Short Story Essay

In Nadine Gordimer’s highly descriptive short story; The Bridegroom, setting and space reveal many aspects about the main character, the relationships in the camp and the bride and her family. The setting is the element which brings each of these aspects together, and essentially exposes the reader to rife issues relating to race, culture, language and gender that were prevalent during the apartheid era in South Africa.

Setting is pivotal to the storyline as it is the foundation of the plot and gives life to the story. Gordimer’s use of detail allows for the setting to come alive and essentially puts the reader into the story. The Bridegroom was published in 1960 and is set in a road campsite neighboring Francistown in the Kalahari dessert. The plot unfolds on a winter evening before the protagonist – the unnamed bridegroom, is due to leave the camp for a week to get married. The 1960s in South Africa was a period characterized by staunch racism, discrimination and inequality. The political and social setting of this time period is distinctly mirrored in story. The reader is immediately introduced to the environment in which the story unfolds. The bridegroom’s campfire and caravan is depicted as neat and clean, which is then contrasted to the road worker’s dust-filled campfire ‘thirty yards away’ from the bridegroom’s (Gordimer 1). These two spaces are established as completely separate, and in this way – both the physical and racial barriers are implied. The two main groups; the bridegroom and road workers - can be seen as a microcosm of the separation between the minority (the white people) and the majority (the black people) prevalent in apartheid South Africa at that time. The road workers are presented in an abstract fashion, in order to seem different. For example, the way in which Piet is introduced as a bony clown (Gordimer 1). This reinforces the notion of the two groups being completely different from one another – and in this way, the black workers...