XII. Writing Samples
43
The Function of the Frame Story in "Once upon a Time"
Nadine Gordimer's "Once upon a Time" (rpt. in Thomas R. Arp and
Greg Johnson, Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 9th ed.
[Boston: Wadsworth, 2006] 220) is a complex, ironic presentation of
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Writing about Literature
the results of fear and hatred. This "children's story," so flat in its
tone, characterization, and reporting of events, proceeds by gradual
steps to show a family systematically barricading itself behind various
security devices, the last of which has an effect opposite of what was
intended in destroying the child that the parents are trying to protect.
The tale is especially harrowing because of the tone hinted at in
the title. This is an easy, casual narration that repeats such standard
storybook phrases as "living happily ever after" (221) and identifies its
characters only by their functions and relationships, never exploring
motivations or revealing the steps of their decision making. The deeper
causes for fear are not defined in the tale. All these qualities, and oth­
ers, establish the tone of fairy tales and other stories for children. In
this story, however, no one lives "happily ever after," for in attempting
to safeguard themselves, the parents destroy their lives.
But that tale doesn't begin until the ninth paragraph of Gordimer's
story. What precedes it is the frame story of a writer who has been
asked to write a story for a children's collection, who refuses to con­
tribute, and then is awakened in the night by some noise that frightens
her. Her fear first chillingly conjures up a burglar or murderer "moving
from room to room, coming up the passage-to [her] door" (220). Then
the actual cause of her waking comes to her: deep down, "three thou­
sand feet below" her house, some rock face has fallen in the gold
mine beneath (221). She is not in personal danger, then. Yet she can­
not return to sleep, so she tells herself "a bedtime story" to relax her
mind-and the story is of the family that grows obsessed with security
and protection, the awful story of the mutilation of the little boy.
The frame story initially seems little more than an introductory ex­
planation of how the tale came to be written, against the writer's will
and purpose. Its details are unrelated to the children's tale-explicitly
so, as the writer, despite her knowledge of two recent murders in her
neighborhood, and the rational fears that such events arouse, has "no
burglar bars, no gun under the pillow" (220), in contrast to the precau­
tions taken in the tale. There is no fairy-tale gold mine in her life, only
the knowledge of the mining of gold a half-mile beneath her. So what
XII. Writing Samples
45
does this frame have to do with the tale, other than to place the reader
within the literal reality of a writer's time and place, from which the
imagination journeys to "once upon a time"? Is it more than an ironic
contrast in subject and tone?
For answers, we need to consider the writer's time and place as
parallels to those of the tale. Both are located in South Africa, both are
in the present (even though the phrase "once upon a time" normally
signals a long time ago, in a far-off place). The family in the tale, with
their burglar bars, walls, alarms, and finally "the razor-bladed coils all
round the walls of the house," are like those people i n the writer's
world who do keep guns under their pillows. Like the real people of
the writer's neighborhood, the family focuses its fears on the black
African populace who surround and outnumber them. On the one hand,
in the writer's world, the fears focus on "a casual laborer . . . dis­
missed without pay" who returns to strangle the watchdogs and knife
the man who treated him unfairly (221); on the other hand, in the chil­
dren's story, the fears focus on the hungry, out-of-work, and begging
multitudes who fil l and spoil the suburban streets of the fictitious fam­
ily's neighborhood. In both worlds, unfairness, want, and deprivation
mark the blacks, while the whites feel surrounded and threatened
by them.
Why cannot the writer return to sleep after she has discovered the
innocent cause of her awakening? Because the comforting natural ex­
planation, which removes her from personal danger, is in fact more hor­
rifying than a murderous prowler. She thinks of
the Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might [be] down
there, under [her] in the earth at that moment. The stope
where the [rock] fall was could have been disused, dripping
water from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred
there in the most profound of tombs. (221)
Two possibilities occur to her-one of no harm to men, the other of
burial alive-both a consequence of the wage-slavery of "migrant min­
ers" over whose heads (literally and figuratively} the white society lives
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Writing about Literature
in "uneasy strain . . . of brick, cement, wood and glass" (221}. If no
miner has been harmed by this rock fall, others have been and will be;
and moreover, being killed in that subterranean world of " ruptured
veins" is not the only harm that the whites have inflicted on the original
inhabitants of the country they control , nor on their own sensitivities
and consciences.
The frame story of "Once upon a Time," then, foreshadows the
fear, the violence, and the pain of the children's tale, and points to the
ultimate cause of its terrible sacrifice of a child-the systematic mal­
treatment of one race by another and the brutality and self-destruction
that are its result.
Comments
This analysis has as its subject an aspect of the story that the writer
can fully develop in the limited space. It is written for our hypothetical
class journal, as indicated by the way in which the writer refrains from
giving a detailed summary of the tale enclosed in the frame (since the
audience is known to be familiar with the story), and presents details
from the frame narration as they support the writer's argument. It em­
ploys some information about the author that is common knowledge to
the class (her nationality and her contemporaneity are in the intro­
ductory footnote to the story). Quotations are integrated into the
writer's sentence structures, and the writer interpolates words within
the extended quotation.