The Razor Wire Symbol Analysis

The razor wire is symbolic of apartheid, which destroyed South African society by keeping different races apart. Apartheid is an Afrikaans word that literally means “aparthood” or “separateness,” so the razor wire—which is meant to violently separate the white family from black intruders—reflects the legal and military infrastructure of apartheid, which kept the races separate by force.

When the suburban husband and wife install the razor wire, they’ve explicitly chosen it for its violence: “Placed the length of walls, it consisted of a continuous coil of stiff and shining metal serrated into jagged blades, so that there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs. There would be no way out, only a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh.” This quote explicitly shows the violence that the couple envisions will keep poorer, black South Africans off their property—but it also foreshadows the ironic ending of the story, in which the couple’s own young son dies horrifically in this exact way. This suggests to readers that the collateral damage of apartheid isn’t one-directional: even though white people think they’ll only benefit from forced segregation, the razor wire cuts both ways, and the family ends up destroyed by it when their son dies. The razor wire can also be interpreted as a description of the logic of apartheid itself: the system of violently separating the races inevitably becomes, like the razor wire, “a struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh.” It’s a horrible, violent system that, once in place, destroys everything around it.

It’s also worth noting that Gordimer consistently associates the razor wire—symbolic of apartheid—with evil. The suburban family chooses razor wire in the first place because it evokes a concentration camp—Gordimer uses that term—in its no-frills style. With this, Gordimer evokes the German Holocaust and also suggests that the family is imprisoning themselves with the razor wire, even as they think they’re keeping themselves safe. The name of the security company, Dragon’s Teeth, also evokes evil, hearkening to the Sleeping Beauty story that the wife tells her son as a bedtime story on the night before his death. In some versions of Sleeping Beauty, the evil fairy conjures a dragon alongside the thorns to keep the Prince from rescuing Sleeping Beauty. So, in Gordimer’s story, the family is the evil fairy, conjuring the thorns to create a malicious barrier that—in order to have a happy ending—has to come down. The metaphorical significance is that wealthy white people who benefit from black exploitation have conjured apartheid—in the way the evil fairy conjured the thorns—and, in order to have a just society, apartheid must be destroyed.