City Lovers by Nadine Gordimer

The two characters that I am going to exploit in this paper are the Nadine Gordimer, 1991 Nobel Prize winner and her wife. Gordimer is a white man while her wife is a colored woman. However, it was the regime of Apartheid in South Africa. Thus, it is against the law for a white man to marry a black lady. Nevertheless, both have fallen in true love with each other, but the Apartheid rule cannot allow them to date or marry publicly. Hence Gordimer decides to marry the black woman in the name of her servant (The New Yorker, 20 min). Therefore, the conflict I am going to analyze in this paper is conflict of race.

On another hand, the fact that blacks should serve the whites act as a motivational to both Gordimer and her wife. Firstly, Gordimer takes the advantage of that and marries the black lady secretly in the name of her servant; no one could question his actions since it was expected blacks to be servants of whites. Secondly, the fact that blacks must serve the whites acts as an advantage to this black woman, since she had real fallen in love with Gordimer and she could do anything for him. Subsequently, the Apartheid environment in South Africa made it easy for both of them since no one could suspect their affairs as she was seen as a servant to Mr. Gordimer (The New Yorker, min 32).

Consequently, conflict and factors of oppression contributes to the meaning of the story in the highlighted ways below. Firstly, the fact that whites are not supposed to date other colors, yet Gordimer decides to marry a colored lady, gives the story its meaning. For instance, Gordimer breaks the apartheid rules and intermarry because of true love. Hadley says that she chose “City Lovers” because “it just catches the two things she does best. It’s so direct about something political, something historical in the world. And yet, it’s also about bodies, individuals, sex, and, of course, that is the very subject of the story—the meeting of the natural, the animal, the flesh, with the overlay of culture and social identity. But that makes it sound a bit boring, because it’s utterly compelling (The New Yorker, min 5).” Subsequently, oppression factor of blacks as servant does not stop her from marrying Gordimer, which implies she had strong feelings for him. Thus, intermarriage of these two people of different races and status, gives the story its meaning; City Lovers.

Works cited

The New Yorker. Fiction Podcast: Tessa Hadley Reads Nadine Gordimer. September 5, 2012.