FEMINIST CONCERNS IN NADINE GORDIMER’S MY SON’S STORY

Abstract

Nadine Gordimer, the first Nobel Prize winner of South Africa reflects in her fiction the heart rending racial and political problems in her country ruled by apartheid. Her tenth novel, My Son’s Story, shows a subtle shift in her literary pursuit   by highlighting gender issues in the building of a new nation. Gordimer believes that racial issues should be solved first, later feminist battle be fought. Critics assert that strong and consistent feminist concerns are embedded in Gordimer’s works.  Especially these have received central focus in My Son’s Story, making the novel Gordimer’s unequivocally feminist novel.  But Gordimer has never accepted her novel as feministic but the reader can understand the positive evolution of female characters against the background of revolution.  It is a tale of a Coloured school master, Sonny who turns out a good speaker and is recruited into the banned African National Congress (ANC) and gets higher positions in it which causes loss of his government job and detention in jail for two years. In prison, he is attracted by Hannah, a blonde activist for an International Human Rights Agency who occasionally visits the detainees. His love affair with her alienates him from his wife Aila, daughter Baby and son Will. Gradually his condition both personally and politically degenerates while Aila and Baby move from passive domestic roles to active political ones when Aila skips bail, Hannah takes a new assignment. Both leave Sonny to take up further political work. Thus, the paper presents gradual degradation of Sonny’s character and emergence of supremacy of the female characters like Aila, Baby and Hannah in critical, political and historical times through which the novelist’s feminist concerns are reflected.