Conflicting Spaces: Gender, Race, and Communal Spheres in Nadine Gordimer’s Fiction

Nadine Gordimer’s fictional characters embody unease and often resentment with social class, expected cultural roles, and place. In her fiction, the conflicting notions of space and self are tied to gender, class, and identity. Gordimer’s characters are victims of circumstance, of birth, of place, but in addition to the feeling of exile linked to these factors, her fiction draws attention to female spheres, communal spaces, domesticity, and sexuality. This paper will examine the role of female spheres and spatiality through a feminist literary perspective. Though Gordimer’s relationship to feminism was at best tentative, her work offers much to the field of feminist studies.