Once Upon a Time Themes

Set in the 1980s in apartheid South Africa, Nadine Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” shows how societies with tremendous wealth inequality are doomed to fail. The story begins with an unnamed first-person narrator who wakes up because of a noise in the night and believes that it’s a home invasion. However, the noise is just the house creaking, and to keep herself company while she lays awake in fear, the narrator tells a “bedtime story”…

“Once Upon a Time” is set during apartheid, a system of racial segregation and discrimination that was the law in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. The story shows how white South Africans benefit from and perpetuate white supremacy—even those like the (presumably white) narrator who are aware of the profound injustice of apartheid but nonetheless enjoy a better life than black South Africans. Gordimer focuses in particular on homeownership (the narrator, as…

Before this story even begins, Gordimer makes an obvious association: she titles the piece “Once Upon a Time.” In doing this, she evokes conventional fairy tale tropes—a hero, a damsel in distress, a happy ending—only to dismantle them and show how dangerous this kind of simplistic fairytale thinking can be. On the most zoomed-out level, it seems that Gordimer believes storytelling to be good, since she’s telling a story to communicate a clear moral about…