Happily Ever After

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Happily Ever After

Written in caustic response to an annoying academic, Nadine Gordimer supplies penetrating social
commentary on South African apartheid in her short story, "Once Upon a Time." The author creates an
underlying uneasiness and obvious irony while following the traditional style reminiscent of bedtime stories,
with modern South African reality filling in for magical kingdoms. Rather than reform the unbalanced
societal structure of apartheid, a white family chooses to ignore the issue and simply add security measures
to their suburban home. The family’s attempt to live happily ever after during a time of social unrest is the
Gordimer’s sarcastic metaphor for the white South Africans and the self-inflicted harm caused by their own
lopsided social system.
The story begins with an anecdote reeking of symbolism. The author wakes in the middle of the night,
unsure whether she's heard the sound of an intruder's footstep. She imagines herself the victim of an
invasion (24) just as the wife imagines herself the victim of intruders opening her gates and streaming in
(26). Time takes the author’s terror away, and she “is to be neither threatened nor spared” (24), realizing it
is the creaking of her house built on “undermined ground” (24). The wife does not see that her imagined
intruders are not the real threat preventing her from sleeping soundly at night, but instead it is the very
apartheid under which her family seeks shelter. The author informs the reader that her neighborhood is built
on gold mine shafts, which are collapsing inward deep under the surface of the ground and “bringing uneasy
strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood, and glass that hold it as a structure” (24).
White-dominated South Africa arose on the wealth of ...