dc.description.abstract | This study investigates the role of the woman character in Alex La Guma's fiction. Available criticism
indicates that this role has received scant attention from literary critics, though it is part of his aesthetic
and cognitive enterprise in sixteen of his eighteen short stories and in his four novels. This indifference
to a writer whose works abound with a portrayal of the woman character's multiple roles reflects critical
neglect in an age when the woman's condition has captured universal imagination.
The primary focus of the study is La Guma's fiction, though the interviews, which appear in the
appendix, and critical works on the author supplement this primary source. Based on an analysis of La
Guma's fiction, the study uses a form of textual criticism which postulates that a moral approach to a
literary text not only reveals its cognitive content but also appreciates its aesthetic dynamics, and vice
versa.
The discussion of the woman's role in La Guma's fiction is divided into five categories: the maternal, the
romantic. the marital, the occupational.rand the political. In the course of analysing these roles, the
study reveals that there exists a correlation between gender discrimination on the one hand, and racial
segregation, political repression or economic exploitation on the other in La Guma's world. At the same
time, it shows that the woman character's multiple, and usually overlapping, roles employ literary
strategies which embody moral intentions that lie at the heart of La Guma's fiction. Such intentions
manifest themselves through the multiple roles the woman character plays in the fiction. These roles .
celebrate and suggest as an aesthetic ideal a humanism antithetical to racial segregation, political
repression, economic exploitation, and sexist discrimination. In the end, this aesthetic ideal demonstrates
and affirms the indivisibility of literature and humanism.
Sununing up the achievements of this research, the conclusion points out that by showing that sexism
sometimes together-with racism, condemns the woman character to menial, subservient and domestic
roles and, by implying that this state is both immoral and destructive, the study complements worldwide
efforts to give the woman her place in the sun. In the process, the study debunks the assumption. evident
in the paucity of critical work on the woman character, that La Guma does not portray her multiple roles
in his fiction. In this sense, this study upturns a virtually virgin area, and therefore advances scholarship
on the works of La Gurna . | en |