Country Lovers Themes

Country lovers

It might seem as yet another innocent love story, but do not let the title fool you. Nadine Gor-dimer hides the real purpose of her story behind the title, creating a choking reading experi-ence as the story develops into a something you thought it was not.

As the story sets off, Gordimer presents us a friendship between Thebedi and Paulus, which blossoms into a little more than that. The development of the relationship is throughout sev-eral years until we reach adolescence. Their secret flirtation steps into the forest where no one will discover them. It all seems like a hopeless love story. Their first love is sweet and the excitement of keeping it secret and sneaking around. The white lies Thebedi has to tell her fa-ther

He is a rich white farmer’s son, who has at-tended boarding school and college. By a very young age, he has already experienced more than Thebedi and is telling stories about his adventures. Gordimer expresses it in a neutral tone, which causes the reader to ignore the fact, that there is a huge racial difference. This might have been how you saw it back then. People might have seen it as a common norm that whites were the dominating race. Paulus is even called “Little-master” by the blacks that were once his playmates. This creates an advantage of being white and superciliousness in a very young age. Paulus flirts with a lot of girls from the sister school and farmer’s girls “had let him do with her in a locked storeroom what people did when they made love” [page 62 line 15] while hiding his relationship with Thebedi, without being prejudiced like Thebedi is. Actually, when reading the story, the narrative does not even give it a second thought, which is proba-bly done on purpose by the author. Their relationship expands into a compli-cated love triangle between Thebedi, Paulus and Thebedi’s husband Njabulo. Thebedi and Njabulo marriage is