ABSTRACT
For a number of white South African women writers, political commitment, particularly during the political unrest in South Africa of the 1970s and 1980s, has been an ongoing and fraught issue, both within the world of their texts and, more broadly, regarding the role of literature itself within a repressive regime. Even those ‘liberal’ minded heroines that Nadine Gordimer has so often portrayed bear within them an ambiguity: while they may commit themselves to political causes, they often retain their inherited white privilege and thus remain outside the experiences of the ‘ordinary’. They may journey across the colour bar to ‘taste’ the life of black South Africans, but usually return to the suburbs and their comfort zones. While often these heroines are feminist in their resistance to patriarchal structures, they can also be seen as marginal, as unable to make a difference. Sarah Nuttall, for example, writing about Elleke Boehmer’s heroine in her 1993 novel, An Immaculate Figure, suggests that the heroine’s story is ‘a story about not seeing, not acting, not being, by implication, about being acted upon’ (Nuttall 1993). Nuttall goes on to pose the question: ‘What are the stories that white South African women, encased, ensconced, and often oblivious, are likely to tell?’ answering her own question with the statement that ‘what might follow on are more ambiguous white South African “heroines” ’ (Nuttall 1993). This chapter examines some of these white South African ‘heroines’ who have engaged in the politics of commitment in the novels of Menán du Plessis and in two novels by Nadine Gordimer, arguing that their subject position is almost always ambiguous. In the work of these writers, the negotiation between feminism and anti-apartheid politics is highlighted as a complex one: South Africa’s patriarchal society and its apartheid ideology are often linked as dual systems of oppression in which the white woman activist is always problematically placed.
