The woman's role in Alex la Guma's fiction

Abstract

This study investigates the role of the woman character in Alex La Guma's fiction. Available criticism indicates that this role has received scant attention from literary critics, though it is part of his aesthetic and cognitive enterprise in sixteen of his eighteen short stories and in his four novels. This indifference to a writer whose works abound with a portrayal of the woman character's multiple roles reflects critical neglect in an age when the woman's condition has captured universal imagination. The primary focus of the study is La Guma's fiction, though the interviews, which appear in the appendix, and critical works on the author supplement this primary source. Based on an analysis of La Guma's fiction, the study uses a form of textual criticism which postulates that a moral approach to a literary text not only reveals its cognitive content but also appreciates its aesthetic dynamics, and vice versa. The discussion of the woman's role in La Guma's fiction is divided into five categories: the maternal, the romantic. the marital, the occupational.rand the political. In the course of analysing these roles, the study reveals that there exists a correlation between gender discrimination on the one hand, and racial segregation, political repression or economic exploitation on the other in La Guma's world. At the same time, it shows that the woman character's multiple, and usually overlapping, roles employ literary strategies which embody moral intentions that lie at the heart of La Guma's fiction. Such intentions manifest themselves through the multiple roles the woman character plays in the fiction. These roles . celebrate and suggest as an aesthetic ideal a humanism antithetical to racial segregation, political repression, economic exploitation, and sexist discrimination. In the end, this aesthetic ideal demonstrates and affirms the indivisibility of literature and humanism. Sununing up the achievements of this research, the conclusion points out that by showing that sexism sometimes together-with racism, condemns the woman character to menial, subservient and domestic roles and, by implying that this state is both immoral and destructive, the study complements worldwide efforts to give the woman her place in the sun. In the process, the study debunks the assumption. evident in the paucity of critical work on the woman character, that La Guma does not portray her multiple roles in his fiction. In this sense, this study upturns a virtually virgin area, and therefore advances scholarship on the works of La Gurna .