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The Bridegroom Short Story Essay

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Understanding The Importance of Setting in Gordimer’s The Bridegroom
An integral part of analyzing short stories involves understanding the narrative in conjunction with the space it occurs in, a trait highly evident in Nadine Gordimer’s short story The Bridegroom, where the setting is responsible in projecting the mentalities of different characters and their relationships with one another. By looking at the environment itself, where the characters are grounded and how they move throughout the narrative, this essay will prove the importance of setting in characterizing the bridegroom, illustrating his relationship with the workers and its deepening of our understanding of the absent bride figure.
The setting in its broadest and most literal sense is made clear in the expositive paragraphs, and continuously highlights the isolationism of the environment. Descriptions that Gordimer (1994) employs such as “grey with Kalahari dust”, “the fourteen miles across the sand” and “birds piping in the great spaces in which the camp was lost” make it clear that the characters are far away from any metropolitan area. To the perspective of the reader, the isolationism these characters find themselves in heightens the significance of their interactions, as it is more personal without the direct policing of socially-imposed expectations.
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“He knew just enough Tswana to give them orders” (Gordimer, 1994) is especially interesting in that it proves the man sees himself as the superior to the road workers. The fact that he thinks the “boys must keep out of the way” (74) when his wife-to-be arrives is another example of this. The story therefore illustrates him as a clear enforcer of the boundaries between white and non-white in how he chooses to only to bridge this gap for his own prejudiced

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