An Interpretation Of The Tragic Romance In An Instant In The Wind From The Perspective Of Spatial Criticism

André Brink is one of South Africa’s leading writers,alongside Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and J.M.Coetzee.As a writer of conscience,Brink has often spoken out for the underprivileged and marginalized,and as such most of his work is set in the apartheid era.An Instant in the Wind,one of Brink’s early masterpieces,is set in mid-18th-century South Africa and tells the love story of Elisabeth,a white woman,and Adam,an enslaved person,exposing the harsh truth that in the face of the continuing oppressive apartheid regime,any conduct against its norms would eventually come to a tragic end.The tragedy of love is one of the essential narrative themes of the novel.This dissertation examines this theme from the perspective of Henry Lefebvre’s spatial theory,discussing how physical,social and mental spaces are involved in the course of the hero and heroine’s love affair.Physical space can be divided into geographical space and scenic space.Geographical space,also known as static space,is the spatial setting in which the story takes place,namely South Africa in the mid-18 th century.South Africa was still under colonial rule,and the apartheid system imposed by the colonial authorities set the stage for the novel’s tragic course.The scenic space,or dynamic space,reveals the inevitability of the love between the hero and heroine by analyzing the features of the landscape,such as wagons,a cave and architecture,which mark the changes in spatial displacement.Social space contains various elements of class,race,history,and culture that act on people with their particular mechanisms of power.The Cape Town,the house space and the dialogue space all work together to participate in the tragic narrative of the love between the hero and heroine,explaining the multiple causes of the tragedy.The mental space belongs to the subjective space,where Elisabeth’s unrealistic fantasies about Cape Town and Adam’s compromise and self-sacrifice are personal psychological factors contributing to the tragedy of love.With the combination of physical space,social space and mental space,the love between Adam and Elisabeth is destined to end in tragedy.