A Study Of Body Writing In Nadine Gordimer’s Novels

"Body"is one of the main issues of western philosophy in the 20th century.From Nitze’s denial of Descartes’s dualism of body and mind and his claim that the body is the basis of human existence,to Foucault’s revelation of the modernity of the body and his creative proposal that the body is under the supervision,control and discipline of the power and knowledge,the body has broken through its physical meaning,and has become a new concept in the post-modern context,which includes the historical,political and philosophical meanings.In the field of literary criticism,Foucault’s theories inspired Feminism,post-colonialism and other theories to pay attention to the body.In the last two decades,body criticism has become a research hit in literary criticism.Nadine Gordimer(1923-2014)is one of the most famous contemporary women writers in South Africa.She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 and enjoys a high reputation internationally.My Son’s Story(1990)and None To Accompany Me(1994)are two of Gordimer’s main novels,written at a time when the apartheid was crumbling.Both of them focus on racial and gender conflicts in South African society.As a writer with humanistic and realistic concerns,Gordimer keeps an eye on the realities that the South African people faced at a time of social unrest.In her works,the body becomes the historical carrier of politics.She specializes in writing the physical conflicts between black and white,men and women,to show the physical and spiritual plight of South Africans caused by the apartheid.Therefore,this paper chooses the perspective of the body,based on Michel Foucault’s body theories,combined with post-colonialism and feminism,to focus on the physical dilemmas and ways of body resistance in My Son’s Story and None To Accompany Me.Furthermore,exploring Gordimer’s body writing strategies.Based on the post-colonialism point of view,the first chapter of the paper analyzes the three kinds of physical oppression caused by the colonial discourse in My Son’s Story——the freedom of movement,occupation and sex are restricted by law and morality.The main form of colonial discourse in the novel is apartheid.In order to resist the body suppression,Baby chooses to participate in the political revolution after her unsuccessful suicide.Ella gives up trying to defend himself under the white court,showing the other form of resistance.The blacks who have finished the physical resistance are still faced with the historical task of reconstruction of their subjectivity.The blacks who have been occupying the position of the other for a long time are mentally been led to become the other spontaneously.Taking Sony’s failure to reconstruct its cultural identity as an example,the novel reveals that what South Africa needs is effective practical solutions,not the resistance in discourse advocated by Homi K.Bhabha.In the second chapter,from the perspective of feminism,the paper analyzes the form that how the male-dominated discourse oppresses the female body in South Africa.Villa,a white woman who dominates work,love and marriages,displays a brave and decisive masculinity.But she is physically dependent on male genitalia,and became an appendage of sex.The black women such as Sally and her daughter are subjected to the oppression of race and gender.The racial oppression manifestes itself in controlling the freedom of the body,inducing physical consumption and propagating the color shame.So black women become the silent voiceless one and are trapped in the family.According to the three modes of female subject proposed by Luce Irigaray,this paper analyzes the different ways and effects of black and white women chosen to re-establish the female subjectivity.The third chapter analyzes the body writing strategies adopted by Gordimer in My Son’s Story and None To Accompany Me in discourse.On the one hand,Gordimer uses the political metaphors of disease,death,sex and consumption to reveal the damages led by colonial discourse and gender politics course on the body.On the other hand,the two novels focus on black kid Will and white woman Villa’s experiences and combine first-person narrative perspective and psychological description,which subvert the dualistic relationship between white and black,male and female.The epilogue summarizes the main points of this paper,and focuses on the strong politics of Gordimer’s body writing,which is the result of the social environment and the author’s attitude.