Wealth Inequality and Fear Theme Analysis

Set in the 1980s in apartheid South Africa, Nadine Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” shows how societies with tremendous wealth inequality are doomed to fail. The story begins with an unnamed first-person narrator who wakes up because of a noise in the night and believes that it’s a home invasion. However, the noise is just the house creaking, and to keep herself company while she lays awake in fear, the narrator tells a “bedtime story” of an unnamed family living in a segregated suburb. The central adult characters of this story—“the man” and “the wife”—are constantly concerned about their personal property, as there are break-ins throughout the neighborhood. The couple takes escalating measures to protect their house and things: building physical walls, installing security systems, and even erecting a lethal razor-wire fence. Both the frame story and the bedtime story are parables of inequality, showing the (presumably white) narrator and suburban family living in wealth while constantly fearing the wrath of those who have less. By showing how wealth inequality ruins even the lives of those who have everything, since they spend their lives consumed by fear, Gordimer points to the profound injustice and absurdity of societies whose resources are so unevenly shared.

Gordimer makes clear that both the first-person narrator and the suburban couple in the narrator’s story are relatively wealthy. While Gordimer doesn’t give much information about the narrator’s life, it’s clear that she is not poor. She has her own house, she makes a living as a writer (an elite profession that separates her from the laboring classes), and she lives in a relatively well-off neighborhood. The narrator’s neighbors protect their homes from robberies, and their belongings (such as a collection of antique clocks) demonstrate their excess wealth. Likewise, the suburban family in the narrator’s story are, at least theoretically, “living happily ever after” among their fancy things: they have a home, a caravan, a car, a swimming pool with a fence, and even a housekeeper (whom Gordimer pointedly includes among a list of their belongings). Furthermore, they live in a white-only neighborhood that is physically segregated from the poorer black neighborhoods nearby, and there are “police and soldiers and tear gas and guns” to keep the rioting poor away. It’s clear, then, that the narrator and the family in her story are beneficiaries of a system of wealth inequality. They are relatively well-off, while those who have nothing suffer.

Despite this, Gordimer emphasizes that neither the narrator nor the suburban family can truly enjoy the comforts that their wealth affords them; they believe that their wealth makes them a target, so they live in fear. The suburban wife explicitly articulates the fear at the story’s center: she worries that the “people of another color” who live in the poorer parts of town “might come up […] and open the gates and stream in.” All the wealthy characters in the story share her fear. The couple’s suburban neighbors have lives that are “hidden behind an array of different varieties of security fences, walls, and devices,” showing how consumed they are by fear of intruders. And while the story’s narrator chooses not to take similar measures to barricade her home, she admits that she has the “same fear” as those who do. This explains why, when she hears a sound in the night, the narrator immediately assumes that she’s being robbed. This pervasive fear has catastrophic consequences: for one, Gordimer suggests that the wealthy characters aren’t able to enjoy their lives because of it. When the wealthy family takes walks around their neighborhood, for instance, they “no longer pause to admire this show of roses or that perfect lawn,” since all the beautiful aspects of the neighborhood are fenced off. And even inside their home, this couple seems primarily to discuss what further security improvements they can make—they are consumed not by happiness or love, but with their quest to keep others out. Of course, the most catastrophic consequence of their fear is the death of their son, who becomes caught in the razor wire fence that the couple ironically installed to protect him. His death at the hands of the security fencing shows that the real menace in this neighborhood is not the intruders that the residents fear, but their fear itself, which is irreparably corroding their lives.

Gordimer’s primary concern, of course, is not that inequality (via the fear it inspires) ruins the lives of the wealthy; instead, she wants to show that widespread wealth inequality will inevitably ruin all of society. To illustrate this, the story’s narrator explains that her house is creaking not because of intruders, but because it has been built on a mine; the ground underneath the house is literally gone, and the whole structure could presumably fall. In Gordimer’s metaphor, the house is South African society and the mine is the system of exploitation and inequality that will inevitably lead to society’s collapse. The social dynamics of South African mining clarify what Gordimer means: the laborers in the mines are black South Africans who work at great peril to themselves (the narrator references the likelihood that miners have died under her house), but the owners of African mines are typically white. This is a major arc of colonialism: wealthy white capitalists extract the labor and resources of a colony, becoming increasingly wealthy as the local population suffers and grows poor. In this light, the scenario that Gordimer describes—a terrified white woman living in a wealthy, segregated neighborhood built on an exploitative mine—is a perfect representation of what is wrong with South African society. Wealthy white people have so ruthlessly exploited black people that South African society—just like the narrator’s house—faces inevitable collapse. And perversely, the white people who benefit from this deplorable system cannot even enjoy it while it lasts.