Wild(e) on Stage: Manipulated Scripts and Suppressed Truths in Nadine Gordimer’s “The Amateurs”

Abstract

This paper deals with the topic of historical inheritance and literary discourse through a prismatic lens. It focuses on Nadine Gordimer, a wellknown white South African writer of Anglo-Jewish and Eastern European origins, who always stood up against racism and the colonialist legacy which deviously paved the way for the apartheid system in her country. In particular, light is shed on “The Amateurs”, one of her earliest short stories and a piercing portrayal of South African segregation policies during the 1940s. At the same time, Gordimer engages here in a critical dialogue with the English fin de siècle and the comedy-of-manners genre by recollecting an episode from her youth, when she happened to play Gwendolen’s role in an amateur staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. As we shall see, “The Amateurs” is a semantically poignant story where the threads of European literary tradition, metatheatricality and personal memory are powerfully interwoven.

Keywords

• nadine gordimer
• south africa
• racism
• historical and personal memory
• oscar wilde
• sociopolitical critique