Identity Crisis In Nadine Gordimer's Julys' People

Nadine Gordimer's July's People is set in a post-apartheid interregnum after the black militants' takeover of South Africa.Despite the futuristic setting,it is imbued with the novelist's profound realistic concerns,notably the disrupted identity of different ethnic communities and the untenability of South African liberalism since the 1970s.With due attention to the socio-historical dimension underlying these issues,this thesis argues that the identity crisis of Bam and Maureen Smales and their ex-servant July is threefold.which involves the interplay of race,class and gender under apartheid capitalism.The destabilization of racial and class hierarchy is represented by the recurring tropes of "July's people" and the "master bedroom." They unsettle the self-other relation circumscribed by the racist economy,under which the white couple is reified by commodity fetishism.As the old political and economic structures are on the wane,the three characters' gender consciousness is foregrounded in their entangled relationships.While Bam's white masculinist authority topples,Maureen and July awaken to their gendered subjectivity,one by denying her othered womanhood as a mediator between her husband and herservant,the other by ascending to African patriarchy despite his previous feminized identity in the Smales household.Their aberration in the black village exposes the precarious social order sustained in white bourgeois domesticity and the unbalanced family pattern of black migrant laborers after their long absence,both of which are the repercussions of the long-standing social stratification under apartheid.The irreconcilable tension between the two communities.as evidenced in July's revolt against his ex-madam and Maureen's fear of the radicalized human connection.points to the incongruity between liberal ideals and a sordid reality marked by the color bar and capitalism.This thesis concludes that Gordimer's realistic representation of social life and her critique of liberalism rellects her intellectual quest for the individual's ethical choice and a viable political tenet for the post-apartheid country.