Gordimer’s “My Son’s Story” can be taken as a historical document of a society divided by the effect of apartheid system, a policy of strict racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against non-whites practiced in the Republic of South Africa. “My Son’s Story” is set in the decade prior to the beginning of the end of apartheid (1990) as a state policy. Gordimer in his novel tried to create a new cultural identity with the introduction of “coloured” identity. And further more, the novel illustrates the process of displacement of individuals. And at the same time Gordimer makes an attempt to constract a possible future of the society. To shape a new reality for a more liberated society, she showed how
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Her apparent quietness as the paragon while the stire within her is the ergon. She never spoke of Sonny’s relationship with Hannah, but suddenly it is deciphered that Alia is connected with the guirella warfare and continues her revolutionary activities. Sonny gets defocused and Aila becomes the centre of attraction. Therefore knowing oneself changes. The lazy, unworking,non-subjective is at work with Aila changing from a tamed, domesticated woman to a revolutionary. In her new situation, her silence is invested with different meaning. Her emergence to autonomous subjectivity and new authority overshadowed Sonny’s masculine identity. In her new world she achieved a new subject position and space: “Aila emanated a stilling atmosphere; the parting jabbler stopped. It was as if everyone found he had unnoticingly entered a strange house, and it was hers; she stood there.” (My Son’s Story, …show more content…
Gordimer in this novel attempted to create a new space for all characters who were passive at the beginning and also showed how one can lost his motive, goal, place with the emergence of others. On one side she had shown how Sonny and Will advanced towards their destiny and on the other hand through the emergence of Aila and Baby she showed the subversion of role which was necessary for that the then cultural and political condition of South Africa. Here we can find a voice of feminism also as Gordimer once wrote about feminist writing to the South African context in her ‘Forward’ to the biography of Oliver Schreiner (1989b); “She (Oliver Schreiner) may have anticipated(as she did much else) the realization, now, by South African of all colours in the liberation movement, that feminism South African style is an essential component in the struggle to free our country from all forms of oppression, political and economic, racist and sexist.” (First and Scott
Her apparent quietness as the paragon while the stire within her is the ergon. She never spoke of Sonny’s relationship with Hannah, but suddenly it is deciphered that Alia is connected with the guirella warfare and continues her revolutionary activities. Sonny gets defocused and Aila becomes the centre of attraction. Therefore knowing oneself changes. The lazy, unworking,non-subjective is at work with Aila changing from a tamed, domesticated woman to a revolutionary. In her new situation, her silence is invested with different meaning. Her emergence to autonomous subjectivity and new authority overshadowed Sonny’s masculine identity. In her new world she achieved a new subject position and space: “Aila emanated a stilling atmosphere; the parting jabbler stopped. It was as if everyone found he had unnoticingly entered a strange house, and it was hers; she stood there.” (My Son’s Story, …show more content…
Gordimer in this novel attempted to create a new space for all characters who were passive at the beginning and also showed how one can lost his motive, goal, place with the emergence of others. On one side she had shown how Sonny and Will advanced towards their destiny and on the other hand through the emergence of Aila and Baby she showed the subversion of role which was necessary for that the then cultural and political condition of South Africa. Here we can find a voice of feminism also as Gordimer once wrote about feminist writing to the South African context in her ‘Forward’ to the biography of Oliver Schreiner (1989b); “She (Oliver Schreiner) may have anticipated(as she did much else) the realization, now, by South African of all colours in the liberation movement, that feminism South African style is an essential component in the struggle to free our country from all forms of oppression, political and economic, racist and sexist.” (First and Scott