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Once Upon A Time Symbolism

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Once Upon A Time Symbolism
Once Upon a Time Symbolism Nadine Gordiner’s story Once Upon a Time contains lots of symbols. Amongst these symbols, the house represents the society she is in and the underground mines and foundation of the house represents the apartheid. This story is built based on fear, racial tension, and the apartheid. To begin with, the house or society is supposed to protect and shelter the people living within it. The house is supposed to be stable, but in paragraph 7 of Once Upon a Time, Nadine mentioned that the house that surrounded her was built on undermined ground. This symbolizes the society Nadine is in and how it’s unstable. If something is undermined, it is loosing support and unstable, therefore implying that the society is not in equilibrium. In continuation, the underground mines represents the aparthied’s secrets and flaws. In paragraph 7, Nadine talked about the “migrant farmers who might have been down there”. She mentioned that the mines were not ideal, or as she puts it, …show more content…
To elaborate on this, if the house represents the society and the mines represent the secrets and flaws of the apartheid, then that means that the society is built on an unbalanced and flawed system. When something is undermined, it is loosing support and therefore, it does not have a strong foundation. “The house’s foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the Rick, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three theousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance,” (Paragraph 7) To explain this, the foundation is no longer stable due to the undermining and thus making straining the balance of the house. To tie this in with the symbols, the racial tension caused by the apartheid is leading the foundation of the society to unrest and
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