, one in the town and another pair in the country. Both of the pairs involved forbidden love because the male protagonists or main characters are whites and the object of their love are a colored woman and the other is a black woman. In this kind of emotional entanglement in which the strict laws of apartheid at the time prevailing in South Africa were strictly applied, the two sets of lovers are in conflict with the legal authorities. At that time, miscegenation or inter-racial love relationships are strictly outlawed. Apartheid was the official system of the government of South Africa to separate or to segregate people of different race from being mixed together through miscegenation or having sexual relations, cohabitation, or marriage. The story of the “Town and Country Lovers” is to be viewed within this context of legally separating different races and ethnic groups at that time to ensure the dominance and control of the whites in economic and social systems of the country of South Africa. The government in this country is controlled by the Afrikaners who are the descendants of the original settlers of Cape Town who were either Dutch or Huguenot, to later include Germans and French enticed to emigrate to Africa for a better life. The idea of apartheid or racial segregation came from the belief of the Afrikaners in their being Gods “chosen people” that was fused with the concept of racial superiority. These two concepts (the religious and the political) formed the foundation of apartheid because it is a good justification for the enforced and radical restructuring of a country along racial lines, of a society that is separated into different living areas, different towns, and separate nations (Chiwengo 104). It is a political program as well as a racially-biased religious ideology which is worse when compared to American slavery and the Jim Crow laws of the South. It is within this very forbidding environment that “Town and Country Lovers” was set by Gordimer. The first story involves Dr. Von Leinsdorf who is in South Africa as a geologist but he lives quite a solitary life as a single man living alone in an apartment. Across his apartment is a little convenience or grocery store where he usually buys his weekly supplies like food, items for use at home like razor blades for shaving, soap, and other necessities in life. In that store works a young colored (or mixed-raced) African girl whom he get enamored with, clearly the kind of love forbidden by apartheid. This young woman started delivering supplies to Leinsdors apartment but they soon developed a liking for each other which lead to sexual relations. Dr. Von Leinsdorf offered to tutor this young woman how to swim, type and write. Dr. Von Leinsdorf is an Austrian and considers himself a tireless and very dedicated worker. His work as a geologist had taken him to many different countries and makes him a well-traveled man, wise to the ways of the world, so to speak. When he is not working at all, he just takes to leisurely activities like skiing to spend his time, listen to good music for relaxation, and reads poetry as a mental distraction from his lonely life (Gordimer 27). Many people had wrongly assumed he is married when in fact he is still single till now. The young cashier has a small body frame and a delicate face, together with a skin that is not really black since she is mixed-race (mulatto) but rather a kind of “subdued satiny color of certain yellow wood” which he found attractive. The young woman soon regularly delivers the groceries to his apartment twice or thrice a week. This arrangement graduated to a series of kind acts like Dr. Von Leinsdorf giving her chocolates or offering her a cup of coffee, and she in return sewed a loose button. They soon became lovers during afternoons. The second story is about Paulus Eysendyck, the white son of the white owner of a farm. He grew up in the farm playing with both white kids and black kids, the children of the farm workers who were black. One of the black children is Thebedi who is the daughter of a farmhand of Paulus father. Their relationship started when they were still children as innocent kids who were growing up together but this soon developed into something much more serious as they grew older into their teen years; the relationship turned into romantic love. Again, this second part of the story in the “Town and Country Lovers” is essentially the same as the first in that both involved two people belonging to different races falling in love, a clear violation of the anti-miscegenation laws of apartheid. A white young man in love with a young black woman is not to be tolerated as it can have serious consequences for their society and their country in terms of the so-called white hegemony in South Africa because it blurs the distinction between races. Paulus seemed to abandon Thebedi later in the story by a refusal to acknowledge their baby; his existential priority was his reputation (Peck 67). People who are in love do not see arbitrary differences as barriers to true love. What Shakespeare said that, “love is blind and lovers cannot see” certainly holds true in the case of Paulus and Thebedi who saw nothing wrong in their relationship, a “thing of our childhood,” as Thebedi puts it when she was questioned why she had engaged in a forbidden affair with a white man when she clearly knew it was supposedly wrong and against their laws. There is no exception to the laws of apartheid, whether a sophisticated man in the city or a relatively-innocent young man in the country falls in love with a mulatto or with a black woman. Discussion Love knows no boundaries, especially if these are artificial boundaries like the skin color of a person. No law could prevent two people from genuinely being affectionate as any such law contradicts human nature to love and be loved. It does not really matter if the white man is an immigrant or a native Afrikaner; the law on prohibition still applied in South Africa regardless of status or birth. This is a clear case of government intruding or interfering into a purely personal affair or matter of its citizen which is clearly wrong from a moralist view. The government exists for the protection of its citizens but apatheid works the opposite way. This political and economic ideology was born out of fear in the white minority (Waldmeir 10). The two sets of love stories are just examples of the larger issue of how government can be used and abused to favor one set of citizens (whites in South Africa) while at the same time used to oppress another set (blacks, coloreds, and mixed races) to justify apartheid which some writers attribute as a reaction to the Holocaust (Gilbert 33). There is no justification for apartheid, like slavery, to even exist in the first place because it is inherently evil. No person with a conscience can allow such a dichotomy to go on unchallenged. While slavery in America existed where white is the majority, the case of apartheid is the reverse in South Africa where the Afrikaner community is the minority. Apartheid has to be enforced in order to ensure continued white dominance. The word apartheid means “separation” but it is in reality a system of segregation and discrimination that was partly a creation of the British governor in South Africa using a racist-capitalist model to exploit mining (Louw 2). Conclusion These two stories about romantic relationships doomed from the start because of the laws of man have a universal theme and will always find an audience if told endearingly. The story of “Town and Country Lovers” reminds the reader of Shakepeares immortal love story which is “Romeo and Juliet” and another good story of the same setting and almost very similar as this story by Nadine Gordimer is “Desirees Baby” by Kate Chopin written in 1892 of a white farm owner whose white wife gave birth to a not so very white baby boy (the baby turned out to be a quadroon or one-fourth black) and the white husband thought his wife had black blood and drover her and the baby out but it turned out it was him who was part black. Nadine Gordimer likes to talk about racial oppression but she refuses to discuss Israeli oppression of Palestinians today. This reluctance on her part to tackle this sensitive issue can be due to her Jewish heritage and there is an added element of terrorism in this Palestinian struggle for homeland but her place in literature is already assured with excellent works. Works Cited Chiwengo, Ngwarsungu. Understanding: Cry, the Beloved Country. Santa Barbara, CA, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007. Print. Gilbert, Shirli. “Jews and the Racial State: Legacies of the Holocaust in Apartheid South Africa, 1945-1960.” Jewish Social Studies 16.3 (2010): 32-64. Print. Gordimer, Nadine. Town and Country Lovers. Emeryville, CA, USA: Sylvester & Orphanos Publishers, 1980. Print. Louw, Eric. The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Apartheid. Santa Barbara, CA, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004. Print. Peck, Richard. “Condemned to Choose, but What? Existentialism in Selected Works by Fugard, Brink, and Gordimer.” Research in African Literatures 23.3 (1992): 67-84. Print. Waldmeir, Patti. Anatomy of a Miracle: The End of Apartheid and the Birth of the New South Africa. Piscataway, NJ, USA: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Print. Read More