once upon a time short story essay

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Once Upon a Time

Nadine gordimer.

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Nadine Gordimer's Once Upon a Time . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Once Upon a Time: Introduction

Once upon a time: plot summary, once upon a time: detailed summary & analysis, once upon a time: themes, once upon a time: quotes, once upon a time: characters, once upon a time: symbols, once upon a time: theme wheel, brief biography of nadine gordimer.

Historical Context of Once Upon a Time

Other books related to once upon a time.

• Full Title: Once Upon a Time
• When Written: Late 1980s and early 1990s
• Where Written: South Africa
• When Published: First version published in 1988 in the Weekly Mail ; expanded version published in 1991 in Gordimer’s short-story collection Jump and Other Stories
• Literary Period: Postmodern
• Genre: Short Story
• Setting: Unspecified but heavily implied to be South Africa during apartheid.
• Climax: The little boy is killed when he tries to cross the razor wire that’s meant to protect the family’s house from intruders.
• Antagonist: Fear and Racism
• Point of View: First Person and Third Person

Extra Credit for Once Upon a Time

Banned Books. During apartheid, the South African government banned several of Gordimer’s works. While some works were banned only for a matter of months, The Late Bourgeois World was banned for 10 years, and A World of Strangers was banned for 12 years.

Famous Friends. Gordimer worked closely with Nelson Mandela on his speech “I Am Prepared to Die,” which he recited from the defendant’s dock during his 1962 trial.

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Once Upon a Time

In Grimms’ Fairy Tales there is a story called “The Stubborn Child” that is only one paragraph long. Here it is, in a translation by the fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes:

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him, and let him become sick. No doctor could cure him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed. After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out. So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

This story, with its unvarnished prose, should be clear, but it isn’t. Was the child buried alive? The unconsenting arm looks more like a symbol. And what about the mother? Didn’t it trouble her to whip that arm? Then we are told that the youngster, after this beating, rested in peace. Really? When, before, he had seemed to beg for life? But the worst thing in the story is that, beyond disobedience, it gives us not a single piece of information about the child. No name, no age, no pretty or ugly. We don’t even know if it is a boy or a girl. (The Grimms used ein Kind , the neuter word for “child.” Zipes decided that the child was a boy.) And so the tale, without details to attach it to anything in particular, becomes universal. Whatever happened there, we all deserve it. A. S. Byatt has written that this is the real terror of the story: “It doesn’t feel like a warning to naughty infants. It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.” That is true of very many of the Grimms’ tales, even those with happy endings.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born to a prosperous couple (the father was a lawyer), Jacob in 1785, Wilhelm in 1786. The family lived in a big house in the Hessian village of Hanau, near Kassel, and the boys received a sound primary education at home. But when they were eleven and ten everything changed. Their father died, and the Grimms no longer had any money. With difficulty, the brothers managed to attend a good lyceum and then, as their father would have wished, law school. But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk . Young men fresh from reading Plutarch at university began sharing stories about what the troll said to the woodcutter, and publishing collections of these Märchen , as folk tales were called. That is the movement that the Grimms joined in their early twenties. They had political reasons, too—above all, Napoleon’s invasion of their beloved Hesse, and the installation of his brother Jérôme as the ruler of the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French vassal state. If ever there was a stimulus to German intellectuals’ belief in a German people that was culturally and racially one, and to the hope of a politically unified Germany, this was it.

Two things sustained the Grimms. First, their bond as brothers. For most of their lives, they worked in the same room, at facing desks. Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities—Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing—but this probably drew them closer. Wilhelm, when he was in his late thirties, made bold to get married, but the lady in question simply moved into the brothers’ house and, having known them for decades, made the domestic operations conform to their work schedule.

That was their other lodestar: their work. Eventually, their specialties diverged somewhat. Wilhelm remained faithful to folklore, and it was he who, after the second edition of “Household Tales” (1819), did all the editorial work on the later editions, the last of which was published in 1857. Jacob branched out into other areas of German history. Independently, Jacob wrote twenty-one books; Wilhelm, fourteen; the two men in collaboration, eight—a prodigious output. Though their most popular and enduring book was “Household Tales,” they were serious philologists, and, in the last decades of their lives, what they cared about most was their German Dictionary, a project on the scale of the Oxford English Dictionary. Wilhelm died at seventy-three. Jacob carried on for four years, and brought the dictionary up to “F.” Then he, too, died. Later scholars finished the book.

There are two varieties of fairy tales. One is the literary fairy tale, the kind written, most famously, by Charles Perrault, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hans Christian Andersen. Such tales, which came into being at the end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works—short stories, really—except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy ducks, princesses who dance all night, and so on. To align the tale with the hearthside tradition, the author may also employ a certain naïveté of style. The other kind of fairy tale, the ancestor of the literary variety, is the oral tale, whose origins cannot be dated, since they precede recoverable history. Oral fairy tales are not so much stories as traditions. In the words of the English novelist Angela Carter, who wrote some thrilling Grimm-based stories, asking where a fairy tale came from is like asking who invented the meatball. Every narrator reinvents the tale. The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed. The premodern tale tellers might also be thought of as descendants of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon Dark Ages or of the griots of West Africa, men whose job it was to carry stories. But scholars tend to associate fairy tales with women, at home, telling stories to one another to relieve the tedium of repetitive tasks such as spinning (which often turns up in these narratives). Each woman would add or subtract a little of this and that, and so the story changed.

In the Grimms’ time, industrialization was starting to simplify or eliminate certain domestic chores. For that reason, among others, the oral tale was beginning to disappear. Intellectuals considered this a disaster. Hence the many fairy-tale collections of the period, including the Grimms’. They were rescue operations. The Grimms, in the introduction to their first edition, assert that almost all their material was “collected” from oral traditions of their region and is “purely German in its origins.” This suggests that the tales were supplied by humble people, and the brothers say that their primary source, Dorothea Viehmann, was a peasant woman from a village near Kassel. They claim that they did not change what Viehmann or the others said: “No details have been added or embellished.”

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Much of this was not true. The people who supplied the first-edition tales were largely middle class: the brothers’ relatives, friends, and friends of friends. As for Viehmann, she was not a peasant but the wife of a tailor. She was also a Huguenot. In other words, her culture was basically French, and she was no doubt well acquainted with French literary fairy tales, Perrault’s and others’. So much for the material’s being “purely German in its origins.” But at least Viehmann was an oral source. Many items in the Grimms’ first edition came not from interviewees but from other fairy-tale collections. Most important, the brothers, especially Wilhelm, revised the tales thoroughly, making them more detailed, more elegant, and more Christian, as one edition followed another. In the process, the stories sometimes doubled in length. The folklore scholar Maria Tatar supplies three sentences from the brothers’ original draft of “Briar Rose,” which we call “The Sleeping Beauty”:

[Briar Rose] pricked her finger with the spindle and immediately fell into a deep sleep. The king and his retinue had just returned and they too, along with the flies on the wall and everything else in the castle, fell asleep. All around the castle grew a hedge of thorns, concealing everything from sight. And here, after seven successive revisions, is how that passage reads in the final edition of “Household Tales”: [Briar Rose] took hold of the spindle and tried to spin. But no sooner had she touched the spindle than the magic spell took effect, and she pricked her finger with it. The very moment that she felt the prick she sank down into the bed that was right there and fell into a deep sleep. And that sleep spread throughout the entire palace. The king and the queen, who had just come home and entered the great hall, fell asleep, and the whole court with them. The horses fell asleep in the stables, the dogs in the courtyard, the pigeons on the roof, and the flies on the wall. Even the fire that had been flaming on the hearth stopped and went to sleep, and the roast stopped crackling, and the cook, who was about to pull the kitchen boy’s hair because he had done something wrong, let him go and fell asleep. And the wind died down and not a single little leaf stirred on the trees by the castle. All around the castle a briar hedge began to grow. Each year it grew higher, and finally it surrounded the entire castle and grew so thickly beyond it that not a trace of the castle was to be seen, not even the flag on the roof. As Tatar has pointed out in her book “The Classic Fairy Tales” (1999), what the Grimms produced falls somewhere between the oral and the literary tale. But the brothers should not be reproached for departing from the original. First of all, whose original? Perrault had written a famous version of “The Sleeping Beauty” more than a century before—Wilhelm, in expanding “Briar Rose,” probably drew on it—and the story was older than Perrault. Most literary tales were derived in some measure from folk sources, and, once they were published, they in turn influenced folk versions. Finally, oral tales, when transcribed faithfully, are often barely readable. Tatar offers an example from the first draft of the Grimms’ first edition. This is part of a sentence: Early the next morning the forester goes hunting at two o’clock, once he is gone Lehnchen says to Karl if you don’t leave me all alone I won’t leave you and Karl says never, then Lehnchen says I just want to tell you that our cook carried a lot of water into the house yesterday so I asked her why.

Though a scholar might publish this in, say, the Journal of American Folklore , nobody else would try to get anyone to read it.

The Grimms, however, changed more than the style of the tales. They changed the content. Their first edition was not intended for the young, nor, apparently, were the tales told at rural firesides. The purpose was to entertain grownups, during or after a hard day’s work, and rough material was part of the entertainment. But the reviews and the sales of the Grimms’ first edition were disappointing to them. Other collections, geared to children, had been more successful, and the brothers decided that their second edition would take that route. In the introduction, they dropped the claim of fidelity to folk sources. Indeed, they accurately said more or less the opposite: that, while they had been true to the spirit of the original material, the “phrasing” was their own. Above all, any matter unsuitable for the young had been expunged.

As with the rating committee of the Motion Picture Association of America, what they regarded as unsuitable for the young was information about sex. In the first edition, Rapunzel, imprisoned in the tower by her wicked godmother, goes to the window every evening and lets down her long hair so that the prince can climb up and enjoy her company. Finally, one day, when her godmother is dressing her, Rapunzel wonders out loud why her clothes have become so tight. “Wicked child!” the godmother says. “What have you done?” What Rapunzel had done goes unmentioned in the second edition. Such bowdlerizing went on for a half century. By the final edition, the stories were far cleaner than at the start.

But they were not less violent. The Grimms were told by friends that some of the material in the first edition was too frightening for children, and they did make a few changes. In a notable example, the first edition of “Hansel and Gretel” has the mother and the father deciding together to abandon the children in the woods. In later editions, it is the stepmother who makes the suggestion, and the father repeatedly hesitates before he finally agrees. Apparently, the Grimms could not bear the idea that the mother, the person who bore these children, would do such a thing, or that the father would readily consent.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians. Toes are chopped off; severed fingers fly through the air. A typical, if especially appalling, case is “The Juniper Tree.” As usual, there is a stepmother who hates her stepchild, a boy. He comes home one day and she asks him if he wants an apple. But no sooner does the boy lean over the trunk where the apples are stored than she slams the lid down and cuts off his head. Now she starts to worry. So she props up the boy’s body in a chair, puts his head on top, and ties a scarf around the neck to hide the wound. In comes Marlene, the woman’s own, beloved daughter. The girl comments that her stepbrother seems pale. Well, give him a slap, the mother says. Marlene does so, and the boy’s head falls off. “What a dreadful thing you’ve done. But don’t breathe a word,” the stepmother says. “We’ll cook him up in a stew.” Then the husband comes home and she serves him the stew. He loves it. “No one else can have any of it,” he says. “Somehow I feel as if it’s all for me.” You can hardly believe what you’re reading.

You get used to the outrages, though. They may even come to seem funny. When, in a jolly tale, a boy sees half a man fall down the chimney, are you supposed to get upset? When you turn a page and find that the next story is entitled “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other,” should you worry? Some stories do tear you apart, usually those where the violence is joined to some emphatically opposite quality, such as peace or tenderness. In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king who has twelve sons decides that, if his next child is a girl, he will have all his sons killed. That way, his daughter will inherit more money. So he has twelve coffins built, each with a little pillow. Little pillows! For boys whom he is willing to murder!

In sum, the Grimm tales contain almost no psychology—a fact underlined by their brevity. However much detail Wilhelm added, the stories are still extremely short. Jack Zipes’s translation of “Rapunzel” is three pages long, “The Twelve Brothers” five, “Little Red Riding Hood” less than four. They come in, clobber you over the head, and then go away. As with sections of the Bible, the conciseness makes them seem more profound.

Since the Second World War, some people have argued that the violence of the Grimm tales is an expression of the German character. Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism. Of course, the Grimm tales were nationalist: the brothers hoped to make their young readers feel and be more German. But in the nineteenth century there were fervent nationalist campaigns in most European countries. That is how many Western empires fell. And though ethnic pride was the Nazis’ chief justification for their movement, that wasn’t necessarily the fault of ethnic pride. Nazism fed on many trends that, previously, had been harmless—for example, the physical-culture movement of the early twentieth century, the fad for going on nature hikes and doing calisthenics. This became a feature of Nazism—an argument for purity, strength, the soil—but it existed also in countries that fought the Nazis, including the United States.

Nevertheless, the Grimms are premier representatives of the nationalism that became Aryanism in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and the Nazis were grateful to them. Hitler’s government demanded that every German school teach the Grimms’ book. After the war, accordingly, the Allies banned the Grimm tales from the school curricula in some cities. Still today, certain people, notably feminists, would like to move them to the back shelves of the library, because, so often, the villain is a woman, doing violence to girls, and also because the girls seldom resist. When, in “Snow White,” the heroine is being hunted down by the terrible queen-stepmother, she does almost nothing to save herself. Finally, she sinks into utter passivity, immobilized in a glass coffin, waiting for her prince to come. In the words of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in “The Madwoman in the Attic,” she is “patriarchy’s ideal woman.”

Gilbert and Gubar actually defend the wicked stepmothers, whose arts, they say, “even while they kill, confer the only measure of power available to a woman in a patriarchal culture.” That is, these women at least have some gumption, unlike the little Barbies they are trying to eliminate. Such feelings are widespread. On a rock at the edge of Copenhagen harbor sits a bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid (who, unlike Disney’s, does not get her man). Over the years, her head has been sawed off repeatedly; she has been blasted off her rock with explosives. A dildo was once affixed to her hand, apparently in celebration of International Women’s Day. At the same time, some writers have recommended that the feminist critics look more closely at the Grimm collection. According to the novelist Alison Lurie, an expert on children’s books, it is primarily the most popular tales, especially the ones adapted by Disney, that feature the wilting violets. Others of the stories have spunky heroines.

But you do not have to be a member of any special political camp to object to the Grimm tales; you only need to be a person interested in protecting children’s mental health. After the Second World War, there was a powerful movement in the United States for realism and wholesomeness in children’s books. No more cannibal stews but, rather, “Judy Goes to the Firehouse.” (This is the trend that Maurice Sendak, to the outrage of many, bucked with “Where the Wild Things Are,” in 1963.) Writers reluctant to part with the Grimm tales suggested that we go on reading them to our children but point out the poisonous stereotypes they contain. Presumably, as your child is nodding off, you are supposed to give her a shake and tell her how the prince’s rescue of Snow White reflects the hegemony of the patriarchy. Other writers have proposed that we revise the tales again. Why not? Why should the Grimms have the last word? Jack Zipes, in his book “Breaking the Magic Spell” (1979), addresses “Rumpelstiltskin,” the story in which, as the Grimms tell it, a king offers to marry a miller’s daughter if she can spin straw into gold. She has no idea how to do this. A gnome, Rumpelstiltskin, offers to do the job for her. But, once she marries, he says, she must give him her first child. When, at the end, she reneges on the deal, he becomes so angry that he tears himself in two. With apparent sympathy, Zipes quotes a writer, Irmela Brender, who, saddened that Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed, when all he ever wanted was a little companionship, has proposed a version in which the miller’s daughter, instead of denying Rumpelstiltskin the baby, invites him to move in with the royal family:

“We could do a lot of things together. You’ll see how much fun we can have.” Then Rumpelstiltskin would have first turned pale and then blushed for joy. He would have climbed on a chair and would have given the queen a kiss on her cheek. . . . And they would have been happy with each other until the end of their days.

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

Then, there are those who believe that the Grimm tales, whatever their cruelty, are indirectly good for us. One camp here consists of the psychoanalytic critics, most notoriously Bruno Bettelheim, whose 1976 book “The Uses of Enchantment” dropped like a hot brick into the tepid waters of children’s literature of that period. Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, by allowing children to attach their unsavory repressed desires to villains (dragons, witches) who were then conquered, helped the children to integrate and control such desires. To Bettelheim, a Freudian, the most important conflict was the Oedipus complex. In his view, it was because of that nasty struggle that the Grimm tales so often featured a wicked stepmother. The child is given the opportunity to hate her mother (in the form of the stepmother) and still, as she does in life, love her mother (the real mother, conveniently absent from the tale).

Such an interpretation makes some sense. Bettelheim went further, though. In “The Frog Prince,” he says, the reason the princess dislikes the amphibian in question is that the “tacky, clammy” feel of a frog’s skin is connected to children’s feelings about the sex organs. This seems a perfect example of the psychoanalytic critics’ habitual indifference to the obvious. Human beings—and probably princesses, especially—don’t generally like creatures that are sticky and warty. To provoke such recoil, you do not have to resemble a sex organ. Furthermore, this particular frog has been pursuing the princess day and night. Finally, he invades her bed. In response, she picks him up and hurls him against a wall, whereupon he explodes and his little guts dribble down the plaster. Fortunately, this causes him to turn into a prince, but, even if he hadn’t, many of us would have endorsed her action.

While Bettelheim tells us that fairy tales help us adjust, Jack Zipes has said the opposite: that the value of fairy tales is that they teach us not to adjust, because the oppressive society in which we live is something we should refuse to adjust to. Zipes, a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, has written sixty books on or of folk tales: critical studies, collections, translations. His newest entry is “The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre” (Princeton), but it does little more than repeat the theory of fairy tales that Zipes has been putting forth for several decades. Zipes is a Marxist of the Frankfurt school. He was also heavily influenced by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and by the student movement of the nineteen-sixties. In keeping with those positions, he believes that fairy tales, because they are grounded in a naïve morality, offer us a “counterworld,” which encourages us to step back, consider the dubious morality of our own world, and take steps to reform it. As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.” This interpretation leads to expectable conclusions. In “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, the duck, in envying the swans, shows “a distinct class bias if not racist tendencies.”

If some of this seems comical, it should be said that Zipes, in his books, shows a real love of fairy tales, especially the Grimms’. Such are the mysteries of literary criticism. His views, however dated, are still, like Bettelheim’s, endorsed by some writers. Maria Tatar seems to be inheriting the position of dean of fairy tales, and in her “Annotated Brothers Grimm” (2004)—this is one of Norton’s series of copiously annotated classics—she apparently feels that she can afford to be nice to everyone. This makes some of the notes in her edition bewilderingly latitudinarian—she nods to Zipes, to Bettelheim, to Gilbert and Gubar. Also, at times she seems very wide-eyed. She tries to find some basis for what seems to her the surprising appearance of anti-Semitic feeling in a few of these nineteenth-century stories. Had Wilhelm been consorting with the wrong people? In any case, she says, such characterizations are unfair to Jews.

Still, her edition is the one I would recommend. The book is dazzlingly illustrated, by Walter Crane (the best), Arthur Rackham, Gustave Doré, Maxfield Parrish, and others. (In the second edition, due to be published in October, there will be six new stories and many more pictures.) Another virtue of Tatar’s edition is that she has isolated, at the end, a group of “Tales for Adults”—stories that she feels should be examined by parents before they are read to children. Included in this section is “The Stubborn Child,” together with such items as “The Hand with the Knife” and “The Jew in the Brambles.” Still, “The Juniper Tree,” which Tatar herself describes as “probably the most shocking of all fairy tales,” is not placed among the “Tales for Adults,” presumably because it is too characteristic, too echt Grimm, to be cordoned off in a special section. (Parents should simply not read it to children. If they give the child the book, they should get an X-Acto knife and slice the story out first.) In truth, most of the Grimms’ tales cannot be made wholly respectable. The rewritings that seem most persuasive are sometimes more unsettling than the Grimm versions—for example, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood.” This story stresses the eroticism of the girl’s encounter with the wolf. When she enters her grandmother’s cottage, she almost immediately understands what her situation is, but she decides not to be afraid. She asks:

What shall I do with my shawl? Throw it on the fire, dear one. You won’t need it again. She bundled up her shawl and threw it on the blaze, which instantly consumed it. Then she drew her blouse over her head; her small breasts gleamed as if the snow had invaded the room. And so on with the rest of her clothes. Then she laughs in the wolf’s face, rips off his shirt, and throws that, too, into the fire: She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony. The blizzard will die down. The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall. . . . See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.

Does the violence in the Grimm collection need a symbolic reading? Marina Warner, in her book on fairy tales, “From the Beast to the Blonde” (1994), says that most modern writers ignore the Grimms’ “historical realism.” Among the pre-modern populations, she records, death in childbirth was the most common cause of female mortality. The widowers tended to remarry, and the new wife often found that her children had to compete for scarce resources with the children of the husband’s earlier union. Hence the wicked stepmothers. As for the scarcity of resources, Robert Darnton has written that a peasant’s basic diet around that time consisted of a porridge of bread and water, sometimes with a few homegrown vegetables thrown in. Often, there was not even porridge. In the Grimm story “The Children Living in a Time of Famine” (Tatar moved this, too, into “Tales for Adults”), a mother says to her two daughters, “I will have to kill you so that I’ll have something to eat.” The little girls beg to live. Each goes out and somehow finds a piece of bread to bring back. But it is not enough. The mother again says to the girls that they must die: “To which they responded, ‘Dearest Mother, we’ll lie down and go to sleep, and we won’t rise again until Judgment Day.’ ” And so they lie down together and die. This is a hair-raising story, but also, I think, a wishful fantasy—that the children might die without crying.

And so you could say that the Grimm tales are no different from other art. They merely concretize and then expand our experience of life. The main reason that Zipes likes fairy tales, it seems, is that they provide hope: they tell us that we can create a more just world. The reason that most people value fairy tales, I would say, is that they do not detain us with hope but simply validate what is. Even people who have never known hunger, let alone a murderous stepmother, still have a sense—from dreams, from books, from news broadcasts—of utter blackness, the erasure of safety and comfort and trust. Fairy tales tell us that such knowledge, or fear, is not fantastic but realistic. Maybe, after this life, we will go to Heaven, as the two little girls who starved to death hoped to. Or maybe not. Though Wilhelm tried to Christianize the tales, they still invoke nature, more than God, as life’s driving force, and nature is not kind. ♦

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Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” Literary Analysis Essay

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Post-Colonial/Ethnic Criticism

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Works cited.

Literature embraces various perspectives on the world and allows writers to explore social, economic, political, religious, and psychological issues prevailing in society at different times. Racial segregation has provided the basis for a broad discussion about ethnic disparities and discriminative practices against minority groups. Nadine Gordimer was a prominent South African writer who contributed to the discourse and elaborated on themes of apartheid and repression in South Africa in her literary works. Written in 1989, her short story “Once Upon a Time” explores the discrimination subject and disguises the anti-apartheid statement as a fairy tale (Rizzardi 43). This paper aims to analyze Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” from the perspectives of “new” and post-colonial/ethnic criticism, as well as examine the historicist context and major themes presented in this short story.

To begin with, it is necessary to explore how the story is narrated. The author starts her “Once Upon a Time” with the first-person narration, where the unnamed main character recalls how strange noises in the house scared her the previous night. She has not taken any special safety measures, such as installing burglar bars or having a gun within her reach; however, she still has “the same fears as people who do take these precautions” (Gordimer 1). The narrator immediately feels like a crime victim, which defines the social context of the story and highlights that crime rates are likely high in the area where she lives. To her relief, the character realizes that the creaking is not caused by human steps on the floor but by the shifting of the house. From this point, Gordimer uses the third-person narration as the character tells herself “a bedtime story” to be able to sleep again (1). In other words, “Once Upon a Time” can be viewed as a story inside a story, narrated in the form of a fairy tale.

The major themes reflected in “Once Upon a Time” need to be defined. The narration reveals that the bedtime story was inspired by the character’s frightening experience in her own house on the previous night. As a result, a fairy tale about a man, his wife, and their son struggling to keep themselves safe was written. It is presented as a story for children, requested from the writer by an individual convinced that every writer must be committed to contributing to a children’s anthology. However, the symbolism and historical context of this literary work implies that “Once Upon a Time” explores the theme of racism, apartheid, and racial segregation and addresses issues that extend beyond youngsters’ audience. According to Rizzardi, Gordimer’s work is a “classical tragedy … that dictates both the form and the content of this brief story, which perfectly mirrors the three Aristotelian unities” (43). The themes of fear, security, separation, and wealth inequality are explored in “Once Upon a Time” through the use of conventional fairy tale elements which prevent the author from making an explicit political statement.

“Once Upon a Time” is narrated as a fairy tale that does not explicitly mention the geographical and time frames of the story. However, the writer’s background and perspective imply that it takes place during the apartheid era in South Africa, marked by white supremacy, racism, systemic oppression, crime, and violence. As stated by Patil, the “apartheid system in South Africa was a policy of racial discrimination which meant to maintain white domination over the blacks” and affected all aspects of social life (1033). Indeed, examples of institutionalized racism can be found throughout Gordimer’s story, ranging from the family’s paranoid concerns about their security to the portrayal of “trusted housemaids and gardeners” (3). As per the advice of the husband’s mother, the protagonists refrained from hiring workers off the street for safety reasons. Hence, the narrator’s story implies that black people were treated as a potential threat and could only be employed if the family’s neighbors recommended them as highly trustworthy.

Another evidence of the racial conflict in the story is the episode depicting black people wandering in the suburbs hoping to find work. However, the wealthy residents are biased and cautious enough to be unwilling to hire people from the streets. At the same time, the wife, portrayed as sympathetic to the beggars, attempts to send the housemaid with food to support them; nevertheless, the whole family soon agrees that it might only encourage crimes and increase the threat. These scenes suggest that the privileged class lives in fear of the black community, which appears irrational and implies the global issue of apartheid and its adverse impact on people’s lives. Even though the author does not make a clear statement, the content of this story provides enough examples of Gordimer’s disapproval of the segregationist policy against non-white citizens. “Once Upon a Time” accurately depicts the racial discrimination and territorial separation imposed by apartheid laws.

The central themes of Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” should be discussed with regard to the historical context of this story. During the apartheid era, segregation policies and laws divided the population into different groups on the basis of race and openly proclaimed the idea of white supremacy. Such an approach aimed to maintain control over the black community, which outnumbered its white counterpart. Apartheid implied territorial segregation and prevented people of different groups from mixing together, which is depicted in Gordimer’s short story, where a wealthy white family lives in the suburbs where black people are prohibited from residing.

At the same time, there are controversial views on racial segregation policies. Even though discriminative laws were imposed on citizens by the government, writers expressed their concerns regarding the violence and political power of the apartheid system, as well as its consequences for the whole community. According to Patil, Gordimer’s story suggests that even though the “apartheid system favored the whites over the blacks, the unjust policy was harmful to both blacks and whites” (1036). “Once Upon a Time” was an attempt to illustrate how harmful bias is and what dreadful consequences racist behavior can lead to. Moreover, Gordimer’s short story implies how privileged the white group is since they do not face such severe problems as unemployment, poverty, diseases, and weakness. Instead, the author emphasizes how socially secure the family is, with their medical and disaster insurance and the newest technology used to protect the property from intruders. Yet, their concerns continue to grow, and instead of living their lives in peace, the husband and wife constantly improve the security systems.

“ New” Criticism

The symbols used in the story and their meaning in the context of “Once Upon a Time” need to be discussed. The “new criticism” is an approach that allows for exploring how symbols “convey a message “between the lines” (“Part Two” 2). In Gordimer’s short story, the wall built around the family’s house stands for separation. The husband and wife decide to make it higher to prevent burglars from accessing their house, and the husband’s mother assists them in this business. The wall symbolizes how the family frantically attempts to separate themselves from the hostile communities outside and protect themselves and their son. Furthermore, another symbol, the razor wire, is used by the author as a means of ultimate protection and separation from the outer world. Gordimer emphasizes that the husband and wife specifically chose this violent device which would result in a “struggle getting bloodier and bloodier, a deeper and sharper hooking and tearing of flesh” to destroy the intruder immediately (4). In a global meaning, the razor wire embodies apartheid and its horrendous consequences for society.

In this regard, the symbolism of the story’s ending should be discussed. Despite all the protective measures against the outside world, the danger comes from inside, as the little boy decides to play near the deadly razor wire. Ironically, he imagines himself as a prince from the book read to him by his mother the night before. Gordimer’s fairy tale does not provide a happy ending, contrary to the common suggestion. As stated by Khalil et al., the author makes a point that “human beings are responsible for their own destruction, … their own made things are harmful to the human beings” (25). The tragic outcome proclaims that apartheid is the biggest threat that must be destroyed.

To summarize, Nadine Gordimer’s “Once Upon a Time” is a short story that makes a metaphorical statement against racial segregation and apartheid. It represents the dangers of bias and inequalities associated with the system that supports white supremacy and illustrates the catastrophic consequences of such an approach. Disguised as a fairy tale, the political paradigm of the author emphasizes how people can be blinded by fear and hatred against non-white groups.

“Part Two of Our Last Analytical Tool Set: Critical Approaches.” English102 class handout.

Gordimer, Nadine. “Once Upon a Time.” English102 class handout . 1989.

Khalil, Muhammad Zohaib, et al. “Human Beings Create their Own Destruction: Critical Discourse Analysis of Once Upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer.” Studies in Literature and Language , vol. 14, no. 6, 2017, pp. 24-27. CSCanada, Web.

Patil, Latika Subhash. “Protest Against Apartheid: A Study of the Selected Short Stories of Nadine Gordimer.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English , vol. 8, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1033-1040, Web.

Rizzardi, Biancamaria. “Once Upon a Time” by Nadine Gordimer: A Fairy Tale for Peace.” Le Simplegadi , vol. XVII, no. 19, 2019, pp. 43-52. Research Gate, Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, July 14). Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" Literary Analysis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gordimers-once-upon-a-time-literary-analysis/

"Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" Literary Analysis." IvyPanda , 14 July 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/gordimers-once-upon-a-time-literary-analysis/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" Literary Analysis'. 14 July.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" Literary Analysis." July 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gordimers-once-upon-a-time-literary-analysis/.

1. IvyPanda . "Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" Literary Analysis." July 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gordimers-once-upon-a-time-literary-analysis/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Gordimer's "Once Upon a Time" Literary Analysis." July 14, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gordimers-once-upon-a-time-literary-analysis/.

Once Upon a Time

By nadine gordimer, once upon a time literary elements.

Short Story

Setting and Context

The setting of the novel is South Africa during the regime of apartheid.

Narrator and Point of View

There are two narrators in the novel. The first part of the story is told by Gordimer through first-person narration; in the second part, there is an omniscient third-person narrator. Both the narrators give their own point of view regarding the events. Gordimer talks about her life, her fears, and her old house, while the second narrator narrates the story of a family in a South African suburb.

Tone and Mood

Tone: light, satirical, ambiguous

Mood: foreboding, uncomfortable, insidious, unsettling

Protagonist and Antagonist

There are not clear-cut protagonists and antagonists; the family thinks that they are protagonists (the little boy is the closest to an actual one) and that the outsiders are antagonists, but this is too simplistic.

Major Conflict

Will all of the family's precautions keep them safe from the loiterers and criminals?

The climax comes at the very end of the story when the little boy climbs into the coils of barbed wire on the wall.

Foreshadowing

Gordimer foreshadows the boy's fate by showing frequently how he is very interested in and wants to play with the security measures.

Understatement

1. Chopi and Tsonga: two groups of Africans from Mozambique 2. Prince and Sleeping Beauty: classic fairytale 3. "Once upon a time": the way almost all classic fairytales begin 4. "Tsotsi": "means hoodlum and may derive from zoot suit—refers to rootless South African young male criminals who, having no tribal connections, take many of their cues from American gangster movies" (New York Times)

The imagery is of the house turning into a fortress: impenetrable, dangerous, and inhospitable. Gone are the flowers and the starry skies unencumbered by bars; now, there are coiled, serrated wires, electronic gates, and robotic intercoms. All the imagery points to frantic, anxious, and futile attempts to shut all danger out of the sacred space of the home—something that fails.

The paradox in the story is that the barbed wires that were supposed to protect the child became the cause of his death. Instead of preserving his life, they end his life.

Parallelism

1. The little boy's "adventure" in the coils parallels the Prince's, but there is a very different outcome. 2. The dangerous conditions outside the neighborhood end up being paralleled by the dangerous condition inside, with the boy getting caught in the coils.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Personification.

1. "I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration" 2. "...the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking this way and that" 3. "I couldn't find a position in which my mind would let go of my body" 4. "...there would be no way of climbing over it and no way through its tunnel without getting entangled in its fangs" 5. "The alarms called to one another across the gardens in shrills and bleats and wails..."

Once Upon a Time Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Once Upon a Time is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Which phrase best describes the author's purpose in listing the items and the people involved in this sentence?

The little boy was hacked out of the security coil.

Title significance of the short story once upon a time by Nadine Gordimer in detail

What are the muting things referred to in the poem?

I'm not sure from the wording of your question exactly what you're looking for here. The "muting" is caused by insincerity.... a reaction to the cold, false, insincere world is which people say things they don't mean and hide their emotions behind...

Study Guide for Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time study guide contains a biography of Nadine Gordimer, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Once Upon a Time
• Once Upon a Time Summary
• Character List

Essays for Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Once Upon a Time by Nadine Gordimer.

• Genre of a Bedtime Story: Narrative Technique in "Once Upon a Time"

Think and Write for CSEC English A and B

Once Upon a Time by Gabriel Okara

Once upon a time, son, they used to laugh with their hearts and laugh with their eyes: but now they only laugh with their teeth, while their ice-block-cold eyes search behind my shadow. There was a time indeed they used to shake hands with their hearts: but that’s gone, son. Now they shake hands without…

Once upon a time, son,

they used to laugh with their hearts

and laugh with their eyes:

but now they only laugh with their teeth,

while their ice-block-cold eyes

search behind my shadow.

There was a time indeed

they used to shake hands with their hearts:

but that’s gone, son.

Now they shake hands without hearts

while their left hands search

my empty pockets.

‘Feel at home!’ ‘Come again’:

they say, and when I come

again and feel

at home, once, twice,

there will be no thricefor then I find doors shut on me.

So I have learned many things, son.

I have learned to wear many faces

like dresses – homeface,

officeface, streetface, hostface,

cocktailface, with all their conforming smiles

like a fixed portrait smile.

And I have learned too

to laugh with only my teeth

and shake hands without my heart.

I have also learned to say,’Goodbye’,

when I mean ‘Good-riddance’:

to say ‘Glad to meet you’,

without being glad; and to say ‘It’s been

nice talking to you’, after being bored.

But believe me, son.

I want to be what I used to be

when I was like you. I want

to unlearn all these muting things.

Most of all, I want to relearn

how to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror

shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs!

So show me, son,

how to laugh; show me how

I used to laugh and smile

once upon a time when I was like you.

The persona in the poem is either a father or mother who speaks to his son about how people, as well as himself, have changed. They no longer show genuine emotion but instead are insincere. He recalls when people would “laugh with their eyes” and “shake hands with their hearts.” His disdain is clear as he speaks to the insincerity of the people and how they have begun to feign laughs and give heartless handshakes while they checked for information about his financial status. The persona also speaks about the way he has adapted to this new insincere world. He says nice things and acts friendly in contrast to what he really feels. But he tells his son that he longs for the time when people were genuine and now, he finds himself unable to really laugh. He wants to be young and able to show his true feelings again like his son.

Theme – societal changes, hypocrisy, and values.

Mood – disdain and nostalgia.

Tone – ironic

“Once upon a time, son, they used to laugh with their hearts and laugh with their eyes”

Stanza one opens with ‘once upon a time,’ which shows that the persona is about to tell a story. The father speaks about ‘they,’ in reference to the people who used to laugh genuinely and show their true emotions.

“But now they only laugh with their teeth, while their ice-block-cold eyes search behind my shadow.”

This suggests that people have changed and that they no longer laugh genuinely. Instead, they “perform” for those they encounter because they hope to find secrets and flaws. He describes their eyes using a metaphor “ice-block-cold eyes”- to show the coldhearted and unfeeling nature of these people.

“There was a time indeed- they used to shake hands with their hearts: but that’s gone, son.”

Again, the persona reflects with nostalgia about when people would shake hands ‘with their hearts,’ or with love, but notes with sadness that those times had passed.

“Now they shake hands without hearts while their left hands search my empty pockets.”

The people shake hands heartlessly. They show that they have no trust or personal warmth. Instead, they want to find out his financial status. This draws parallel to the capitalist ideals and with what was said at the end of the previous stanza: “… their ice-block-cold eyes search behind my shadow.” This means that their main aim is to find or gain some understanding about the persona, and therefore they have lost sincerity with their gesture of shaking hands.

‘Feel at home!’ ‘Come again’: they say, and when I come again and feel at home, once, twice, there will be no thrice- for then I find doors shut on me.”

This is a continuation of the previous thoughts where people are inspecting and evaluating the persona even as they embrace a newer culture where financial and social status is dominant. The persona notes that these people are hypocritical because they tell him to feel at home with each visit and once, they realize that he does not meet the financial or social status then he is no longer welcomed in their homes.

“So I have learned many things, son. I have learned to wear many faces like dresses – homeface, officeface, streetface, hostface, cocktailface, with all their conforming smiles like a fixed portrait smile.”

There is acceptance in this line as the persona has learn to embrace this new culture where he is cold and has so little or no feelings towards people. He has created different faces to suit the encounters and each reaction depends on the specific person.

“And I have learned too to laugh with only my teeth and shake hands without my heart. I have also learned to say, ‘Goodbye’, when I mean ‘Good-riddance’; to say ‘Glad to meet you’, without being glad; and to say ‘It’s been nice talking to you’, after being bored.”

The persona tells his son the things he has started doing over the years. These things do not come from his heart but rather for show in hopes of gaining something.

“But believe me, son. I want to be what I used to be when I was like you. I want to unlearn all these muting things. Most of all, I want to relearn how to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs!”

The father wants to be like his son again. Yes, he has learnt these hollow expressions because he wants to conform to the changes in society, but he wants to return to the days of his childhood and his innocence and sincerity. These deceitful and insincere things he has learnt have only served to mute him (‘these muting things’) and silence his true thoughts and emotions. He has embraced this cold culture and his laugh in the mirror shows that his teeth are the only things that are laughing. Therefore, he seems deceitful and deceitful like a snake.

“So show me, son, how to laugh; show me how I used to laugh and smile once upon a time when I was like you.”

The persona now pleads (pointlessly) to his son to teach him how to laugh and smile genuinely again. He wants to be innocent and sincere like he was when he was younger and lived in a society that encouraged honesty and a pure identity.

Literary Devices

“I have learned to wear many faces like dresses” (lines 20-21)

The persona’s many ‘faces’ or personalities which can be compared to women’s dresses. He changes his face or expressions to suit the situation.

“…with all their conforming smiles like a fixed portrait smile.” (lines 23-24)

The different faces of the persona are compared to that of a fixed portrait smile. A smile in a portrait is not the normal state of a person but changes on different occasions to suit the picture. It is structured and can be uncomfortable and exaggerated as the person pretends to be happy. This can be compared to that of the persona who changes his smile for each occasion.

“my laugh in the mirror shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs!” (lines 38-39)

The father’s teeth are compared to a snake’s fangs because the snake is deceptive and deceitful. Therefore, the father is no longer sincere when he laughs. His teeth are deceptive because they do not reflect his true feelings. He is snakelike with this deception.

“while their ice-block-cold eyes” (line 5)

The eyes of the people are compared to ice blocks because they are cold and unwelcoming and callous and unfeeling the people have become.

“Once upon a time…” (lines 1 and 43) to reinforce the idea that the persona is telling a story.

An enjambment is when a line runs on to a new line without a stop or pause.

“And I have learned too

and shake hands without my heart.” (lines 25-27)

“they used to laugh with their hearts

and laugh with their eyes:” (lines 2-3)

(There are many more examples in the poem)

Alliteration

“shake hands without hearts” (line 8)

“…after being bored.” (line 32)

“But believe me, son.” (line 33)

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Once Upon a Time

52 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Introduction

Before Reading

Reading Context

During Reading

Reading Questions & Paired Texts

After Reading

Discussion/Analysis Prompt

Essay Questions

Exam Questions

Exam Answer Key

Reading Check

1. A gold mine (Paragraph 7)

2. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED (Paragraph 9)

3. Riots and burglaries (Paragraphs 10, 11)

4. A dog and a cat (Paragraph 9)

5. Barbed-wire coils (Paragraph 17)

6. He dies after getting caught in the barbed wire. (Paragraph 18)

Short Answer

1. He uses the alarm system as a toy to play walkie-talkies. (Paragraph 10)

2. She suggests burglar bars for the doors and windows as well as an alarm system. (Paragraph 11)

3. Playing pretend, he imagines himself as a prince saving Sleeping Beauty. (Paragraph 18)

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