Storytelling Theme Analysis

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 apartheid South Africa. However, the stories told inside the story itself seem only to lead to violence and fear rather than genuine happily ever afters. The narrator is a writer who is gripped by fear (partly because of stories she’s heard about violence around her) and who tells herself a horror story about injustice and fear to occupy herself while she’s unable to sleep. Then, within that story about a suburban husband and wife, there are other instances of frightening stories inadvertently or deliberately leading to violence and fear. However, there is a key difference between the way storytelling plays out in the frame story and the bedtime story: Gordimer suggests that telling truthful stories like the narrator does is a necessary (but insufficient) step toward rectifying social wrongs, whereas telling falsely comforting ones—or drawing the wrong moral from scary ones—like the suburban family does leads to further violence.

First, by positioning this story as a fairy tale, Gordimer implies that there will be a clear hero, a clear villain, and likely a happy ending. She wants to engage with the readers’ preconceptions of stories that begin with “Once Upon a Time” so that the plot of her story is extra shocking. The omniscient narrator claims that the suburban family is “living happily ever after” over and over, a claim that the author goes on to wholly reject. The couple lives in fear of aggression by people who are just “looking for their chance” to invade. In this way, the couple sets themselves up as victims in distress, telling themselves a story that places others in the position of villains. By punishing the couple at the end with the death of their son, Gordimer clearly complicates the couple’s good (us) versus evil (them) logic. Gordimer also evokes the trope of “wise old witch” through the character of the husband’s mother. She helps pay for bricks in the wall around the couple’s house and gives a book of fairy tales to the couple’s son. But, unlike many fairy tales where there are wise elders guiding heroes down the right path, the “wise old witch” is a key part of the family’s undoing. When the wife reads to her son from this book of stories, he associates thickets of thorns with the barbed wire on the family’s fence, and by trying to mimic the action of the Prince, he dies. Gordimer thus suggests that the “story” of the generational advice passed down in apartheid society will be damaging as it is so tainted with racist ideas.

Thus, Gordimer gives her white characters a choice: fall into the trap of imagining oneself as the victim, or understand the danger inherent in simplistic, fairy tale logic. In the beginning of the story, the narrator mentions that as soon as she hears a noise and is frightened, she is “a victim already.” But this character goes on to destroy this thought in her own mind: she reminds herself that her house is built on “undermined ground,” indicating that her status as victim should be reevaluated. This allows the author to refocus her priorities and tell herself a gruesome but pointed story. Additionally, this narrator’s rejection of writing a children’s book is likely a parallel for Gordimer herself not wanting to tell a tale that conventionally situates the white, wealthy people of South Africa as good and everyone else as bad; this was the message coming from the white South African government, just as the request in the story to write a children’s book is coming from an authoritative “someone.” Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” and the unnamed author’s decision to tell a gruesome story are both meant to combat conventional narratives. By contrast, the couple in the white suburb believe themselves to be soon-to-be victims and rather than face the reality of their social situation, and so they take the easy way out and heighten security. To make her point obvious, Gordimer even has the company that they use to install the wire be called “Dragon’s Teeth”. The couple does not understand the irony of using “dragon’s teeth” as a defense, but a reader would. Seeing themselves as the victim is clearly wrong—if anything, they are on the side of the dragon.

Gordimer lastly uses the little boy to demonstrate how even people without preconceived notions of good and evil will eventually be ensnared in this simplistic way of thinking. By imagining himself the hero of the story “Sleeping Beauty” and innocently believing in the simplistic fantasy of fairy tales, the little boy tragically ends up dying. The white parents, who less innocently believed in the fairy tale-like narrative they told themselves, caused the death of their child. In the story of Sleeping Beauty, an evil witch conjures thorns and a dragon around Sleeping Beauty to prevent her from being rescued—just like how the suburban couple puts up the thorny wire from the “Dragon’s Teeth” company. So while the suburban couple thinks that they’re heroes and that everyone else is a villain from whom they need to protect themselves, they are actually much like the bad witch in Sleeping Beauty—they are not being honest about their role in the story. The story the white narrator tells herself provides a sharp contrast, as in the frame story, she is somewhat villainous sitting in her house safely on top of a mine full of (presumably) dead indigenous miners. The only way to look at something as ugly as apartheid, Gordimer consequently suggests, is to upend conventional tropes of who is a hero, victim, or villain.

Gordimer tries to attack apartheid from all angles in this story. As a writer, she suggests that stories can be an effective critique of the unjust social system; though the effectiveness of this kind of protest can be debated, Gordimer clearly believes in the power of writing. She is highly cautionary, though, of any story that is too simplistic in its dealing with morality, as fairy tales so often are. Thus, she evokes the fairy tale trope only to upend it and show that one-dimensional narratives in an unjust society (here, apartheid) should be greatly distrusted.