“Dulcie Longs for the Comfort of the Quotidian”: The Place of Everyday Life in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story

Abstract

Criticism of David's Story has often focused on the problematic nature of David's relationship with Dulcie and on the complex ethical and aesthetic questions that Dulcie's figuration raises, questions that are rendered all the more perplexing by the anti-naturalistic mode in which Dulcie's story is narrated. In contrast, critics have tended to devote only passing attention to David's wife, Sally, possibly because she is embedded in the domestic sphere – with its connotations of familiarity and stasis – and perhaps also because the manner in which she is represented seems straightforward and unproblematic. This essay breaks with the general critical tendency by finding significance in the very mundaneness of Sally's characterisation. Availing myself of Njabulo S Ndebele's distinction between the spectacular and the ordinary, I contend that while domestic life as represented in the novel is disfigured by the markings of repressive ideologies, it also contains more positive elements, among them everyday pleasures and the playful treatment of steatopygia. In contrast with the blurred and deeply pessimistic figuration of Dulcie's tortured body, the representation of Sally's ordinary habitus offers concrete – if sometimes sharply qualified – grounds for hope.