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Emotional Ties in Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story

Literature has often been used as a vehicle to express a country’s social, political,
cultural and emotional attitudes. Every writer chooses any one of the themes in a
different plot and structure. This paper focuses on emotional attitude, which
automatically comes under other attitudes. Nadine Gordimer is very clever by choosing
the right pick with a bit of thinking and planning by stuffing the problems in the minds of
her characters.
The problem of apartheid - the policy of enforced separation of black and white
dominates South African literature. Writers irrespective of colour write about the
oppressors and the oppressed. But there is a marked difference in the writings of Nadine
Gordimer, winner of 1991 Nobel Prize. Gordimer with her restless energy and
prodigious discipline has established herself as one among the prominent writers in the
galaxy of South African literature. She exemplifies herself as an ardent crusader.
Gordimer deals with the issues of apartheid, displacement, alienation, love, sex
and illegal relationship in most of her novels. Emotional attitude is the fundamental
feeling for all these issues. Ties (feelings) are tied (bound) emotionally; as a result, there
comes a tie (equality) in the minds of every character. Emotional bond is seen in most of
her novels. In this paper it is highlighted through Gordimer’s My Son’s Story (1990).
Gordimer’s novels always discuss the family politics, the ambivalent relation of the
individual to home, sensuous experience and issues of social self-identity. The theme
appears old fashioned, but yields some valuable results. Gordimer crystallizes her vision
of multi-racial in My Son’s Story.
Gordimer begins her novel My Son’s Story by using the quotation of
Shakespeare.
You had a father, let your son say so
It is an epigraph from Shakespeare’s sonnet -13. In the very beginning of the novel
Gordimer uses this ambiguity. The title of the story is also an ambiguous one. The
pronoun ‘My’ in My Son’s Story should indicate a set of parents. But the title of the
novel seems best to be interpreted as the telling of a son’s story through the life of his
father.
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My Son’s Story is a novel of conviction - a passionate novel. It is a tough

unsentimental work of art, which is moving in the extreme. The novel wrestles with the
issues of psychic conflict in a family. The central characters Sonny, Will and Hannah
Plowman are beautifully drawn and sustained in the progress of their individual
confusion and emotional suffering. During the insurgent time, politics deeply affects the
lives of the people who have participated in the revolutionary activities as in Sonny’s
family.
In My Son’s Story, Gordimer discusses the concept of human relationship and its
adaptability with familial and social problems. She effectively discloses how a man’s
illegal relationship strews the entire family. My Son’s Story is a tale, full of betrayal and
deception and adultery and its destructive fall out. The novel revolves round Sonny, a
coloured schoolteacher, who later becomes a revolutionary activist and goes to prison, in
course of his political activities. Sonny meets Hannah Plowman, a white representative of
an international human right organization. Gradually they become deeply involved. The
family is dismembered because of Sonny’s love affair with Hannah – Baby, his daughter
tries to commit suicide, Will, his son refuses to show respect and Aila, his wife, secretly
becomes a revolutionary without his knowledge. The novel ends with the departure of
Hannah. Finally Sonny dedicates himself totally to the cause of his people and seeks
solace in revolutionary work.
Familial conflicts are predominant in My Son’s Story. It deals obsessively with
the betrayal enacted by Sonny that makes Will, a writer. The father can be known only
through the story of his son. It is also a story of a son who becomes a man and writer in
response to his father’s absence and a son’s need to make his father present in words.
Sonny, who is from a bourgeois background, is a respectable schoolmaster. He is
a son of an upholsterer and is originally from Benoni. He is the first person in his family
to gain a formal education. He is an avid reader of Shakespeare and Kafka. He constantly
reads books and even enrolls in a correspondence course of comparative literature. His
yearning for knowledge and intellectual companionship is not satisfied fully in the Reef
town in which he is a schoolteacher.
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Whenever he visits the city with Aila and his children he experiences the hardship
due to the apartheid laws forbidding any interaction with the whites. He has to stand in
separate queues in the stores and take his children to the railway station lavatories
although the department stores have a cloakroom reserved for white customers.
Initially, Sonny is not interested in joining the black struggle because he wanted to be
safe. Here, Gordimer brings forward the distinction between coloured and the blacks. By
writing about this aspect of the relationship between coloureds and blacks, Gordimer has
touched a sensitive nerve of the multi-racial society of South Africa.
However, Sonny’s attitude toward the blacks undergoes a change when his
coloured students join the black solidarity group. He goes with them in their procession
as a mediator to face the police and the principal. As a result of his participation in the
rally Sonny is banned from teaching. Gradually, Sonny gains prominence as an orator
and revolutionary leader. He is even imprisoned for his activities against the
government. He also comes to be regarded as a hero in his community and treated with
respect and admiration. By this time Sonny’s family moves from the Reef town to a
house in a white suburb in Johannesburg. Everybody in the family suffer indirectly
because they are coloureds.
Sonny is applauded at party meetings for his brave work and is appointed as a
member of the executive committee. He leads a hectic life as a revolutionary, holding late
night meetings at home and arranging for protest rallies. He is also subjected to state
surveillance as he is considered a threat to the government. Amongst his several
admirers, one of them is a young white woman named Hannah Plowman. Sonny is drawn
to Hannah because he feels he can share a special friendship with her. She fulfills his
need for intellectual companionship. He finds that Hannah is a person he can talk to
more freely than he ever can with Aila, his wife. Sonny’s complaint is “Why did Aila
never speak? Why did she never say what he wanted her to say?”(p.57).
Sonny and Hannah first become acquainted with each other during his prison term
when she writes encouraging letters to him and visits him occasionally. Their love for
the cause draws them closer. Will sees them in the cinema hall. There comes an ordinary
mishap. The illegal bond of Sonny with Hannah scatters his family completely.
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Here Gordimer crystallizes her vision of cross-racial relation in her portrayal of a

coloured man and a white woman. Sonny’s emotional tie with Hannah affects everybody
in the family. As a result of the tie there comes many ties between Sonny and everyone in
the family. When Baby, his daughter, comes to know about his illegal relationship, she
tries to commit suicide. She attends parties, takes drugs and at last leaves home.
Gordimer shows that the old story of the love for a parent of the opposite sex and hatred
and jealousy of the parent of the same sex. Sonny thinks after his daughter, Baby, tries to
kill herself:
But nobody loved Baby more than he did, nobody!
The boy was “her” child; Baby was “his”; (p.137).
Will seems more of a mother’s son, helping Aila to deal with family problems. On
the other hand Sonny’s favourite and eldest born is Baby. Will, a fifteen years old boy
gets shocked to see his father coming out of the cinema hall with a woman. He feels
anguished and trapped and he is dominated by powerful emotions as anger, bitterness and
sexual envy towards his father. Will while writing about Sonny’s relationship with
Hannah,
She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn’t eat pig (p.93).
And his thought about his father is,
…as if he were not my father. (a father would never do
such a thing). And yet because he was my father
how could I resist, how could I dare refuse him? (p.31).
As a teenaged boy the illegal bond of his father psychologically affects his mind.
From the beginning the narration declares that Aila is a typical domestic woman.
For Sonny, Hannah is an ideal woman for his political commitment, while to Will she is
never match up to calm dignity of his mother. Sonny’s affair is the only reason for the
mental imbalance of his family members. His male excuse is that his wife is incapable of
providing mental companionship to a revolutionary, as Hannah can. Will exposes his
frustration in the last lines,
What he did _ my father _ made me a writer.
… I am a writer and this is my first book-that
I can never publish (p.277).
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Will cannot imagine Hannah as his father mistress and hates completely.
On the other hand Aila, whose voice is heard only in the silence, does not show
any sign of resentment or acknowledgment of Sonny’s relationship with Hannah. Really
Aila, the loyal wife, makes the most impressive sacrifices for the movement. Alienated
from Sonny, Aila becomes a confidante for her daughter. Her consequent trips to Zambia
to visit Baby, leads to her own unexpected involvement in the moment. This involvement
revealed only later in the novel. Sonny, Will as well as the readers astonished through her
arrest. Aila leaves Sonny and Will, which is a permanent loss for them. As a wife, Aila
discloses her power because of Sonny. It is good for her race, but for herself it is a pain to
leave her family and lead an alienated life in a strange place.
The reason for Aila’s displacement is Hannah Plowman, the grand daughter of an
Anglican missionary. She has been educated in England as she grew up in the missionary.
She developed a desire to do something for the blacks of South Africa. During the course
of her work, Hannah visits many political prisoners. She comes to admire the courage of
the prisoners and the fortitude of their families. She feels a bond between herself and the
families whenever she visits them. She is totally dedicated to the liberation movement.
For Hannah “the people in the battle are her only family, her life, the happiness she
understands (p.67).” The relationship of Hannah and Sonny is developed by the gradual
visiting of Hannah. Sonny believes that the joy he finds with Hannah is the “ultimate joy
of making love with someone who, too, is in the battle” (p.67). The attraction Sonny feels
for Hannah is respectively evoked by the phrase “needing Hannah”. But it leads to
Baby’s suicide attempt and Aila’s arrest. After Aila’s arrest Hannah leaves Sonny to do
refugee work in some other place in Africa and after a short time all correspondence from
her ceases. Sonny’s involvement with her, though it leaves her unscathed, destroys his
family and his status in the society.
Sonny, the protagonist is the cause for every twist in the novel. There is a
competition in the mind of Sonny, which always ends in a tie; he could not come to a
solution, but he suffers a lot. Because he is mentally and emotionally tied with society,
family and Hannah. As a result he misses his wife and daughter forever. Sonny silently
accepts Aila’s departure. He spends his remaining life for the welfare of his people.