Discussion Topic
Frame Narrative and Fairy Tale Events in "Once Upon a Time"
Summary:
In Nadine Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time," the frame narrative and the fairy tale are intertwined through themes of fear and societal instability. The frame story features a narrator, possibly Gordimer herself, who is awakened by fear of an intruder, reflecting the societal tension in South Africa. This fear transitions into a fairy tale about a family whose extreme security measures, driven by fear of the outside world, lead to tragedy. Both narratives highlight how societal structures and systemic oppression, rather than individual actions, contribute to insecurity and fear.
In "Once Upon a Time," how do events in the frame story relate to the fairy tale events?
The frame story and the fairy tale are connected by fear.
At first, the narrator resists writing a children's story (although she has been asked to), saying she doesn't write children's literature.
Then, that night, she is awakened by a creaking noise in her dark house. She fears a robber or home invader. She remembers a woman murdered in her home two blocks away and a widower murdered by a disgruntled employee he had laid off. Having guard dogs didn't keep the widower safe. Blacks in South Africa have become increasingly angry at the terrible way they have been treated, and they are now fighting back.
Although the narrator realizes there is nobody in her house, she is still wide awake and frightened. Therefore, she says, she tells herself a "bedtime story."
This story is the fairy tale of a family so fearful of the outside world invading their beautiful...
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home that they top the walls of their house with razor wire to feel safe. Unfortunately, their little boy gets tangled in the razor wire and is killed.
This may not be a story appropriate for children, but both the frame story and the fairy tale show that building walls and putting up defenses can't keep people safe in societies based on oppression and inequality.
Gordimer begins her story with a first person narration. While it is unwise to presume that the narrator and the author of a story are the same person, it is implied that they are in the frame story; the narrator is a writer in an increasingly unstable South Africa, a description that matches that of the author.
Having been awakened by something unknown, she fears for her own safety. She remembers the violence recently perpetrated in her own neighborhood and wonders if she is to be the next victim; she classifies every sound in the darkness. She notes that:
I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take those precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass.
But then she realizes that she is to be "neither threatened nor spared." In her own words:
There was no human weight pressing on the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house's foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as a structure around me.
And then Gordimer starts her bedtime story, in which a family succumbs so deeply to fear that their son dies as a result of their precautions.
The frame story and the fairy tale seem tangential, connected only to the role of fear, until one examines the significance of the mine. The narrator had previously feared individually-driven violence, but the real source of stress is structural. In recognizing this, she shifts the blame from individuals to society itself.
The mine is the source of instability in the first story; if the stories run parallel, where does that place the blame in the fairy tale? At first glance, as in the frame, it seems to be individually driven, but in fact Gordimer places heavy blame on the South African government, personified as the "wise old witch." The husband's mother plays the role of the government: spreading fear based on racial discrimination and encouraging hysteria. The family's "happily ever after" begins its downward spiral after she cautions them not to hire anyone off the street, as the government did in South Africa, and she provides the stepping-stone to the little boy's death: the book of fairy tales.
Gordimer does not excuse the actions of individuals in either the frame story or the fairy tale, but she puts them in a broader context.
How does the frame narrative relate to the bedtime story in "Once Upon a Time"?
The frame narrative of "Once Upon a Time," in which someone phones Gordimer and asks her to write a children's story, establishes the subsequent action as having elements of a fairy tale or bedtime story.
The story that Gordimer relates may not be a children's story, but it certainly shares certain features with traditional fairy tales. For one thing, it provides the reader with a moral lesson.
The white couple in the story think that they can protect themselves against burglars by putting barbed wire on the top of the walls surrounding their suburban home. In actual fact, however, the couple's security measures end in tragedy after their son dies in the act of trying to climb over the barbed wire.
What this demonstrates is that simply walling oneself off from the world does not necessarily make oneself safer. Despite all the security measures taken by the couple and their neighbors, the number of burglaries in the neighborhood remains stubbornly high. To a large extent, this is due to the extreme poverty experienced by the majority Black community under apartheid.
That being the case, the suburban couple's illusions of safety and hesitancy toward change—the belief that they deserve and will achieve a happy ending behind their walls—is just the kind of wishful thinking we would expect to see in the children's story the caller in the frame story wants Gordimer to write.