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    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time"
    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time"
    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time"
    Ebook37 pages21 minutes

    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535830188
    A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time"

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      A Study Guide for Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" - Gale

      10

      Once Upon a Time

      Nadine Gordimer

      1989

      Introduction

      Nadine Gordimer's Once Upon a Time is set in a white suburb in the author's country of South Africa. It is a story in two parts: the first is a first-person account by a writer who has heard a frightening sound in the night, and the second is the bedtime story she tells herself as she lies awake. In the bedtime story, a parody of a fairy tale, a husband and wife who are living happily ever after address their fear by continually increasing the security at their house until they are living behind a high wall topped with razor wire—but their safety devices bring their own dangers. The story features white people who fear the black people they have oppressed for generations, but its theme of how fear makes one a victim already is universal.

      As has been true for most of the author's work, the implied criticism of apartheid, or government-imposed racial segregation, in Once Upon a Time led to its being more widely read outside South Africa than within it. The story first appeared in a shorter form in the South African alternative newspaper the Weekly Mail, in its issue of December 23, 1988-January 12, 1989, with the title Once Upon a Time: A Fairy Tale of Suburban Life. In its current form, it ran in the Winter 1989 issue of the American journal Salmagundi, and then in Gordimer's fifteenth collection of short stories, Jump and Other Stories (1991).

      Author Biography

      Gordimer was born on November 20, 1923, in Springs, a small mining town near Johannesburg, South Africa. Her parents were Jewish immigrants who lived, as most white families in South Africa did, separate from and ignorant of the lives of blacks. Gordimer wrote her first story when she was nine, and after she was removed from school at the age of eleven for health reasons, she spent most of her time alone, reading and writing, until she was sixteen. Many years later, Gordimer learned that her mother had fabricated the heart condition that kept her an invalid—a discovery she did not share with others until after her mother's death. Gordimer published children's stories during her teens, and in her twenties she began publishing rather conventional adult stories

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