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Foil
Explanation and Analysis—Stephen and John:
Stephen Kumalo’s meeting with his brother is among the many difficult reacquaintances that take place in the novel. The novel’s protagonist not only struggles to recognize John Kumalo but finds himself unable to understand him. By setting Stephen and John up as foils, the novel demonstrates the different ideologies and visions at play during this period in South Africa.
Decades after leaving for Johannesburg, the John Kumalo that Stephen now meets is urbane and suave, schooled in all the ways of city life. As a successful politician, he represents everything that the rural clergyman is not. Stephen’s brother has carved out a slice of fame for himself, taken a second wife, and parted ways with the Church. The “great man in politics” plays the perfect counterpart to a sibling who still saves for gas stoves, keeps “brown and frayed” clerical collars, and gets duped upon setting foot into the city.
The gulf that separates these two siblings goes beyond the country-meets-city storyline. For all their physical differences, Stephen and John also advance different visions of South Africa and display varying levels of commitment to them. John, a pragmatic visionary, has grown disillusioned with the Church’s tepid social stances and makes rousing appeals for greater Black autonomy. At the same time, though, this radicalism is compromised by suggestions of hollowness. John takes grand positions but does not actually follow through with his promises. He fires up his followers and “pulls back” whenever he senses the limits. Paton fashions John Kumalo as showman who delivers little more than fiery rhetoric.
Stephen binds his moderate politics with a more earnest commitment to his people. The parson remains wedded to the old ideals of marriage and faith, but he also petitions the chief and headmaster for solutions to Ndotsheni’s agricultural decline. He deferentially addresses Mrs. Jarvis as inkosikazi, yet supports his parishioners and the agricultural manager in reimagining the way they use the land. Deeply grounded and grassroots-oriented, Stephen manages to create more tangible change than any of his brother’s empty speeches.
As if to further the contrasts between the two brothers, the novel assigns their sons to wildly diverging fates. Matthew Kumalo, John’s son, arguably has as much a hand Arthur Jarvis’s fatal end as Absalom does—he accompanies his cousin and breaks into the house. But Absalom gets hanged, but John’s son does not. Accordingly, one father mourns and the other does not, as John and Stephen part ways yet again.
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Foil
Explanation and Analysis—Jarvis Jr. and Stephen:
Throughout Cry, the Beloved Country, James Jarvis and Stephen Kumalo’s lives alternately overlap and diverge. They both hail from the same village and suffer personal tragedies. But in a deeply unequal 20th-century South Africa, they also occupy the far ends of the social ladder and trace different life experiences. As such, the fellow locals—and foil pair—form a prism through which the novel navigates race, privilege and class.
James Jarvis and Kumalo share with each other a deep grief. As father figures, the pair must grapple with deep loss. “This thing of all my years, is the heaviest thing of all yours also,” the trembling parson tells the farmer. James Jarvis’s son dies from Absalom’s bullet; Stephen Kumalo’s meets a death sentence. Both part with their loved ones too early.
For the foil pair, these similarities underscore their contrasts, stylistic and otherwise. Jarvis is Stephen’s impenetrable opposite. The novel gives few—if any—glimpses into his thoughts or personality beyond the brief moments in which he paces around his son’s room or works in the fields. The farmer’s silence stands as a negative complement to the parson’s wandering, sensitive thoughts.
The two characters differ just as much in social station. James Jarvis benefits from his landowning status, while Kumalo scrounges money for new clothing. One oversees entire tracts of land and enjoys vast resources at his disposal. Another ministers to a church with a leaky roof. Insulated by his wealth, James Jarvis can ignore the injustices of poverty and criminality that Kumalo must endure. By setting their two narratives in parallel, Paton contrasts the respective experiences of South Africa’s citizens.
Related Themes:
