Rosa Berg, Berg's Daughter, "the Hero Of Identity Research

Nadine Gordimer, a South African fiction writer, scenarist, human rights activist, views political and social shifts of South Africa as the main original source of her literary creation. In 1991 Gordimer won the Nobel Prize in Literature for being what critics term the literary conscience of South Africa.Her seventh novel, Burger's Daughter, was banned by the South African authorities a month after it was published in London in June 1979. According to the Censorship Board of South Africa, the book is an outspoken furthering of communism and it creates and fosters a sense of grievance which is most undesirable in a political situation where there are racial situations. Most literary critics view the novel as the relentlessly chilling reflections on South African society during the height of apartheid.The thesis, however, is a study of Rosa Burger's identity, i.e. the identity of the protagonist of the novel. Born into a white middle-class family in South Africa as a daughter of a white communist Afrikaner hero, Rosa experiences a unique identity formation and transformation. And it would therefore be more fruitful to explore Rosa's identity through three different aspects, namely, gender identity, racial identity and political identity. Although the trip she takes to France leads to a negative transformation of her identity, her final voluntary return to South Africa, a land of trouble and conflicts, contributes to the positive reconstruction of her identity as a South African female revolutionary.The study of Rosa Burger's identity and its transformation reveals Rosa's self-development eventually to be a complete being with social and historical responsibilities, which in turn suggests that in South Africa the apartheid will be abolished someday with an increasing number of South Africans following Rosa's example. In that sense, a study of Rosa Burger's identity is conducive to a full view of Gordimer's opinions on the development of the individual against the harsh racial and historical background in South Africa as well as the future for South Africa. What is more, Nadine Gordimer's courage and talent to portray the character in the novel should be well recognized as much as the individual's self-development.