Overview
Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer is a novel that blends psychological and political realism. Set between 1962 and 1977, the story follows Rosa Burger, a young woman struggling with her identity and legacy as the daughter of anti-apartheid activists. The novel takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Nice, France. First published in 1979, Burger’s Daughter was initially banned in South Africa due to its critique of apartheid, but it remains one of Gordimer’s most powerful explorations of resistance, personal freedom, and the weight of history.
Plot Summary
Part 1 of Burger’s Daughter, which takes up more than half the novel, establishes the basic family relationships and social background of the protagonist, Rosemarie, or Rosa, Burger. Her father Lionel, as both physician and disciplined revolutionary, is a man of overwhelming moral integrity who, moreover, dies in prison—a martyr to his beliefs. Rosa’s mother, an equally dedicated Communist, also has spent time in prison, so that the child Rosa learns early to take on adult responsibilities—which include not merely caring for herself and her father but also smuggling messages into the prison. She has grown accustomed to almost total social ostracism from her first days in school. Rosa is, however, spared poverty.
The Burger family seems to have more than enough money. There are black servants (who are treated decently, without condescension) and even an informally adopted black child who is being reared in the family as a son. Party members, whether white, black, or colored (or underground) are continually being quartered at the large family house, sometimes for months at a time. In addition, the family has a swimming pool, which is just as forthrightly and openly integrated racially as the house. Lionel loves to teach young Africans—city dwellers in an arid region—how to swim. It is in this pool, however, that Rosa’s younger brother, Tony, drowns.
By the time she is twenty, Rosa’s parents both have died. She is without a passport in a nation that despises her. Though she has friends—Party members—she tends to avoid them. She lives in a state of existential loneliness— or aloneness, well aware of the emotional neglect she has suffered in her life but with no way to blame anyone for it. A brief affair with a Swedish documentary filmmaker (Marcus) has little effect on her condition. A longer affair with the student Conrad seems promising—but each allows so much freedom to the other that what first might have been love dissolves into something more like a sibling relationship, from which Rosa finally withdraws, thinking it “incestuous.” Through all of this, one senses Rosa’s emotional entrapment by the memory of her father and her inability to believe that she has a truly personal future or destiny.
Part 2 of the novel witnesses Rosa’s spiritual betrayal of her father: obtaining a passport by appealing directly to an influential apartheid loyalist, Brandt Vermeulen, who, however, has a degree from Princeton and fancies himself a kind of liberal. She visits her father’s first wife and enjoys in Nice a period of cathartic—if “decadent”—freedom. She obtains from this woman, Katya Bagnelli, a degree of emotional support that she failed to get from her mother. A professor from Paris, Bernard Chabalier, becomes her lover—but when he invites her to live in Paris, where he has a wife and children, to become his permanent mistress, she declines. She unexpectedly sees the African Baasie, her childhood “little brother,” now a student in France and full of hostility toward her as a white woman, despite the past. She decides to return home, feeling that she has finally attained emotional freedom from the power of her father.
The final part of the novel, and the shortest, sees Rosa, with a new sense of self-security, make a true commitment to her land—and to justice for all of its people—which is in some sense inspired by her father but not dictated by him. She takes a job in a hospital helping crippled children, as a profession. She is excited by the Soweto students’ proclamation of June 16, 1976, perceiving that a real revolutionary initiative was coming from the people, from the Africans themselves. During the demonstration of October 19, 1977, many people are arrested, including Rosa and one of her very best African revolutionary friends from the old days, Marisa Kgosana. Rosa is afraid neither of prison nor of the future. In the women’s cells, she feels a real sense of sisterhood.
Characterisation in Burger’s Daughter
Summation:
Rosemarie (Rosa) Burger is the protagonist, a young intellectual woman struggling to find herself after the deaths of her parents.
Lionel Burger is Rosa’s father, a medical doctor and a prominent leader in the South African Communist Party.
Cathy Burger is Rosa’s mother, a deeply committed and dedicated Communist.
Katya Bagnelli is Lionel’s first wife, who was once a Communist but now lives a pampered bourgeois life in Nice.
Baasie is a young African boy who was taken in by the Burger family during Rosa’s childhood.
Conrad is Rosa’s first important lover, a graduate student writing a thesis on Italian literature.
Bernard Chabalier is a married professor with children who becomes Rosa’s lover while she is in France.
Nadine Gordimer’s protagonist is a masterfully drawn character, seen in the full context of her life and times (some details of which the reader learns in flashback). It is easy for the reader to believe that he knows virtually everything about Rosa Burger, but on deeper reflection one realizes Rosa has secrets disclosed neither by her nor by her creator. (The reader comes to know this character about equally through authorial third-person and first-person narration.) It might be better to say that Gordimer, in her portrayal of Rosa, does not so much withhold certain things as merely give the reader hints of them, expecting him to make all the connections for himself. Sometimes this is not so easy to do; Gordimer, indeed, has a reputation for being a difficult writer—and an emotionally cold one. The question here would be whether Rosa has a “cold” personality or is simply so reticent (or is presented so sparingly) that the reader cannot be certain of her true state.
It would certainly be difficult to construct a full picture of Rosa’s sexuality. Gordimer, however, presents a poignant description of Rosa’s first teenage “passion”: At the age of seventeen, she was designated by the Party to act as the “fiancee” of a certain half-Portuguese Communist prisoner named Noel de Witt. Once a week, as his “legal relative,” she would visit him and pass along important messages. She took her role seriously and would shake a few drops of perfume down her breasts before leaving for the prison. One day, de Witt was released. He left Rosa some flowers without a card. “Those were my love letters,” recalls Rosa. “Those visits were my great wild times.” Much that transpires later in Rosa’s love life is explained by this teenage adventure.
Not only Rosa but all of Gordimer’s characters as well are presented against the complicated background of South African politics and race relations. There is such a permanency in the South African political crisis that no one may ignore it; in any case, all are swept along by it. Gordimer’s characters, therefore, have such a strong element of inevitability in their lives that they all seem to be actors in a Greek tragedy. The author’s task is simply to outline the politics with reasonable objectivity and then spend most of her effort on accurate psychological portrayal.
To portray the South African kaleidoscope faithfully requires a variety of actors: white radicals on the one hand (more often English, but in this novel the chief radical, Lionel Burger, is Boer-Dutch), and white conservatives on the other (the Boer relations of Lionel, Coen and Velma Nels, who practice the Dutch-Reformed religion and whom Rosa often visited in childhood); African conservatives such as Lily Letsile and her husband, Jamison, who are religious and believe that they have to apologize for the antireligious Burger family; and African revolutionaries such as Marisa Kgosana, a follower of Nelson Mandela. There is also a variety of casual “colored” Indian characters, and there is even a Portuguese greengrocer (from neighbouring Mozambique), Henriques.
Themes in Burger’s Daughter
Summation: The major themes in Burger’s Daughter are racism, political resistance, moral responsibility, and personal identity. Gordimer explores the effects of apartheid on both black and white South Africans. She also examines communism as a response to racial oppression and delves into Rosa’s struggle to balance her father’s political legacy with her own search for self-discovery. The novelist presents an exploration of race, politics, and feminine identity.
The author’s abhorrence of racism determines the overriding theme of the novel. (It is the existence of racism that determines nearly every aspect of the lives of South Africans—Gordimer’s characters.) Gordimer is all the more effective for her tendency to dramatize her convictions rather than preach them. She demonstrates the honesty of her convictions by portraying black Africans as they are, with understanding and without condescension. Furthermore, she refuses to be utopian in her expectations—as in her treatment of Baasie, Rosa’s childhood “brother,” and in Rosa’s witnessing a brutal beating of a donkey by an old, drunk, black peasant. She sees the man’s guilt in an obvious way but understands also that she and other whites are responsible for his brutalized condition. She drives on without interfering but remembers the donkey as “the sum of suffering” for her. It persuades her (at this point in the novel) that she is unable to live in the country of her father. The beating of the animal, incidentally, recalls Raskolnikov’s dream of the horse whipped to death by a peasant in Fyodor Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment (1866). Earlier, Rosa had seen a black man die on a park bench—an ex-miner out of work and living on the streets, old at forty-six. He remains for Rosa a primary symbol of racial oppression. He is the donkey that the white man beats without ceasing.
It is possible that Gordimer’s insistence on a Communist heroine, whose father is a Communist of almost unimpeachable virtue, is meant in part as a kind of threat to government authorities: The longer that apartheid continues, the more likely that the masses will turn to Communism. There are enough references to the ineffectiveness of Communism in Eastern Europe to indicate that the author herself is not likely a dedicated Marxist. There is also a certain irony in Gordimer’s choice of surname for the family of her protagonist. The title of the novel makes one think of “burgher’s daughter”—or, daughter of a bourgeois. The implication is that if the supposedly Christian nation of South Africa practiced racial justice, then Rosa would be leading a normal bourgeois life. As it is, having been born in May of 1948, when the National Party assumed power, she is a symbol of resistance. Meanwhile, racial oppression calls for a more radical Communist response, and Gordimer approves that response.
Aside from the themes of race and politics, there is that concerning feminine psychology as perceived through the personality of Rosa. Occasionally, Gordimer explores this theme through symbolic juxtapositions. For example, Rosa seems to gain from Katya, her father’s first wife, a sense of freedom that her mother had not been able to give her. A certain illumination comes from realizing that the Russian soubriquet “Katya” is the exact equivalent of the English “Cathy,” the name by which Rosa’s mother was usually known. It is interesting, too, that the first part of Rosemarie’s name, “Rosa,” links her with the great Marxist revolutionary, Rosa Luxemburg, and the last part, “Marie,” with church and family. Her best hope is that she is finally able to absorb into herself, in harmonious balance, many elements of her exotic country, while retaining her personal integrity as a woman.
Critical Context
As might be expected, Burger’s Daughter was banned for a time in South Africa. After prolonged controversy, however, restrictions on it were lifted. Gordimer published a book about the banning, which includes documents related to the case: What Happened to “Burgers Daughter,”: Or, How South African Censorship Works (1980). Gordimer’s ability to prevail over her government derives from her great moral reputation in combination with her having chosen to remain in her native land (as does her protagonist Rosa), while so many South African writers, among them Alan Paton, have chosen to emigrate. In addition, there is Gordimer’s formidable reputation, based on her many novels and collections of short stories.
In general, Burger’s Daughter is like most of Gordimer’s other fiction in that it is a ruthlessly lucid vision of contemporary manners. It was generally regarded as her best work until July’s People was published in 1981. Her observations seem too cold and clinical to some. Gordimer replies, however, that she does not think warmth essential in a novel. For her ideological scrupulosity, she has been criticized both by the black radicals and by the nationalist government.
Part of Burger’s Daughter is based on historical fact. Lionel Burger’s life closely follows that of Bram Fischer—from his family background to his trial (and betrayal) in 1966 to his death in prison.
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